Rumours on social media platform Facebook claim users can block fact checkers by heading to their settings, clicking on Blocking and typing in “fact checker”
The rumours claim this will prevent a user’s posts being flagged as misinformation.
An example of such a post on social media can be seen below.
You can block fact checkers on fb. Go to your settings, then to blocking, and type fact checker…block everyone that pops up, but you will have to do this everyday, maybe even a couple of times a day. New ones pop up all the time. Tired of fb “fact checking” truth!!!
The posts themselves are, perhaps ironically, misinformation. They make several false claims and assumptions. (The post is very similar to an earlier and equally spurious message from 2020 that claimed you could block “Facebook bots” by typing “fact check” into your settings.)
Firstly, if you type “fact checker” into your settings, you get a list of pages and profiles that – unsurprisingly – contain the words “fact checker” in their title or vanity URL. From what we can determine, the majority of these profiles or pages have very small audiences and most have been, at some point, abandoned or are now rarely updated. (Most pages on Facebook no longer post regular content, and many are abandoned at or near the point of inception.)
Perhaps some of these pages were once upon a time intended for fact checking (though many actually had nothing to do with fact checking) but the ones that appeared on our list did not represent significant fact checking organisations, and none would have been responsible for classifying posts on Facebook as misinformation.
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Secondly, while Facebook does partner with many fact checking organisations to identify misinformation on their platform, it should be noted that these organisations – all of which comply with the Poynter Institute’s Code of Principles – don’t flag posts arbitrarily, and will classify a post as false based on the content of that article. Each time a post is classified as false, it will include a link to an analysis along with sources explaining why the post was classified as false.
Thirdly, the fact checking organisations that have partnered with Facebook don’t appear on the list of pages and profiles when you type in “fact checker” into your settings. That’s likely because they don’t have branding that includes those words. By typing in those words and blocking every result that appears, users are essentially wasting their time blocking small and usually irrelevant Facebook pages that have nothing to do with classifying or flagging posts on Facebook’s platform.
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And finally, even if the fact checking organisations partnered with Facebook did appear on this list, blocking these organisations doesn’t stop the people that work with them from seeing your posts and classifying them as misinformation (if the posts are indeed just that.) The organisations that partner with Facebook can see all posts made in the public sphere (i.e. posted on pages, groups, events etc.) and blocking their public facing Facebook pages isn’t going to change that.
To surmise, no, you cannot block partnered fact checkers from Facebook, or stop them from seeing the content you post publicly on the platform. Following the instructions contained within the message above is a fruitless, time wasting endeavour. If you post false information on Facebook, there is a significant chance that it will be flagged as such, regardless of whether you follow these instructions.