Characteristics of Facebook’s third-party medical fact checkers

INTRODUCTION: Social media websites, such as Facebook, have made an effort to monitor and label news stories and op-eds that could be false or misleading. As such, we sought to evaluate fact checkers for news stories and op-eds that circulate on Facebook. METHODS: We searched all articles on HealthFeedback.org for names of reviewers and other quoted individuals cited in the article and their professional titles. We searched Twitter on March 10, 2021, to see whether the reviewers and quoted individuals had an account and noted the number of Twitter followers. RESULTS: The median number of followers on Twitter for reviewers was 10,000 (since January 2020) versus 1012 (prior to January 2020; p = 0.007). The median number of followers on Twitter for quoted individuals was 153,050 (since January 2020) versus 314 (prior to January 2020; p = 0.04). CONCLUSION: Current fact-checking processes appear to be strongly associated with large Twitter followings. Greater transparency in the process of determining misinformation is needed.