No, social-distancing measures were never part of a plan to “install Sharia law” during the coronavirus pandemic. Nor does Nancy Pelosi’s husband own Dominion Voting Systems, the election-software company whose product “glitched in favor of Biden” in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. And SpongeBob SquarePants’s pineapple under the sea, while prime Bikini Bottom real estate, is not, in fact, located on Little St. James, the private Caribbean island once owned by Jeffrey Epstein.
I came to the above conclusions after hours of painstaking research, from scouring the then House Speaker’s financial-disclosure reports to cross-referencing satellite images of Little St. James with the address on the fictional fry cook’s elusive boating license.
Between late 2019 and the spring of 2021, I was part of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking initiative, spending my first job out of Columbia Journalism School, and most of the pandemic, debunking viral claims that were seen and shared by thousands before they ever came across my desk.
Mark Zuckerberg, announcing the end of fact-checking at Meta this week, claimed that “fact-checkers have been too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created.” As a former fact-checker, I’d like to rule that statement as false, unless Zuckerberg sees the truth itself as “too politically biased.”
In 2019, I was hired as a research assistant to Steve Adler, Reuters’s since-retired editor. I joined the organization’s nascent fact-checking team the following year. An idealistic 23-year-old, I was eager to play a role in something that felt so important—to enlist in the righteous war against disinformation and combat its culprits on the front lines.
In February 2020, Facebook and Reuters announced their fact-checking partnership. Addressing U.S. intelligence concerns, the move came amid growing pressure on the tech giant to counter misinformation on its platforms ahead of the 2020 election. Reuters joined seven other news organizations in this effort, including the news agencies Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press.
Two years later, the newly rebranded Meta would describe this project as part of its promised commitment to “innovation, collaboration and the future of fact-checking.” Though the financial terms were not disclosed, I can disclose that I made $22.00 an hour—before taxes.
Little did I know we were about to reach a nadir in the disinformation crisis—that over the next 15 months, I would inhabit a hellish eco-system of hoaxes, half-truths, and historical revisionism during a global pandemic, a nationwide racial uprising, and a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair presidential election.
Through it all, my colleagues, beaming in from London, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, demonstrated their steadfast desire to protect the public from deception. Some were such skilled sleuths that they could have found careers in the C.I.A.
Posts would get flagged by either Facebook or the platforms’ users as potentially false or misleading. We would then investigate. I got to correspond with historians I admire, such as David Blight and Timothy Snyder, who offered their respective expertise on fact-checks regarding whether Congress designated Confederate soldiers as U.S. veterans (it didn’t), or whether Hermann Göring “defunded the police” in Nazi Germany (he didn’t). I spoke with pulmonologists, constitutional scholars, and even Taylor Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, to produce my fact-check articles—which would be linked to from the offending Facebook post—citing medical journals, archival research, and Reuters reporting along the way.
Take the laborious fact-check I did after Biden’s inauguration regarding QAnon claims that military vessels, anchored off the coast of Long Beach, California, had arrived to keep Trump in power. It took me several days of research, which included marine-traffic data analysis and e-mails with Port of Los Angeles reps, to prove that the ships were mostly passenger and cargo ships—none of them U.S. Navy. But on Facebook and Instagram it was too late. Thousands of users would continue to share the post.
I would inhabit a hellish eco-system of hoaxes, half-truths, and historical revisionism.
In March of that year, I was tasked with unpacking further QAnon claims that President Biden was working out of a fake White House—either the old set of the 1995 film The American President in Los Angeles, or one at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. While a Perry spokesperson confirmed that the president had not been using their set, The American President’s director, Rob Reiner, himself e-mailed me to say that his set had been destroyed years prior. But for those hoping that Biden was not really president and that Trump was about to save them, the truth, and my efforts to prove it, did not matter. The day after my fact-check article was published, one user commented on his own, newly blurred post, “I FACT CHECKED the FACT CHECKERS ,,, THEY LIE.”
(In the highly publicized case of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, the suppression of posts and articles on the topic was decided and carried out by Facebook itself, not by its fact-checking partners.)
In May 2021, I was searching for my own Moderna shot while disproving claims that vaccines caused the Spanish flu or that only viruses made in laboratories required vaccines. I felt so demoralized by the thankless futility of my work that I quit.
Nine months after an attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a joint study by N.Y.U. and the Université Grenoble Alpes, in France, found that fake news on Facebook got six times more engagement than factual news during the 2020 election cycle. Validating criticism that the company’s algorithms promote the spread of misinformation, the study also determined that right-wing publishers were far more likely to share false information than publishers of other political leanings.
When it comes to content moderation at Meta, those who have “destroyed more trust than they created” are not its third-party fact-checkers but Meta itself, Zuckerberg chief among them. For the company’s top brass, efforts to course-correct its damage to democracy were little more than window dressing, despite all the good work of its fact-checkers. (Meta did not respond to request for comment)
On the one-way highway toward our post-truth era, Facebook poured the asphalt and forged its own rules of the road. And to the future authors of Meta’s “Community Notes,” I wish you safe travels. Good luck getting Tree Paine to talk to you.
Carrie Monahan is a Brooklyn-based writer and producer
