Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was scrapping its long-running fact-checking program, claiming that it had enabled excessive “censorship” on the company’s apps. Meta has now set a deadline for fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads (at least for US users).
“By Monday afternoon, our U.S. fact-checking program will officially end,” Meta’s newly promoted head of policy Joel Kaplan announced in a post on X. “This means no new fact-checks and no more fact-checkers.”
Instead, Meta is slowly developing the Community Notes service. In February, Meta started allowing potential contributors to register. Earlier this month, it began testing a system that will initially work on the same algorithm as Community Notes on X. But crowdsourced fact-checking has not yet appeared in publicly available publications. It seems that this will also change soon with the official termination of cooperation with Meta’s fact-checking partners. “The first community notes will start to gradually appear on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram without any penalties,” Kaplan said.
Although Meta has said that it wants to eventually abandon fact-checking entirely, the company has been relatively quiet about its plans for Community Notes outside the United States. This may be because officials in other countries, such as Brazil and the European Union, have already expressed concern about how this change could affect the flow of disinformation around the world.
Meta’s decision to discontinue fact-checking in the U.S. came earlier this year along with several other policy changes that marked a marked shift to the right for the social network just as President Donald Trump took office. The company also discontinued DEI’s corporate programs, rolled back hate speech protections on its services, and added a close Trump ally to its board of directors.
