As Facebook ends fact checking, a pioneering Duke prof is worried about what’s next | Opinion

With President-elect Donald Trump – the great prevaricator – about to return to the White House, fact checking will need to go into overdrive.

Unfortunately the overseer of social media sites highly susceptible to falsehoods is checking out of the business of fact checking. Mark Zuckerberg said this week that third-party fact checking is ending at sites within his Meta empire – Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Zuckerberg’s action – ostensibly to free conservative voices from suppression by allegedly biased fact checkers – disappointed a Duke professor who helped make political fact checking a formal journalism practice.

Bill Adair, who as a journalist created the Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact in 2007, said, “It’s discouraging to see this because Facebook was really doing it right. Facebook has shown a real commitment to helping people get accurate information.”

It’s further discouraging that Zuckerberg’s reason for ending the truth tests wouldn’t pass a fact check itself. “It’s really wrong for him to say fact checkers are biased. Meta had a process to make sure fact checkers were nonpartisan,” Adair said.

Zuckerberg’s action – widely seen as a capitulation to Trump and his MAGA followers – doesn’t mean fact checking doesn’t have an effect, Adair said, but it can’t prevent lying.

“People have unrealistic expectations of fact checking,” he said. “People wrongly say things like, ‘People still vote for liars, therefore fact checking is a failure.’ It’s like saying investigative reporting is a failure because politicians are still corrupt.”

Adair said the end of fact checking at Meta gives into complaints from those whose claims most need to be checked, conservative Republicans and their followers.

In his new book, “Beyond the Big Lie,” Adair describes how he once denied on television that he knew Republican politicians make false statements more than Democrats. PoltiFact’s tallies showed that they had.

“I wanted to appear impartial, but the reality is that Republicans do lie more,” he said. “And that creates this very difficult situation for journalists because they don’t want to say that. It’s the reality, but no one wants to face that truth.”

For his book, Adair interviewed politicians about abusing the truth. He said the tendency among Republicans started long before Trump. It spread in the late 1990s under House speaker Newt Gingrich, who pushed a warlike style of politics in which truth was the first casualty.

That legacy has put today’s Republicans in conflict with fact checking and fact checkers, he said.

The correct response is not to abandon fact checking to appease MAGA Republicans, Adair said, but to expand fact checking in hopes that those who chafe at it will see the value of it.

Some conservative media outlets have embraced the idea, Adair said, noting the even-handed fact checking done by The Daily Caller and The Dispatch.

He hopes others will follow. “We need more conservative organizations to do fact checking,” he said. “We need more organizations that realize that, hey, truth matters. People should care about lying.”

One reason people might be more tolerant of politicians lying is that they can’t agree on what’s true. In 2018, after witnessing Trump’s denigration of true reporting as fake news, the literary critic Michiko Kakutani explored the effect in a short, meditative book entitled “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.”

In a week when the founder of Facebook, a site that disseminates information to more than 3 billion active users, announced that fact checking is too divisive and troublesome, Kakutani’s words are worth revisiting.

“Without commonly agreed upon facts — not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today’s silo-world — there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this and those seeking democracy’s survival must recognize it today.”