By Polly Toynbee – The Guardian:
The US president, JD Vance and Nigel Farage seem to believe that checking facts is a form of censorship. Nonsense: speech is only free when it is anchored in truth
Facts are becoming less sacred by the day in Donald Trump’s US, where many of his supporters now deny the very existence of truths. To them, inconvenient evidence is by definition “bias”. His followers and those who fear his fist are falling into line: media, universities and that infamous regiment of tech zillionaires who stood right behind him on inauguration day. The day after Trump’s election victory was certified by an electoral vote tally in Congress, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that, starting with the US, the company would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
A similar hammer blow has just struck Full Fact, the exceptionally valuable UK factchecker whose word is a gold standard for honesty. Google has pulled its £1m funding. Along with the ending of sizeable donations from Meta in the US, the charity tells me this amounts to a loss of a third of its funding.
Full Fact’s CEO, Chris Morris, says: “We think Google’s decisions, and those of other big US tech companies, are influenced by the perceived need to please the current US administration, feeding a harmful new narrative that attacks factchecking and all it stands for. Verifiable facts matter and the big internet companies have responsibilities when it comes to curtailing the spread of harmful misinformation.” Morris pioneered the BBC’s reality check, now called BBC Verify, charting the BBC’s perilous course through the Brexit and pandemic years. As a member of the European governance body of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network, Full Fact has shared its falsehood-finding AI tool with factcheckers in more than 40 countries.
The “community notes” system that replaces factchecking at Google, Meta and X abandons a notion of objective truth verified by science or evidence. Instead, it crowdsources any comments on a piece of content and the algorithm finds a “consensus”: the Earth could be flat if most people say so.
Google recently dropped its ClaimReview, a tagging system that lets search engines, apps and social
media platforms find fact checks and display them with the original factual error: Google used to boast it reached billions of users. When I asked why it had gone, a spokesperson directed me to the company’s statement that it is “simplifying search results”, and pointed out that it also continues to offer dedicated tools such as Fact Check Explorer, “for people who specifically want to explore claims that have been reviewed”.
The anti-fact ideology was proclaimed in JD Vance’s full-throated assault on Europe in February in Munich, when he warned that European democracy was at risk from the enemy within. (Many might identify a different enemy.) He claimed that Joe Biden’s administration “threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation”. He described “misinformation” as an “ugly Soviet-era word” and suggested anyone using it doesn’t like the idea that “somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion”.
Vance seems to think factchecking is censorship. Full Fact responds that it “doesn’t restrict debate: it strengthens it by grounding it in truth”. The checkers never ask to remove or censor content from the internet. In its now axed American partnership with Meta, it would simply attach a label to a post suggesting that readers might want to see what Full Fact says about it before sharing it further. Among the things Full Fact checks are harmful financial scams, false and misleading medical information that damages people’s health, and online videos that encourage suicidal thoughts among teenagers.
The word “misinformation” is now all but banned among any in the US relying on government approval: the US National Science Foundation, for instance, terminated grants worth many millions it had awarded to researchers studying misinformation. But as Full Fact says, “debating the language risks missing the real issue: our online information environment is under greater threat than ever before.” This dispute is also at the heart of debate on the UK’s Online Safety Act, designed to protect children and others from the worst harms. Nigel Farage pledged to abolish it on his trip to the US Congress last month where he said of UK free speech: “At what point did we become North Korea?”
A long list of distinguished institutional and charitable funders back Full Fact. It is free to use and, like the Guardian, relies on individual supporters, who relish, as I do, avalanches of daily checks. Here’s a sample: No, the UK hasn’t pledged £40bn to Gaza’s reconstruction. No, James Cleverly didn’t (quite) say about China what Keir Starmer claimed he did in PMQs. No, police say no immigrants are eating swans. No, immigration didn’t increase four-fold under the Tories, but it doubled. There is no evidence for Trump’s claim that London is under sharia law. A picture of beautiful Epping mums protesting in pink against an asylum hotel is an AI fake (but there were mums there). Its rolling government tracker is compelling: 59 out of 86 pledges happened or are in progress.
In her conference speech, Kemi Badenoch quoted Margaret Thatcher claiming that “the facts are conservative”, a dangerous line of thought when JD Vance seems to believe that facts belong to Trump. The critical value of independent checkers is to hold on to the truth that facts belong to no one. Right here, this is one of the Enlightenment’s frontlines against the gathering storms of unreason.
