GD Rejoices at News of Meta Rolling Back Factchecking
Georgia’s ruling party has enthusiastically welcomed the recent news from tech giant Meta that it is abandoning the use of independent fact-checkers on its Facebook and Instagram platforms and replacing them with X-style “community notes,” although the jubilation may be a bit premature, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the move would initially only be implemented in the United States.
“Facebook’s adoption of a more democratic factchecking practice, similar to X’s Community Notes, is a positive step forward in strengthening the value of facts over the perceptions or outright disinformation,” wrote Shalva Papuashvili, the Georgian Dream parliament speaker on X.
But the GD fellow may not have gotten the message right. “Shalva Papuashvili’s insinuation is completely at odds with reality, while Zuckerberg’s statement about the new model of fact-checking does not apply to the work of European fact-checkers in exposing disinformation, which will be seen in the coming days,” Tamar Kintsurashvili, the head of the Media Development Foundation (MDF), a local NGO that runs the Myth Detector fact-checking project, wrote on Facebook.
Still, GD’s apparent glee at Meta returning to its “roots around free expression” by weeding out “too politically biased” fact-checkers, as Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it, is not surprising. GD-controlled media content and various associated channels on Facebook and Instagram have often been removed from Meta’s platforms after fact-checking reports for various reasons, including disinformation.
One of the latest such cases was last August, when Meta removed Russian-origin accounts and pages from its platforms, criticizing protesters against the Foreign Agents Law while supporting the ruling Georgian Dream party. Meta’s fact-checking has also previously targeted GD-affiliated inauthentic channels.
- 03/05/2023 – Meta Deletes Dozens of Accounts Associated with Georgian Government
- 06/04/2021 – Facebook Removes Nativist Georgian March Linked Network
- 05/05/2020 – Facebook Removes Hundreds of Inauthentic Pages, Accounts in Georgia
- 20/12/2019 – Facebook Removes Hundreds of Georgia Govt Linked Pages for ‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior’
Papuashvili said Facebook relied primarily on two Georgian NGOs: Georgia’s Reforms Associates’ project FactCheck and the Media Development Foundation’s (MDF) MythDetector for fact-checking, both of which proved to be a headache for the GD, which sought high reach for its content on Meta’s platforms. “Both of these NGOs were paid millions from foreign governments for this work,” Papuashvili claimed.
He further claimed that the fact-checkers in Georgia are “under control of Sergi Kapanadze and Tamar Kintsurashvili” who he noted held high positions in the United National Movement government under President Mikheil Saakashvili serving as Deputy Foreign Minister and Deputy Secretary of the National Security Council. “You can only imagine the level of ‘impartiality’ and ‘integrity’ given by these two covert politicians to their factchecking mission,” Papuashvili concluded.
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