FACT-CHECKING POLITICIANS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Published in The Journal of Online Trust & Society (available here)

When misinformation poses serious risks of harm, social media platforms often remove it. In other cases, where the harm of the falsehood is more diffuse, platforms pursue a milder, alternative remedy: they label the post as false or misleading, posing a link to a third-party fact-checker.  Yet many platforms, such as Meta, currently exempt politicians from its fact-checking protocols, allowing them to post misinformation uncontested. Can this exemption be justified? We argue that it cannot. We explore four rationales for exempting politicians: (a) free expression, (b) respect for the democratic process, (c) enabling scrutiny, and (d) newsworthiness. We argue that none of these reasons justifies the exemption. We also argue against the selective fact-checking of politicians in paid advertisements; if fact-checking is appropriate in that context, it is appropriate in general.

Written by Sarah A. Fisher, Beatriz Kira, Kiran A. Basavaraj, and Jeffrey W. Howard