Facebook’s Independent Fact Checker’s Wuhan Connection

Facebook has been known to use external fact checkers since December 2016 to try to combat fake news on their platform. They are proud of the fact that they use third party, ‘non-partisan‘ fact checkers, certified through the International Fact-Checking Network to help identify and review false news.

Facebook uses six different outside entities to fact check information (as reported by the hill), one of those entities is science feedback, which is an umbrella for health feedback and climate feedback.

From Science feedback’s website, they state:

As of today, there are over 50 organizations around the world covering over 40 languages which are part of the partnership. Science Feedback is the only organization dedicated to verifying information in scientific fields by empowering the scientific community to take an active part in this endeavour to make the Internet a more credible place.

Focusing on their health feedback website, they list their six step workflow on combating fake news.

1. Select an article for assessment, according to subject matter, relevance, and potential digital influence
2. Call on scientists with relevant expertise to participate in article analysis
3. Analyze selected article, with a focus on assessing (claimed) fact-based assertions and scientific reasoning
4. Evaluate the article’s overall credibility against current state-of-the-art knowledge and thinking in science
5. Summary & Feedback
6. Help promote our analyses!

This all sounds great so far, right? Facebook are protecting us from being duped by fake news! But have you seen the flaw yet?

Who is monitoring the fact checkers to ensure they are truly independent?

If science feedback and by extension, health feedback, is the only organization dedicated to verifying information in scientific fields then they will be the organization that are fact checking any potential false news about the coronavirus (covid-19) that first appeared in Wuhan. They would also then be the people who are fact checking theories that covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Let’s look at one of these viral articles that was reviewed by the health feedback independent fact checkers. On February 22nd, the below New York Post article went viral on facebook. The article suggested that covid-19 had escaped from a lab and that China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, is the National Biosafety Laboratory, which is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The article was reviewed by two scientists at health feedback, who said that they estimated its overall scientific credibility to be low to very low. So far, so good, but who are these scientists?

Meet the fact checkers

There were two fact checkers for the New York Post article that went viral on facebook, we’re going to be focusing on one of them. Meet Dr Danielle Anderson who is the Scientific Director of the Duke-NUS Medical School ABSL3 laboratory in Singapore.

Dr Anderson’s previous work has included the detection and characterization of a novel bat borne coronavirus in Singapore. You’d think she’d absolutely be the ideal person to fact check an article about coronavirus, especially an article where the implication was that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Except This is where we run into a potential conflict of interest and the true independence of the fact checker could be called into question. Dr Anderson appears to have some fairly close ties with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In the past she was one of the co-authors of a research article for the Journal of General Virology, and three of her co-authors were all part of WIV.

Going further, Dr Anderson even states on her fact check of the article that:

“I have worked in this exact laboratory at various times for the past two years,” she said. “I can personally attest to the strict control and containment measures implemented while working there. The staff at WIV are incredibly competent, hardworking, and are excellent scientists with superb track records.”

Is this fact check truly independent then?

That’s a hard question to answer. Can we really say that the fact check is independent and unbiased when we know that the fact checker in question has ties to the institution being discussed, has worked there and and was recently co-authoring papers with scientists from that institution? That’s for you the reader to decide.