Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and X-rival Threads—has begun gearing up for the coming European Parliament elections by announcing a plan to ramp up its content moderation policies to fight disinformation by deleting or hiding misleading posts.
According to the announcement blog post written by Marco Pancini, the head of Meta’s EU affairs, any content that might contribute to “imminent violence” or that is “intended to suppress voting” in the EU elections is being removed from the platforms.
Posts that deal with the election but do not violate these policies are still being reviewed and rated by a network of 26 “independent” partner organizations across the EU, covering 22 languages. Preparing for the EU elections, Meta is also partnering up with three additional organizations to cover France, Bulgaria, and Slovakia.
To help these third-party organizations review and evaluate content faster and more efficiently, Meta will give them “keyword detection” tools, as well as let them use its new research tool, Meta Content Library, so that its “powerful search capability [would] support them in their work.”
Meta is also establishing a so-called Elections Operations Center gathering various experts from its intelligence, data science, engineering, and legal teams to “identify potential threats and put specific mitigations in place across our apps and technologies in real time.”
When content is debunked by any of these local fact-checker organizations, Meta attaches warning labels and reduces its distribution “so people are less likely to see it.”
For instance, there were nearly 70 million posts on Facebook and Instagram with added fact-checking labels in the EU in the last six months of 2023. According to Meta, these labels are quite successful, preventing 95% of people from clicking on the content.
Then, once debunked, content can no longer be used in political advertising either. Ads will also have to comply with a whole series of criteria. Anything that might discourage people from voting; contain premature claims of victory; or question the legitimacy of the elections, the electoral process, or its outcome will be banned instantly.
The troops in the fact-checking army
One obvious question is: why would anyone trust Meta to be unbiased, especially after the Twitter Files showed that social media companies are in the pockets of the leftist establishment and various intelligence services? But besides that, the other question is—who are the 29 “independent” organizations selected to police our democracy, and how much power are they actually given?
Looking at Meta’s independent fact-checking network, which consists of 90 organizations dealing with disinformation in 60 languages globally, we can also see the selected partners in each European country.
In Europe, the largest partner, active in over half the EU countries, is the continent’s primary news agency, the French AFP (as well as the DPA in every German-speaking country). Like other global news wires, the media giant rarely engages in any kind of political commentary which should make it ideal for unbiased moderation. Except it isn’t. AFP’s Fact Check side has been given the strongest leftist bias rating by AllSides for story and word choice and was noted for disproportionately fact-checking right-wing political figures—not to mention past criticism it has received for the blatant leftist bias in its popular photo library as well.
But apart from these two, Meta employs one or two local organizations in nearly every EU country. These can range from professional fact-checking NGOs to popular news sites and even to tabloids, as long as—the company claims—all of them have the global IFCN (International Fact-Checking Network) certification that is supposed to guarantee non-partisanship and transparency.
The IFCN label, however, means the opposite to those familiar with the inner workings of U.S. politics. The Network is a subdivision of the shadowy Poynter Institute, whose funding comes from the American Left’s notorious triumvirate: Silicon Valley tech giants, stockbroker philanthropists, and the Democrat-led U.S. government itself. IFCN’s initial founders were the usual suspects as well: Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook, as well as the State Department-run National Endowment for Democracy, notorious for interfering with the domestic affairs of sovereign nations. You can’t become less democratic than that.
In Germany, for instance, Meta’s main partner is none other than the non-profit—but government-funded—investigative journalist organization Correctiv, the same one that published the infamous hit-piece about the right-wing populist AfD’s alleged deportation masterplan, giving the left-wing major mobilization opportunities, only to later backpedal and admit they made up most of it. It also turned out that the Correctiv’s director was having closed-door meetings with Chancellor Scholz himself just days before publishing the article, which hardly implies “non-partisanship.”
The list also includes various other news sites such as France24, the Irish Journal, and the Italian Open, all of which operate under some level of liberal bias. But you can also find France’s free print publication 20Minutes, or the Dutch-language Belgian tabloid Knack with an openly “left-liberal” orientation.
The vast majority of Meta’s partners, however, are local, “independent” NGOs that exclusively deal with online fact-checking.
In Spain, we have Newtral, and in Italy the Pagella Politica, which both appear to be heavily inspired by the U.S.-based (and famously Democrat-leaning) PolitiFact. Both also appear to be fact-checking the populist Right (Vox, Lega, Fratelli) way more often than other politicians, so they might be guilty of bias through their story selection choices. Newtral, especially, was created and is run by well-known leftist media personalities in Spain.
In Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, three inter-connected organizations are employed, bearing the same name (Demagog). By the look of it, they mostly deal with Russian disinformation but also frequently fact-check politicians—most of them right-wing. The Czech site has been repeatedly accused of engaging in one-sided “slander” by politicians while also drawing criticism for receiving funds from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
The Croatian Faktograf came under heavy fire during the pandemic for flagging alleged COVID misinformation for Facebook to remove, only for many of the posts to be proved correct later. It was founded and is still being run by journalist Petar Vidov, who previously wrote for Index, one of the country’s biggest news sites, described as having a “reputation of an independent, liberal, and strongly opposition outlet” with a “strong liberal bias.”
Re:Baltica, covering Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, focuses its debunking work on three major areas: Russia, climate change, and LGBT issues—not too hard to guess its political alignment. The Danish TjekDet seems fairly neutral at first, but it’s worth mentioning that it belongs to the weekly magazine MandagMorgen whose target audience is decision-makers in business and politics, and whose frontpage will have at least one or two articles complaining about the lack of workplace diversity at any given time.
You get the picture. It’s also true that the entire “fact-checking” industry is left-leaning by nature and that Meta usually picks the largest organizations with the most resources in each country. But the problem is not the lack of right-leaning fact-checkers—any “lean” should be unacceptable when it comes to democracy. The problem is that these organizations are given the tools and the power to restrict the visibility of or even delete content and are even paid to do so. Technically, of course, the button is pushed by Meta, but the company will not independently verify each claim, especially when it comes to local context.
Liberal censorship disguised as fact-checking is much more common than you would think—again, remember the Twitter Files—and it would be especially naïve to think it would not happen during the 2024 EU elections, the ones that could bring the biggest breakthrough in decades for the conservative forces.
