Latin American Fact-Checkers Brace for Meta’s Next Moves | EUROtoday

This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump’s imminent second presidential time period and to the strategies of the competitors, reminiscent of X’s Community Notes. Meta determined to not make investments any extra money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram customers themselves would be the ones to determine what content material is disinformation or not.

In the assertion the place Zuckerberg introduced that he’ll dismantle this system, he stated that fact-checkers succumbed to political bias, destroying extra belief than they’d created within the US. However, for Laura Zommer, former director of Chequeado (one of the vital Spanish-speaking verifier organizations) and LatamChequea, and now chief of Factchequeado (a verification media aimed on the Latino group within the US), Zuckerberg’s statements aren’t a shock, and he doesn’t have scientific proof for his claims. “Far from censoring, fact-checkers add context,” Zommer says. “We never advocate for removing content. We want citizens to have better information to make their own decisions.”

Zommer, who is skeptical of how the dissolution of this program might benefit Meta, emphasizes that the company contradicts itself by ending the fact-checking program, especially because it has highlighted its positive results in the past. Zommer also agrees with Angie Drobnic Holan, current director of IFCN, who, in a LinkedIn post, wrote: “It’s unlucky that this resolution comes within the wake of maximum political stress from a brand new administration and its supporters. Factcheckers haven’t been biased of their work—that assault line comes from those that really feel they need to have the ability to exaggerate and lie with out rebuttal or contradiction.”

As Trump, just days away from his inauguration, threatens a mass deportation of migrants, the Hispanic community is facing a possible new wave of disinformation. “The proof makes us assume this shall be dangerous. Until it’s carried out we’ll see, however we are able to say that, in the course of the Trump marketing campaign, one of many important disinformation narratives was in opposition to migrants, reminiscent of people who stated migrants would commit fraud. That was false. The knowledge from the previous makes us assume that this resolution is prone to negatively have an effect on Latino communities within the US,” Zommer tells WIRED en Español.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not the only thing endangering the ecosystem. In an age where deepfake video and audio scams are spreading, having viable information will be a priority.

Spanish-Speaking Fact-Checking Media at Risk

The Latin American news ecosystem, with its economic vulnerability, is at risk. “Facebook’s fact-checker program funds had been nonetheless holding fact-checking organizations and information organizations with a fact-checking part afloat. So I feel that, most probably, if these organizations do not handle to diversify quickly, lots of them are going to vanish,” says Pablo Medina, disinformation research editor at the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, CLIP.

While the decision applies only to the US for now, the disappearance of the project has raised alarm in the Hispanic media ecosystem. “The attack expressed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on what he called ‘secret courts’ that promote censorship of the platform in Latin America—a false claim—indicates that Brazil is a key focus of the company’s concerns,” says Tai Nalon, CEO of Aos Fatos, one of the most important fact-checking media in the global south.

“This is completely in line with the rhetoric of Donald Trump, a regular detractor of journalism and fact-checking,” Nalon says. “The arguments used by Zuckerberg have been widely exploited by the far right around the world to delegitimize effective initiatives against disinformation. Since there has never been dissatisfaction with the work of fact-checkers before, this seems to me to be a move aimed at gaining some political advantage. We know that Meta is facing antitrust cases in the US, and being close to the government could be an advantage for the company.”

Meanwhile, as Laura Zommer says, evidence from the past gives the news ecosystem reason to worry.

WIRED en español contacted Meta for this story. Through a media representative, the company replied with the statement (in Spanish) of the decision and said that this does not apply to WhatsApp and is only for US verifiers.

This story initially appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.