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Soon to be out of a job, Meta’s fact-checkers battle a blaze of wildfire conspiracy theories

Just hours after Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg announced last Tuesday that the social media giant would eliminate its US-based fact-checkers, the iconic hills above Los Angeles began to smolder.

“Cutting fact checkers from social platforms is like disbanding your fire department,” said Alan Duke, a former CNN journalist who co-founded the fact-checking outlet Lead Stories, one of dozens of such organizations around the world funded by Meta. Duke, a Los Angeles resident, could see the orange glow of the fires from his home as he and his colleagues at Lead Stories worked to tackle conspiracy theories about the blazes that have left at least two dozen people dead. PolitiFact, the Florida-based Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-check organization that also is part of Meta’s program, debunked a viral post on Threads falsely claiming Los Angeles police were “looking for three ‘persons of interest’ all tied to a MAGA website who were spotted at the source of all three major LA fire.”

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