News organizations like my own publication make these judgments a million times a day. And we sometimes get them wrong. But we are checked by the power of our competitors and, for news organizations with a subscription business, by readers who stop paying us if we fail them.

To be sure, this business model is under great stress as people lose trust in news organizations. But I don’t believe the solution is to give up on it, particularly if the alternative is to cede the power of authentication to companies like Facebook.

I’m not comfortable trusting the truth to one gatekeeper that has a mission and a fiduciary duty to increase advertising revenue, especially when revenue is tied more to engagement than information. Facebook continues to consider, for example, how it can win approval to enter the Chinese market, including by censoring content. For the company, business can come before truth.

No matter how many editors Facebook hired, it would be unable to monitor the volume of information that flows through its site, and it would be similarly impossible for readers to verify what was checked. The minute Facebook accepts responsibility for ferreting out misinformation, users will start believing that it is fact-checking everything on the site.

And what about more private content in groups or messages? For that to be fact-checked, Facebook users would have to trade their privacy (as an analogy, imagine AT&T fact-checking phone calls). That isn’t a position I think Facebook would ever want to be in.

The second reason I am fearful of Facebook as fact checker is what it will do to journalism.

If you don’t believe that Facebook’s policies could sway the news industry, you haven’t been paying attention over the past five years. Publications have been suckered into tweaking their content and their business models to try to live off the traffic Facebook sends them. They’ve favored Facebook clicks over their core readers, and are no closer to addressing plummeting print revenues. What would happen if the distribution of their articles on Facebook was tied to submitting data about their sources or conforming to some site-endorsed standards about what constitutes a trustworthy news source?

My fellow reporters and editors will argue that I am letting Facebook off too easy. While my husband did work there for a brief period, my position isn’t a defense of the company, which I have covered critically for years. I simply don’t trust Facebook, or any one company, with the responsibility for determining what is true.