Snopes ends their 'debunking false stuff' partnership with Facebook. Here's why.
Fact-checking site Snopes said in a statement Friday they're ending a partnership with Facebook that was intended to help Facebook cut down on the use of its platform to share disinformation and promote accuracy in public discourse.
It's over.
Poynter's reporting says the reason for the breakup is “bandwidth,” namely Snopes's:
Read the restSince fact-checkers have to manually enter each false post they flag into a dashboard on the platform, it takes a lot of time for an operation that only employs 16 people and has no physical headquarters.
“With a manual system and a closed system — it’s impossible to keep on top of that stuff,” Green told Poynter in a phone interview. “Do you need fact-checkers to stop and do all this manual work? Or should fake websites just be reported through other means and supply a body of evidence that these people shouldn’t be on your platform because of their nefarious activity?”
Snopes had been contributing to Facebook’s fact-checking partnership since December 2016, when the company announced that it was teaming up with independent fact-checking organizations to limit the reach of fake news following the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the program has become a staple of Facebook’s anti-misinformation efforts — to the point of being cited by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg in Congressional testimony.
In 2017, Snopes received $100,000 from Facebook for participating in the partnership. According to Green, Snopes hadn’t been downranking hoaxes on Facebook since the end of December, when its contract with the company lapsed.