The partnership press: Lessons for platform-publisher collaborations as Facebook and news outlets team to fight misinformation

In Dec 2016, shortly after the US presidential election, Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes—entered a partnership to combat misinformation. Variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or an unavoidable coupling of organizations through circumstances beyond either’s exclusive control, the partnership emerged as a key example of platform-publisher collaboration. This report contextualizes the partnership, traces its dynamics through a series of interviews, and uses it to motivate a general set of questions that future platform press partnerships might ask themselves before collaborating. The press’s public accountability, technologists’ responsibilities, and journalists’ ethics will increasingly emerge not from any single organization or professional tradition; rather they will be shaped through partnerships that, explicitly and tacitly, signal which metrics of success, forms of expertise, types of power, and standards of quality are expected and to be encouraged. Most broadly, and as a set of concluding recommendations details, such partnerships between news organizations and technology companies need to grapple with their public obligations.