Bad news on the Facebook fact-checking front…

Want to get away with posting fake news on Facebook? Just change your website domain.

One of the most frequently debunked fake news publishers on Facebook is still getting past the platform’s fact-checking system — and it’s doing it by using the simplest of tricks.

In the fall, YourNewsWire, one of the most infamous misinformers on the internet, migrated its site and rebranded as News Punch.

[…]

So far, it seems like its strategy is succeeding.

And in related news…

Snopes pulls out of its fact-checking partnership with Facebook

Snopes is no longer debunking misinformation in partnership with Facebook.

[…]

“After contributing to that effort for two years, we want to inform our readership that Snopes.com has elected not to renew our partnership with Facebook,” reads the statement, which was signed by CEO David Mikkelson and Vinny Green, vice president of operations. “At this time we are evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party fact-checking services, and we want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication, and staff.”

[…]

In 2017, Snopes received $100,000 from Facebook for participating in the partnership. According to Green, Snopes hadn’t been downranking hoaxes on Facebook since the end of December, when its contract with the company lapsed. Since then, the fact-checking project has been renegotiating the contract to try and make it easier for fact-checkers to flag falsities on the platform.

That ended on Friday.

“It doesn’t seem like we’re striving to make third-party fact checking more practical for publishers — it seems like we’re striving to make it easier for Facebook. At some point, we need to put our foot down and say, ‘No. You need to build an API,’” Green said. “The work that fact-checkers are doing doesn’t need to be just for Facebook — we can build things for fact-checkers that benefit the whole web, and that can also help Facebook.”