The famous hills over Los Angeles started to smoulder just hours after Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, declared last Tuesday that the social media behemoth would fire its fact-checkers headquartered in the United States.
The fact-checking partners, who were still employed by Meta, took up their battle while fire crews frantically attempted to contain the ensuing firestorm, attempting to slow the rapid spread of viral misinformation surrounding the flames.
Online rumours and conjectures surrounding the catastrophe started to burn like blazing coals before escalating into a massive conspiracy theory firestorm.
According to Alan Duke, a former CNN journalist who co-founded Lead Stories, one of the dozens of fact-checking organisations financed by Meta worldwide, “removing fact-checkers from social platforms is like disbanding your fire department.”
According to someone familiar with the operation, Meta may discontinue its fact-checking initiative as early as March, though the company has not yet disclosed when it would formally terminate it. Once the company’s funding runs out, the decision will compel some of Meta’s fact-checking partners to close or lay off employees.
While he and his coworkers at Lead Stories worked to address conspiracy theories regarding the fires that have claimed the lives of at least two dozen people, Duke, a native of Los Angeles, could see the orange glow of the fires from his house.
“Both looting and fires.” An Instagram video featuring guys retrieving a television from a house in the middle of a fire said, “A typical Democrat-run city.”
Meta put a fact-check label on the video after Lead Stories verified the claim and discovered that the men were the residents’ family members assisting them in preserving their possessions rather than robbers.
According to Meta, when a post is flagged as misleading or untrue, it alerts users who attempt to share it and imposes fines that “significantly reduce that content’s distribution so that fewer people see.”
Los Angeles police were allegedly “looking for three ‘persons of interest’ all tied to a MAGA website who were spotted at the source of all three major LA fires,” according to a widely shared post on Threads that was refuted by PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking group based in Florida and included in Meta’s programme.
A picture that was making the rounds on Instagram that claimed to show the famous Hollywood sign burning was also refuted by PolitiFact. The misleading image was probably produced by artificial intelligence, according to PolitiFact.
A significant portion of the online disinformation was distinctly partisan and was disseminated outside of Meta’s platforms by some of the most popular and powerful people on the internet.
President-elect Donald Trump spread inaccurate allegations that the Democratic Party was to blame for the flames on his Truth Social platform. While constantly attributing the fires to diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) principles, Elon Musk minimised the impact of climate change on X. “DEI refers to individuals who have DIE,” Musk wrote.
Alex Jones, a disgraced conspiracy theorist, stated on X that the fires were “part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialise the United States before trigger total collapse.”
Musk responded to Jones with the message, “True.”
Conspiracy theorists said the government intentionally started the flames in Los Angeles, similar to the deadly Maui wildfires in 2023 and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024.
There have been unfounded claims that the government was manipulating the weather and causing high winds to spread the fires.
