Factcheck.bg has renewed its partnership agreement with Meta for another 12 months, effective February 1st, continuing the successful partnership established in March 2024.
As Bulgaria’s largest fact-checking platform, Factcheck.bg remains committed to combating misinformation. Our continued collaboration with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, allows us to reach a wider audience with accurate and reliable information.
In the first ten months of the partnership, Factcheck.bg published 122 articles addressing misleading content identified on Meta platforms. We debunked various types of misinformation, including:
- Scam schemes that defraud users by withdrawing money from their bank accounts,
- Dangerous health-related disinformation, such as false claims that Switzerland banned mammography, and
- Malicious disinformation and propaganda related to the Paris Olympics, climate and energy and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
One notable example was the debunking of a widely circulated post falsely claiming that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had banned the Lord’s Prayer from Facebook.
Our partnership with Meta aligns with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which explicitly requires Very Large Online Platforms to prevent the spread of disinformation. The importance of such efforts was recently highlighted when disinformation and voter manipulation led to the annulment of a presidential election in an EU member state.
We believe fact-checking is essential to provide EU citizens with trustworthy information, ensuring their freedom to make informed decisions. Factcheck.bg is a proud member of The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN).
Fact-checkers neither ban nor delete content; rather, they add context and clarity to the ocean of information and disinformation we all, as users, navigate in.
In a statement published on Tuesday, EFCSN expressed concern over Meta’s decision to end its Third-Party Fact-Checking Program in the United States and strongly condemned comments by its CEO equating fact-checking with censorship. We fully support this message and believe it would be a significant mistake for Meta to abandon this well-functioning program. Such a move would not only harm democratic societies and individuals’ well-being, especially concerning health misinformation, but it could also negatively impact Meta’s reputation.
Factcheck.bg is the second third-party fact-checking partner of Meta in the Bulgarian language, following the France Presse Agency. Both organizations adhere to the highest international and European fact-checking standards, and their successful partnerships with Meta demonstrate the critical need for such initiatives.
