Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg
His company Meta announced on Tuesday that it would scrap the facts.
He accused the US checkers of making biased decisions and said he wanted greater freedom of speech. Meta uses third-party independent fact checkers from around the world. Here, one of them, who works at the Full Fact organization in London, explains what they do and their reaction to Zuckerberg’s “mind-boggling” claims.
I was a fact checker at Full Fact in London for a year, investigating questionable content on Facebook, X and newspapers. Our diet is filled with disinformation videos about wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as fake AI-generated video clips of politicians, which are becoming increasingly difficult to disprove. There is. Colleagues are tackling coronavirus disinformation, misinformation about cancer treatments, and there’s a lot of climate-related talk as there are more hurricanes and wildfires.
As soon as you log on at 9am, you’re assigned something to watch. By accessing Meta’s system, you can see which posts are most likely to be false. In some cases, there may be 10 or 15 potentially harmful things and it can be overwhelming. But you can’t check everything.
If a post is a little wild but not harmful, like this AI-generated image of the Pope wearing a giant white puffer coat, we might leave it. But if it’s a fake image of Mike Tyson holding a Palestinian flag, we’re more likely to address it. We propose them in the morning meeting and are then asked to start checking.
Yesterday I was working on a deepfake video in which Keir Starmer said many of the claims about Jimmy Savile were frivolous and that was why he was not prosecuted at the time. We’re getting a lot of engagement. Starmer’s mouth did not look right and did not appear to say anything. It seemed like a false alarm. I immediately started doing a reverse image search and discovered that the video was taken from the Guardian newspaper in 2012. The original was of much higher quality. The area around his mouth is very blurry and you can see exactly what he’s saying when you compare it to what he shares on social media. We contacted the Guardian for comment on the original Downing Street. You can also get in touch with various media forensics and deepfake AI experts.
Some misinformation continues to resurface. There is a particular video of a gas station explosion in Yemen last year that has been reused as either a bombing in Gaza or a Hezbollah attack on Israel.
Fact checkers collect examples of how that information has appeared on social media in the past 24 hours or so, often times like the number of likes or shares, and how do they know when it’s incorrect? indicates.
Attaching fact checks to Facebook posts requires two levels of review. Senior colleagues question every leap in logic we make. For recurring claims, this process can be completed in half a day. New, more complex cases may take closer to a week. The average is about 1 day. It can be frustrating to go back and forth at times, but you want to be as close to 100% sure as possible.
It was very difficult to hear Mark Zuckerberg say that fact checkers are biased on Tuesday. Much of the work we do is about being fair, and that’s instilled in us. I feel it is a very important job to bring about change and provide good information to people.
This is something I wanted to do in my previous job in local journalism, go down rabbit holes and track down sources, but I didn’t have many opportunities. It was very Churnalism. As a local reporter, I was concerned and felt helpless at the amount of conspiracy theories people were seriously engaging with and believing in Facebook groups.
At the end of the day, it can be difficult to switch off. I’m still thinking about how to prove something as quickly as possible. When I see things like content stock prices constantly going up, I get a little worried. But when a fact check is published, there is a sense of satisfaction.
Zuckerberg’s decision was unfortunate. We put a lot of effort into this and we think it’s really important. But we renew our resolve to fight the good fight. Misinformation will never go away. We will continue to be here and fight against it.
Source: www.theguardian.com
