January 15, 2025<\/p>\n
4 min read<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Does Fact-Checking Work? Here\u2019s What the Science Says<\/p>\n
Communication and misinformation researchers reveal the value of fact-checking, where perceived biases come from and what Meta\u2019s decision could mean<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
By David Adam<\/a> & Nature magazine<\/a> <\/p>\n Meta plans to scrap its third-party fact-checking programme in favour of X-like \u2018community notes\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n PA Images\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n It is said that a lie can fly halfway around the world while the truth is getting its boots on. That trek to challenge online falsehoods and misinformation got a little harder this week, when Facebook\u2019s parent company Meta announced plans to scrap the platform\u2019s fact-checking programme, which was set up in 2016 and pays independent groups to verify selected articles and posts.<\/p>\n The company said that the move was to counter fact checkers\u2019 political bias and censorship. \u201cExperts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact-check and how,\u201d Meta\u2019s chief global-affairs officer Joel Kaplan wrote on 7 January<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nature<\/i> spoke to communication and misinformation researchers about the value of fact-checking, where perceived biases come from and what Meta\u2019s decision could mean.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n In terms of helping to convince people that information is true and trustworthy, \u201cfact-checking does work\u201d, says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who acted as an unpaid adviser on Facebook\u2019s fact-checking programme in 2022. \u201cStudies provide very consistent evidence that fact-checking does at least partially reduce misperceptions about false claims.\u201d<\/p>\n For example, a 2019 meta-analysis of the effectiveness of fact-checking in more than 20,000 people found a \u201csignificantly positive overall influence on political beliefs\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIdeally, we\u2019d want people to not form misperceptions in the first place,\u201d adds van der Linden. \u201cBut if we have to work with the fact that people are already exposed, then reducing it is almost as good as it as it\u2019s going to get.\u201d<\/p>\n Fact-checking is less effective when an issue is polarized, says Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University in New York City. \u201cIf you\u2019re fact-checking something around Brexit in the UK or the election in United States, that\u2019s where fact-checks don\u2019t work very well,\u201d he says. \u201cIn part that\u2019s because people who are partisans don\u2019t want to believe things that make their party look bad.\u201d<\/p>\n But even when fact-checks don\u2019t seem to change people\u2019s minds on contentious issues, they can still be helpful, says Alexios Mantzarlis, a former fact checker who directs the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York City.<\/p>\n On Facebook, articles and posts deemed false by fact checkers are currently flagged with a warning. They are also shown to fewer users by the platform\u2019s suggestion algorithms, Mantzarlis says, and people are more likely to ignore flagged content than to read and share it.<\/p>\n Flagging posts as problematic could also have knock-on effects on other users that are not captured by studies of the effectiveness of fact-checks, says Kate Starbird, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. \u201cMeasuring the direct effect of labels on user beliefs and actions is different from measuring the broader effects of having those fact-checks in the information ecosystem,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n Regarding Meta\u2019s claims of bias among fact-checkers, Van Bavel agrees that misinformation from the political right does get fact-checked and flagged as problematic \u2014 on Facebook and other platforms \u2014 more often than does misinformation from the left. But he offers a simple explanation.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s largely because the conservative misinformation is the stuff that is being spread more,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen one party, at least in the United States, is spreading most of the misinformation, it\u2019s going to look like fact-checks are biased because they\u2019re getting called out way more.\u201d<\/p>\n There are data to support this. A study published in Nature<\/i> last year showed that, although politically conservative people on X, formerly Twitter, were more likely to be suspended from the platform than were liberals, they were also more likely to share information from news sites that were judged as low quality by a representative group of laypeople.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you wanted to know whether a person is exposed to misinformation online, knowing if they\u2019re politically conservative is your best predictor of that,\u201d says Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who worked on that analysis.<\/p>\n Meta\u2019s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that in place of third-party fact-checking, Facebook could adopt a system similar to the \u2018community notes\u2019 used by X, in which corrections and context are crowdsourced from users and added to posts.<\/p>\n Research shows that those systems can also work to correct misinformation, up to a point. \u201cThe way it\u2019s been implemented on X actually doesn\u2019t work very well,\u201d says van der Linden. He points to an analysis done last year that found the community notes on X were often added to problematic posts too late to reduce engagement, because they came after false claims had already spread widely. X vice-president of product Keith Coleman told Reuters last year<\/a> that community notes \u201cmaintains a high bar to make notes effective and maintain trust\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cCrowdsourcing is a useful solution, but in practice it very much depends on how it\u2019s implemented,\u201d van der Linden adds. \u201cReplacing fact checking with community notes just seems like it would make things a lot worse.\u201d<\/p>\n This article is reproduced with permission and was <\/i>first published<\/i><\/a> on January 10, 2025<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Meta](\"https:\/\/static.scientificamerican.com\/dam\/m\/827ea601918969e\/original\/Meta_Zuckerberg_text.jpg?m=1736962782.332&w=600\")
On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n
Positive influence<\/h2>\n
More misinformation, more red flags<\/h2>\n
Implementation matters<\/h2>\n