CRC member Yarden Skop wins AoIR2024 Student Paper Award
“How Fact-Checkers are Becoming Machine Learners: A Case of Meta’s Third Party Programme”
Yarden Skop (University of Siegen) and Anna Schjøtt Hansen (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
The paper of our CRC 1187 member Yarden Skop is honored as best student paper at the 2024 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. The article will be published in the proceedings of the conference and will be available online on October 30th, 2024.
About the paper
A recent development in the field of fact-checking is what some scholars call the “debunking turn” in which fact-checking organisations move from fact-checking expressions of politicians and public figures to checking claims made on social media. A main driver of this change is the proliferation of a paid program initiated by Meta, where fact-checkers check and label claims on the platform in exchange for monetary remuneration. This paper draws on interviews with and fieldwork amongst fact-checkers who are or have been part of the Meta partnership. Based on the empirical insights we argue that the human-machine assemblage in fact-checking is (1) enabling a move beyond the ‘debunking turn’ by turning journalists into ‘machine learners’ and (2) cements a ‘politics of demarcation’ in which public contestation over public facts is diminished and moved into networked infrastructures.
With this argument, the paper highlights an additional aspect of the platformisation of journalism, as the labelling and claim-checking work of journalists now also enables large tech platforms to expand technical infrastructures that commodify journalistic work by turning it into training data aimed at improving their ML systems and algorithms. This enables platforms to move further beyond their current market role, as they also participate in the further industrialisation and standardisation of fact-checking. As large tech companies become industry leaders in the provision of ML systems, for example, for fact-checking, the need to understand what politics they produce equally increases, as they become integral in the production of democratic ideals of citizens and public debate.
Yarden Skop is a Research associate writing her PhD in Media Studies at the International Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” (funded by the DFG, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) at University of Siegen. She is a member of project
A07: The Industry of Personal Data. For her dissertation she conducts critical qualitative research on the development and deployment of ML and AI tools for the identification of toxic speech and fact checking, from a platform studies and content moderation studies perspective. Her articles have been published in academic journals such as
Big Data and Society,
Media Culture and Society, and
First Monday. She holds an MA in New Media Digital Culture from the University of Amsterdam.
The Association of Internet Researchers is an academic association dedicated to the advancement of the cross-disciplinary field of Internet studies. It is a member-based support network promoting critical and scholarly Internet research independent from traditional disciplines and existing across academic borders. The association is international in scope.