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Five times Facebook’s fact-checking went wrong
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Telegraph (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)


The Telegraph (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers), January 7, 2025
Posted: January 27th, 2025
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-f...

Mark Zuckerberg has announced he is scrapping fact-checks on Facebook, claiming the labels intended to warn against fake news have “destroyed more trust than they have created”. Facebook’s fact-checkers have helped debunk hundreds of fake news stories and false rumours – however, there have been several high-profile missteps. In 2020, Facebook and Twitter took action to halt the spread of an article by the New York Post based on leaked emails from a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. As coronavirus spread around the world, suggestions that the vaccine could have been man-made were suppressed by Facebook. An opinion column in the New York Post with the headline: “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab” was labelled as “false information”. In 2021, Facebook lifted its ban on claims the virus could have been “man-made”. It was months later that further doubts emerged over the origins of coronavirus. In 2021, Facebook ... was accused of wrongly fact-checking a story about Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. A British Medical Journal (BMJ) report, based on whistleblowing, alleged poor clinical practices at a contractor carrying out research for Pfizer. However, Facebook’s fact-checkers added a label arguing the story was “missing context” and could “mislead people”. Furious debates raged over the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of Covid-19. Facebook’s fact-checkers were accused of overzealously clamping down on articles that questioned the science behind [mask] mandates.

Note: Read a former senior NPR editor's nuanced take on how challenging official narratives became so politicized that "politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that should have been guiding our work." Opportunities for award winning journalism were lost on controversial issues like COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and more. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.


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