San Francisco: Two leading fact-checking agencies have ended their partnerships with Facebook, striking a significant blow to the network’s efforts to fight fake news, media reports said. The social network had paid the AP and Snopes to combat its misinformation crisis. But both confirmed they stopped checking articles at the end of 2018, and will not renew their contracts, the BBC reported. The AP confirmed to TechCrunch it was “not currently doing fact-checking work for FB”. An AP spokesperson told the BBC: “AP constantly evaluates how to best deploy its fact-checking resources, and that includes ongoing conversations with Facebook about opportunities to do important fact-checking work on its platform.” The AP representative contacted TechCrunch to say that although it was not doing fact checking work for the program, it was not leaving it altogether.
Snopes, the popular myth-busting website, has said it was ending its partnership with Facebook as part of a “difficult, but necessary change”. A Snopes statement said it was “evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services” and wants the efforts to be “a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff,” the Guardian reported.
