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As CNN’s Brian Stelter observed, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook) is undergoing a “MAGA makeover.” Zuckerberg has apparently joined the “tech right” and broken up with PolitiFact, choosing to emulate X’s Community Notes instead for content moderation.

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This has sent up an emergency flare for the International Fact-Checking Network. We honestly thought this was a parody, but apparently it’s a real thing, according to Business Insider. 

Pranav Dixit reports:

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) has convened an emergency meeting of its members following Meta’s announcement on Tuesday that it will end its third-party fact-checking partnerships in the US and replace them with a crowdsourced moderation tool similar to X’s Community Notes.

…

The meeting is expected to draw between 80 to 100 attendees from IFCN’s network of fact-checkers, which spans 170 organizations worldwide. Not all of the attendees are Meta fact-checking partners, although many of them have a stake in the program’s future and its global implications.

The IFCN has long played a crucial role in Meta’s fact-checking ecosystem by accrediting organizations for Meta’s third-party program, which began in 2016 after the U.S. presidential election.

IFCN certification signaled that a fact-checking organization met rigorous editorial and transparency standards. Meta’s partnerships with these certified organizations became a cornerstone of its efforts to combat misinformation, focusing on flagging false claims, contextualizing misinformation, and curbing its spread.

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We knew about individual fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact, Snopes, and NewsGuard, but we had no idea they were part of an international cabal.

An emergency meeting, huh? What’s the emergency, specifically? PolitiFact isn’t going to get paid to fact-check memes?

We honestly thought it was. International Fact-Checking Network assemble!

We had to look up their website to see if it was real. It’s led by Poynter. According to its site:

The network advocates for information integrity in the global fight against misinformation and supports fact-checkers through networking, capacity building and collaboration. IFCN’s network reaches more than 170 fact-checking organizations worldwide through advocacy, training and global events. Our team monitors trends in the fact-checking field to offer resources to fact-checkers, contribute to public discourse and provide support for new projects and initiatives that advance accountability in journalism.

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More than 170 fact-checking organizations? Who pays these people? And how do they all share the same political bias?

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