Opinion and satire to be exempt from fact checking

Facebook plans to exempt opinion pieces and satire from its fact-checking program, according to sources.

Facebook will allow publishers of information found to be false by outside fact checkers to appeal to the company. Picture: AP

Facebook plans to exempt opinion pieces and satire from its fact-checking program, according to sources, as the social-media giant grapples with how to stop the spread of falsehoods while maintaining its own neutrality.

As part of the new rules, Facebook will allow publishers of information found to be false by outside fact checkers to appeal to the company. Posts that Facebook deems to be either opinion or satire won’t be labelled as false even if they contain information the fact checkers determined was inaccurate.

The new rules follow Facebook’s acknowledgment last week that it will continue exempting politicians from fact checks, on the grounds that such comments are newsworthy, as well as a recent controversy arising from a third-party fact checker’s decision that an anti-abortion group’s video was false.

The rules, which haven’t been announced, coincide with Facebook’s decision last week to remove a false designation from a Washington Examiner opinion piece, overriding the conclusion of one of its fact-check partners. That op-ed argued that global-warming climate models had been inaccurate and that the risks of climate change was overblown.

The removal of the false label was celebrated by the CO2 Coalition, which employs the op-ed’s authors and argued in a letter to Facebook that the company had “used a partisan fact-check group to defame them”. The group, which receives funding from the oil-and-gas industry, dismisses global warming as a hoax and advocates for the “important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy”.

A Facebook spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment on the new rules.

Together, the changes demonstrate the company’s continuing struggle to limit the spread of so-called fake news and other misinformation without being accused of stifling free speech.

Angie Drobnic Holan, the editor of PolitiFact and a member of the board of the International Fact-Checking Network, said she expected the changes would only affect the overall fact-checking program at the margins.