Fact-checkers quit Facebook's anti-fake-news programme, saying the task has become 'impossible'

A fake news vendor in Manhattan, aiming to educate readers about disinformation - AFP

Two important partners in Facebook's flagship anti-fake-news project have pulled out, with staff at one saying it has become "impossible" to manage the workload.

Snopes.com, a venerable fact-checking website founded in 1994 to debunk urban myths, said it had ended its role in Facebook's fact-checking programme after two years after "evaluating the ramifications and costs".

Snopes' vice president of operations Vinny Green accused the social network of not doing enough to help fact-checkers manage its torrent of fake news, adding that it seemed to be relying on them to do its work.

The Associated Press, one of the world's biggest news agencies, also told Techcrunch that it was “not currently doing fact-checking work for Facebook", though declined to say why.

"It doesn't seem like we're striving to make third-party fact-checking more practical for publishers," Mr Green told the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “It seems like we’re striving to make it easier for Facebook."

"At some point, we need to put our foot down.... with a manual system and a closed system, it’s impossible to keep on top of that stuff."

He said that Facebook's interface for fact-checkers was painfully slow, and that the company needed to build an API, or specialised data interface, which would let journalists find and debunk fake news more quickly and extensively.

Snopes admitted that by leaving the project would leave give up the grant money it had been receiving from Facebook, which previously came to $100,000 (£76,000), but said it would "adapt to make up for it". 

The split follows criticism from two former Snopes employees, who told the Guardian last year that Facebook had used Snopes for "crisis PR" and that it wanted the "appearance of trying to prevent damage without actually doing anything".

David Mikkelson, one of Snopes' founders, disagreed with their depiction of the partnership, but said that Facebook had left his employees in the dark about whether their efforts were working.

Doreen Marchionne, Snopes' managing editor, said employees had expressed frustration about the partnership during two recent staff virtual meetings and through an internal survey.

Sites such as Snopes, Politifact and Factcheck.org are at the centre of Facebook's efforts to fight fake news, receiving money in return for independently checking and rating stories being shared on its service.

The social network has repeatedly emphasised that it does not want to make decisions about what is true and what is false on its own because of the danger to free speech. Instead it "demotes" content that is rated "false" by fact checkers. 

According to Meredith Carden, Facebook's head of news integrity partnerships, suspicious stories are referred to fact-checkers by AI systems which look for signs of falseness (such as users expressing disbelief). Those which are rated "false" gain the disfavour of Facebook's algorithms, which the company says reduces their traffic by an average of 80 per cent.

But a report by the Columbia Journalism Review found that many fact-checkers found the programme opaque and were uncomfortable with how little they knew about how Facebook chose the stories that it referred to them. 

That left Snopes employees spending more and more of their time dealing with Facebook-recommended content without being able to design new tools to tackle it.

The same report also suggested that the fact-checkers' own activity helped train Facebook's algorithms on what kind of content was rated as false and what kind of content was given a pass.

A spokesman for Facebook said: "We value the work that Snopes has done, and respect their decision as an independent business. Fighting misinformation takes a multi-pronged approach from across the industry. We are committed to fighting this through many tactics, and the work that third-party fact-checkers do is a valued and important piece of this effort.

"We have strong relationships with 34 fact-checking partners around the world who fact-check content in 16 languages, and we plan to expand the program this year by adding new partners and languages.”

Snopes said that it did not rule out working with Facebook again in future. 

Speaking before the decision was announced, Mr Green said tech companies such as Facebook needed to give fact-checkers proper access to Facebook's data so that users could flag content to them directly on a large scale.

As it stands, he said, Facebook's recommendations happened "behind closed doors", making it impossible for journalists to keep track of what Facebook users report as fake news.

On Thursday, Facebook revealed that it had taken down almost 800 pages and accounts operated from inside Iran which had been masquerading as local activist groups in various countries and reposting narratives from Iranian state media. 

Nathaniel Gleicher, a former White House official who was hired as Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy in early 2018, said that the Iranian networks had been focused on topics such as Israel and Palestine, the wars in Syria and Yemen and the role of the USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia in those conflicts.

He said that the investigation had been aided by a tip-off from Twitter, which announced its own removals of thousands of accounts associated with Iran, Russia and Venezuela.

This year Facebook will open two new election operations centres in Dublin and Singapore in order to coordinate Facebook's response to fake news and information warfare around the world.