Fact Check: Facebook Third-Party Fact Checkers Did NOT Rate The Bill of Rights as False Information

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fact Check: Facebook Third-Party Fact Checkers Did NOT Rate The Bill of Rights as False Information Fake Picture

Did Facebook's independent fact checkers rate an image of the Bill of Rights as "False Information"? No, that's not true: an image circulating on social media that appears to show a fact checking overlay on the Bill of Rights is a crude forgery. We contacted several of the fact checkers Facebook is working with and none of them (including ourselves) have ever fact checked or rated the Bill of Rights.

An example of the false image can be seen in the viral post (archived here) published on the page "Being Libertarian" on May 23, 2020:

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

Facebook screenshot

Facebook has entered into a partnership with several independent third-party fact checking organizations to help stop the spread of harmful misinformation on Facebook and Instagram. (Disclosure: Lead Stories is part of this partnership and gets paid by Facebook for the work we do in connection with it.)

The way it works is that fact checkers are able to add labels and warnings to false and misleading content and clicking these labels leads to a fact check published by the fact checker in question. Note that this does not remove the content, Facebook's fact checking partners do not have the ability to delete or remove anything. Only Facebook's own moderation teams can do that and they only take that action when content violates the Community Standards (and note that the Community Standards explicitly allow posting false news).

Here are two examples of what these labels look like. Here is one that covers a forged screenshot showing a tweet that President Trump never made:

overlay.jpg

And this is an example of a labeled post on Instagram about another forged tweet supposedly made by Chuck Schumer:

instagramoverlay.jpg

As you can see the somewhat transparent but fuzzy overlay pretty thoroughly covers up the underlying image and the text and icon are bright white sit directly on top of the semi-transparent layer.

However on the fake Bill of Rights image the text and icon seem to be sitting on top of a grayish background that is not transparent at all, and the underlying image of the Bill of Rights just appears to have been made somewhat darker than the original, with no semi-transparent layer in evidence:

fakeoverlay.jpg

Compare with this post we made on our own Facebook page:

(Also note the distinct lack of fact checking overlay, proving it is definitely possible to post this image to Facebook without a fact checking label appearing)

In the United States Facebook works with following independent third-party fact checkers:

AFP United States

On the AFP Fact Check website a search for "Bill of Rights" (archived here) only brings up a story about South Africa.

The Associated Press

A search of Google's Fact Check Explorer for Associated Press fact checks of the "Bill of Rights" (archived here) yielded no results.

Check Your Fact

Check Your Fact provided us following statement: "Check Your Fact has not fact checked the Bill of Rights, nor have we rated such an image "false" to my knowledge. The image appears to be poorly photoshopped to resemble the misinformation overlay applied to false and partially false photos. As you know, the false information overlay completely greys out images, whereas this one does not."

Factcheck.org

A search of Google's Fact Check Explorer for "Bill of Righs" posts from factcheck.org (archived here) shows two results but none of them claim the Bill of Rights is false.

Lead Stories

Our own position on this is clear: we have never fact checked or labeled the Bill of Rights.

PolitiFact

Asked for a statement by Lead Stories in an email, PolitiFact said the following: "We have never fact-checked the bill of rights, nor would we. We have cited it as a source many times."

Science Feedback

Lead Stories received a similar reply from Science Feedback: "Science Feedback never fact-checked the Bill of Rights, nor did any staff marked a picture of it as False."

Reuters Fact Check

A search for '"Bill of Rights" fact check' (archived here) on the Reuters website yielded only four results and none of them were about fact checks of the Bill of Rights.

USA TODAY

A search for USA Today fact checks about the "Bill of Rights" (archived here) on Google's Fact Check explorer yielded no results.

Conclusion: the meme is a crude forgery and the Bill of Rights can be posted to Facebook and Instagram without the risk of any fact checking labels appearing.

Note: now that we have published this fact check, posting the false meme itself will probably result in a fact checking label being applied. Let's be very clear here: the Bill of Righs is NOT false. What is false here is saying or implying Facebook fact checkers labeled it false.

(Editors' Note: Facebook is a client of Lead Stories, which is a third-party fact checker for the social media platform. On our About page, you will find the following information:

Since February 2019 we are actively part of Facebook's partnership with third party fact checkers. Under the terms of this partnership we get access to listings of content that has been flagged as potentially false by Facebook's systems or its users and we can decide independently if we want to fact check it or not. In addition to this we can enter our fact checks into a tool provided by Facebook and Facebook then uses our data to help slow down the spread of false information on its platform. Facebook pays us to perform this service for them but they have no say or influence over what we fact check or what our conclusions are, nor do they want to.)


  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

Different viewpoints

Note: if reading this fact check makes you want to contact us to complain about bias, please check out our Red feed first.

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2020/05/fact-check-bill-of-rights-rated-false-information.html
leadstories.com
CC-MAIN-2024-10
100590
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TVX3NOX7XEJQ7XNTFYMQUOUUC2BRETNP
<urn:uuid:6a7d1fe4-2268-40f2-9a27-0e1bd64abd1e>
2024-02-28T16:28:19Z
172.67.28.131
text/html
sha1:SQHJXANF4F23RHW5SEEJSBNBAV35YKVK
<urn:uuid:250eac58-0e15-4b15-a25b-738741cfe458>
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2020/05/fact-check-bill-of-rights-rated-false-information.html
response
<urn:uuid:0b5ce4ea-6587-410b-8cd7-434bc0c68656>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-10
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February/March 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-196
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/