Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would end fact-checking on its platform. In the process, a partnership with the network of third parties that has provided review and ratings of viral misinformation since 2016 will be terminated. To some observers, this news suggested that the company was abandoning the very idea of truth, and opening its gates to lies, perversions, and deception. But this is wrong: Those gates were never really closed.The idea that something called “fact-checking” could be (or could have been) reasonably applied to social-media posts,…
