RIP fact checking?

Fact checking is out of vogue and soon it might be out of options, with Google making moves to limit, if not end, the whole industry. Here in Australia, it’s decided to stop funding AAP FactCheck, which is unwelcome if not unexpected news. Globally, Google is downgrading fact checking too.

In the pre-internet age, fact checking was the domain of journalists, done in the normal course of their work. But in an era where information and misinformation has flooded into newsrooms from all directions, including social media, fact checking done by specialists has grown into an industry. It was given a financial boost by Meta after the 2016 US election, where Russian misinformation farms reportedly flooded US social media sites – primarily Meta-owned Facebook - with anti-Democrat messaging. But even before the election that spawned Donald Trump 1.0, it wasn’t unusual to see a Facebook or Instagram post plastered with notices that the post contained unverified information, or false information.

Those labels originated with external fact checkers, now mostly extinct thanks to the politicisation of the industry since 2016 based on claims that fact checking bumps up too hard against free speech. The industry limped along until free speech ‘absolutists’ such as X owner Elon Musk agreed with political conservatives that people should be able to say what they like regardless of its veracity. The crowd will correct wrong information, said Musk, without the influence of ideological bias. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg agreed. In January 2025, as Donald Trump moved back into the White House, Zuckerberg announced Meta was abandoning fact checkers for X-style community notes. As he said, ‘Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US.’  

Along with its decision to end funding of AAP FactCheck, Google has decided to end a global program called ClaimReview, a tagging system that lets apps, search engines and social media platforms find fact checks and surface them in individual newsfeeds or even search results. The system allowed fact checkers to attach code ‘behind the scenes’, says Andrew Duffield, head of AI at Full Fact, a US-based fact checking site. ‘Platforms like Google can read these signals and choose to show the content differently to a normal search results page.’

As the Poynter Institute for Media Studies notes,‘More than 250,000 fact checks have been tagged with ClaimReview, and Google itself reported in 2019 that annual impressions likely reached 4 billion.’ With 4 billion impressions, why get rid of it? Unlike with AAP, the decision isn’t one that will save money, because the fact checks were provided to Google for free. Google says the end of ClaimReview will ‘help streamline the results page and focus on other experiences that are more useful and widely used.’ But Duffield is alarmed, because he says the move comes as Google AI begins to push quality information further down the page. 

Without fact checking, the internet is going to be an even more unreliable source of information. AAP Fact Check might limp along till the end of 2026, when its current contract with Meta expires. After that, Australians will seemingly be left to rely on journalists to get it right. Apart from that, we’ll be on our own to sort through the dross that floods our searches and feeds.