Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement regarding Meta’s decision to discontinue its longstanding fact-checking program. The reason cited for this move was the belief that the program had led to excessive «censorship» on the company’s various apps. As a result, Meta has now established a timeline for ending fact-checking on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, at least for users in the United States.
Meta’s policy chief, Joel Kaplan, revealed that the fact-checking program in the US would officially come to an end by Monday afternoon. This means that there will be no new fact checks conducted and no fact checkers employed moving forward.
In place of fact-checking, Meta has been gradually introducing Community Notes as an alternative. The company has allowed interested individuals to sign up for this program, which will initially operate using the same algorithm as Community Notes on X. While this system was launched earlier this month, crowdsourced fact checks have not yet been publicly visible on posts. However, it appears that this will change soon following the termination of Meta’s existing fact-checking partnerships. Kaplan mentioned that the first Community Notes will gradually start appearing across Facebook, Threads, and Instagram without any associated penalties.
Although Meta has expressed a desire to eventually phase out fact-checking entirely, there has been limited information provided about the company’s plans for Community Notes outside of the US. This lack of transparency may be due to concerns raised by officials in other countries, such as and the , regarding the potential impact of this change on the spread of disinformation globally.
The decision to end fact-checking in the US was part of a series of policy adjustments made by Meta earlier this year, coinciding with a noticeable shift towards the right for the social network around the time of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In addition to discontinuing corporate , Meta also scaled back protections on its services and appointed a close ally of Trump to .
This article was originally published on Engadget at .
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