Report: Facebook Fact Checkers Claim to Be Harassed

A recent report alleges that Facebook fact checkers in Brazil are being targeted and threatened by angry users.

A recent report from Gizmodo claims that fact checkers for Facebook in Brazil are being threatened by right-wing extremists in the country. One lead fact checker, referred to by the pseudonym of Julia in the article, describes how she and her team were forced to shut down their own personal Facebook pages and were personally threatened by extremists within the country.

“Saying that they would shoot us, we wouldn’t see Brazil’s next president,” Julia told Gizmodo. “Also people said they were going to follow us one by one… Every day we get at least two to four tweets or Facebook messages saying that we are either censors, we don’t deserve to be online, we should die, or something like that,” Julia said. “It’s pretty bad. Brazil is going crazy right now. You’re either against fact checking, or you’re very quiet about it.”

Brazil’s right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was recently charged “with inciting hatred and discrimination against blacks, indigenous communities, women and gays,” and his son Eduardo was charged with threatening a journalist. It’s believed that some of Bolsonaro’s supporters are behind the threats made towards fact-checkers, who are finding themselves increasingly in danger as Facebook continues to hire more third-party fact-checking companies across the world to help moderate the content on their platform.

A Facebook spokesperson told Gizmodo that their fact-checking program so far had managed to “reduce future views of debunked stories by 80%, but it’s worth noting that we don’t believe it’s a silver bullet to fighting misinformation.” Fact-checkers gave an insight into how Facebook’s system works saying that most of their activity revolves around a Facebook dashboard which lists links to news stories are listed along with data showing how often they’ve been clicked and shared, etc.

Fact checkers then research the topic and assign it a tag from “False” to “Satire” to “Opinion” to “Not Eligible.” Depending on the assigned tag, the news story is then ranked higher or lower within users’ Facebook feeds. Pages that regularly share stories deemed false by fact checkers will also have their distribution demoted and their monetization and advertising privileges revoked.

Gemma Mendoza, a key figure behind fact-checking efforts and disinformation research on social media at Philippines-based Rappler, another group part of Facebook’s fact-checking network, stated:

“Whenever you see certain types of individuals, certain individuals, certain personalities become part of the discourse, or certain critics become prominent for that week or for a certain period, then you notice they figure more in these sites, these dubious sites we are monitoring. You see those patterns. It seems there’s a content plan, like they are also in tune with current events except the content is, in many cases, made up.” Essentially, pages that regularly publish misinformation are keeping up with current news events and creating fake stories around current, real events.
Angie Holan, an editor at PolitiFact, which is also involved in Facebook’s fact-checking efforts told Gizmodo: “I don’t think we’re going to reach some state of perfection with no misinformation online,” Holan said, stating that human nature means there will always be some form of misinformation. “I think the Alex Jones thing that happened … [recently]… his content being removed from platforms is very interesting and a turning point of the platforms accepting the role that they have as gatekeepers.”

The full report from Gizmodo can be found here.