How do I dispute a Facebook fact-check

Recently, Facebook has been taking a harder stance on misinformation.

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What to do if you want to query our rating
How do I dispute a Facebook violation?
What does missing context mean?

The company banned content related to the QAnon conspiracy theory and cracked down on coronavirus misinformation. But it's still not enough.

According to a recent study by the non-profit advocacy group Avaaz, Facebook is failing in a major, basic way. Facebook Pages that spread misinformation are finding their way around one of the platform’s most important tools for fighting fake news: its AI system.

When Facebook’s fact-checkers debunk a claim in a post, its AI is supposed to flag and label alternative versions of the post spreading the same misinformation. But the study says Pages are getting around these fact-checks.

How? By slightly tweaking the photos and memes used to spread misinformation.

Avaaz’s researchers looked into 119 “repeat misinformers” – pages that have spread misinformation a minimum of three times – to understand how these pages get around Facebook’s AI detection.

Turns out, all they have to do is change the background color or font on the photo or meme they’re sharing. They can also change up the location of the text on the meme or try cropping it.

Below is an example from the study showing two pieces of content spreading the same fact-checked claims. The image on the left just needed to change the format and text placement of the image on the right to avoid the fact-check label from Facebook.

A fact-checked meme could easily avoid a Facebook warning label by just tweaking some attributes. Credit: AVAAZ

Another workaround is to simply take the text from an image and copy and paste that same text on top of a different image or meme. Or they can take that copied text from a meme and simply paste it as a Facebook status. All of these methods will avoid Facebook’s AI detection, which means the content will appear without a fact-check or warning label.

Avaaz estimates that these 119 “repeat misinformer” Pages amassed 5.2 billion views from August 2019 to August 2020. Alternative versions of fact-checked posts had around 141 million views with 5.6 million interactions.

The study points out that the misinformation attacked both presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and other Democrats and Republicans. However, there is a clear partisan bent on the list of “repeat misinformer” Pages that received the most interactions. Eight out of 10 of them shared right-wing content.

Alongside pages like “Conservative Values” and “President Trump Fans” spreading misinformation is a sitting Congressman’s official Facebook page: Republican Rep. Steve King.

This is particularly concerning being that politicians are exempt from many of Facebook’s rules. One such policy, which has been routinely criticized since it was announced late last year, basically allows public servants to lie on the social media platform.

In fact, the one way a politician would be fact-checked on the platform is if they’re sharing content that has already been fact-checked. However, the workarounds uncovered in Avaaz’s study help politicians avoid even that.

Avaaz presented its findings to Facebook before publishing the study. The group says Facebook added a warning label to 4 percent of the 738 posts it flagged. It removed another 3 percent. The majority remain on the platform without a label.

We’ve been working with Facebook on their Third Party Fact Checking work since 2019, and a big part of that is giving social media posts a rating.

If you’re a Facebook group admin, page owner or you posted something from your personal account, you might have received a notification saying that we’ve rated your content.

If we rated your content ‘false’, ‘partly false’ or ‘altered’, Facebook may take a number of actions. Firstly, the content will appear lower in news feeds, meaning fewer people see it. Facebook also takes action against individuals, pages or websites that repeatedly share content that fact checkers mark as ‘false’ or ‘altered’ and you may see restrictions on advertising if you are a repeat offender. We don’t decide on or control that process, Facebook does. All we do is rate the accuracy of the content and provide our fact check supporting that.

If your content has been fact checked as ‘false’ or ‘altered’, deleting the content will not solve the problem. Facebook says that deleting these posts “will not eliminate the strike against the Page or domain” and it also means the fact checker can’t process a correction. It doesn’t matter if you’re not the original creator of the content. We all have a responsibility to check what we share is true if we present it as fact, particularly if we have a following online.

We understand that you may want to correct your posts after we’ve fact checked them for a number of reasons. You may want to dispute the rating or you may have changed your post to reflect that what it initially said was false.

Facebook says that users can contact fact checkers if they correct their content which must “correct the false content and/or clearly state that a correction has been made directly on the story.” For an article this could mean correcting the headline so it is no longer false, and adding a line to the article itself saying that the article has been changed. At Full Fact, we correct any mistakes we make in the same way and also publish all our corrections in one place.

If it’s an image or video, Facebook says: “please update the caption to correct the false content and clearly state that a correction was made. You may also link to an additional post that includes an updated, accurate version of the image or video, or to a fact-check article.”

Users can do something similar for a post involving video. For example, this post included a video which was claimed to show panic on board the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed in March 2019. As this was incorrect, the user could change their status to say: “CORRECTION: This video does not show the Ethiopian Airlines crash from March.”

This is by no means compulsory. But in order for us to change the rating on a previously inaccurate post, this is what you would need to do. As fact checkers, we think the best corrections to false social media posts is to make clear the original error even to someone just scrolling past and not paying too much attention.

What to do if you want to query our rating

If you’ve corrected some content that we have rated within the partnership with Facebook, you can email us on facebook-tpfc-appeals (at) fullfact (dot) org with a link to your post and your query. You can also email us if you want to dispute the rating we’ve given.

We can only change the ratings for posts we have fact checked. If your content has been rated by another of Facebook’s partners, you’ll need to contact that factchecker directly.

How do I dispute a Facebook violation?

Appeal a decision Facebook made about your content:.

Go to your Support Inbox and click Your Violations..

Open the update we sent you about our decision. ... .

Follow the on-screen instructions which will take you to the Oversight Board website to complete your appeal..

What does missing context mean?

Missing Context This includes: Clip or excerpt from authentic media that has not been altered (see Altered rating definition) or presented in a false context (see False rating definition), but distorts the meaning of the original content to imply a false claim.