Soon to be out of a job, Meta’s fact-checkers battle a blaze of wildfire conspiracy theories

By Donie O’Sullivan, CNN

Los Angeles (CNN) — Just hours after Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg announced last Tuesday that the social media giant would eliminate its US-based fact-checkers, the iconic hills above Los Angeles began to smolder.

As fire crews scrambled in vain to contain the resulting firestorm, the fact-checking partners, still working for Meta, took on their own fight: trying to slow viral misinformation rapidly spreading around the wildfires.

Rumor and speculation about the disaster began to swirl online like glowing embers, before eventually becoming a wild blaze of vast conspiracy theories.

“Cutting fact checkers from social platforms is like disbanding your fire department,” said Alan Duke, a former CNN journalist who co-founded the fact-checking outlet Lead Stories, one of dozens of such organizations around the world funded by Meta.

Meta has not announced when it will formally end its fact-checking program, but a person familiar with the program said it could be eliminated as soon as March. The decision will force some of Meta’s fact-checking partners to lay off staff or shut down once the company’s financial support dries up.

Duke, a Los Angeles resident, could see the orange glow of the fires from his home as he and his colleagues at Lead Stories worked to tackle conspiracy theories about the blazes that have left at least two dozen people dead.

“Fires and looting. A regular Democrat run city,” read the caption on an Instagram video showing men removing a television from a home amid the fires.

After Lead Stories fact-checked the claim and found that the men were not looters, but in fact the resident’s family helping save their belongings, Meta placed a fact-check label on the video. When a post is labeled as false or misleading, Meta says it applies penalties that “significantly reduce that content’s distribution so that fewer people see” it and also notifies users who try to share the post.

PolitiFact, the Florida-based Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-check organization that also is part of Meta’s program, debunked a viral post on Threads falsely claiming Los Angeles police were “looking for three ‘persons of interest’ all tied to a MAGA website who were spotted at the source of all three major LA fire.”

PolitiFact also debunked an image circulating on Instagram that purported to show the iconic Hollywood sign on fire. PolitiFact said the false image was likely created using artificial intelligence.

Much of the misinformation swirling online was of a distinctively partisan nature and spread beyond Meta’s platforms by some of the most widely followed and influential figures on the internet.

False claims promoted by President-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform sought to blame the Democratic Party for the wildfires. On X, Elon Musk downplayed the role of climate change while repeatedly blaming diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies for the fires. “DEI means people will DIE,” Musk posted.

The disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed on X that the fires were “part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the United States before trigger total collapse.”

“True,” Musk wrote in a response to Jones.

Like the devastating Maui wildfires in 2023 and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, conspiracy theorists claimed the Los Angeles fires had been deliberately set by the government. Some baselessly suggested the government was controlling the weather and directing strong winds to spread the fires.

“The false claims we are seeing on the wildfires are similar to what happened with the recent hurricane that slammed the southeast a few months ago. It creates distrust of emergency agencies that are actively responding to the disaster, making it more difficult for them during the crisis,” Duke told CNN.

“The same thing happened after the Maui fires in 2023,” he added. “Space lasers were blamed. It was allegedly a conspiracy to steal the land. Unless the false claims are countered with facts collected and assessed by professionals, the myths and distrust will continue to spread.”

But removing professional fact-checkers from the equation is precisely what Zuckerberg intends to do.

In his announcement last Tuesday, the billionaire said he planned to replace the fact-checking program that was created in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election with something similar to X’s Community Notes feature. Community Notes is a crowd-sourced form of fact-checking where the platform’s users can append notes to debunk or provide further context to posts.

Community Notes only appear on posts when X users with “diverse perspectives” agree a post warrants one, the Musk-owned company outlines in a somewhat obscure explanation on its website.

“Community Notes doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings,” the company says.

Unlike fact-checking journalists, however, community users are not bound by ethical guidelines to provide fair and accurate assessments. Fact checks in the form of Community Notes have been added to posts on X, including on a video with more than 500,000 views that falsely purported to show the fire approaching the Hollywood sign (An assessment by Lead Stories found the video was likely created using artificial intelligence).

Another Community Note offered a robust fact-check of a post from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene about the fire that played into conspiracy theories about the government’s ability to control the weather.

But other posts baselessly suggesting the fires had been planned by the government, started using lasers, and spread through weather manipulation have gone unchecked on X.

Alex Jones’ baseless claim that the fires are part of a “globalist plot” has not been marked with a Community Note and as of Sunday had been viewed more than 17 million times.

Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network, whose members are part of the Meta fact-checking program, told CNN that while Community Notes has had some success, it is no substitute for professional fact-checks.

“Professional fact-checkers can tackle a wider variety of complex conspiracy theories and political claims, while community-based systems excel mainly at flagging obvious visual misattribution,” Holan said.

The-CNN-Wire
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