Meta announced today that it is ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will instead rely on a Community Notes approach similar to what is used on Elon Musk's X Platform.
The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policy could help the company win friends in the Trump administration and in conservative-leaning state governments that have tried to impose legal restrictions on content moderation . The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Governments and traditional media have increasingly imposed censorship. A lot of this is clearly political,” Zuckerberg said. He said the recent election “feels like a cultural tipping point toward reprioritizing speech.”
“We're going to phase out fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “After Trump was first elected in 2016, the traditional media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We have tried in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of the truth. But the fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the US.”
Meta says the soon-to-be-discontinued fact-checking program includes more than 90 third-party organizations evaluating messages in more than 60 languages. The US-based fact checkers are AFP USA, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, TelevisaUnivision, The Dispatch and USA Today.
The independent fact-checkers assess the accuracy of posts and apply ratings such as False, Modified, Partly False, Missing Context, Satire and True. Meta adds notices to posts that are rated as false or misleading and notifies users before they attempt to share the content or if they have shared it in the past.
Meta: Experts “have their own biases”
In the blog post accompanying Zuckerberg's video message, Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the 2016 decision to deploy independent fact-checkers “seemed like the best and most reasonable choice at the time… The intent of the program was to let these Independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, especially viral hoaxes, so they could judge for themselves what they saw and read.”
