"Fact checkers" would be hilarious if they weren't so effective at fooling the gullible. I don't know why exactly they sprung up, I guess people eventually started to cotton on that news and internet corporations were not exactly on the up and up. So calling something news or journalism no longer cuts it. We now have another layer called "fact checking" and millions of people fell for it. Pretty soon it's going to be "really truthful Science™-based fact checking brought to you by Experts".
tl;dr there's a system that brings third parties and pays them for this. They're not actually Facebook employees but are generally expected to be journalists of some kind. Still, they get it really quite wrong occasionally:
I didn't intend to imply they're Facebook employees or was even talking about facebook specifically at all. Just the idea of calling this stuff "fact checking".
> Still, they get it really quite wrong occasionally:
Don't worry that'll never happen with super-duper science-based expert fact checkers.
