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Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, announced that the company will be ending its US fact-checking program. “By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers,” he said.
This is a significant change in Meta’s content moderation strategy, moving away from dedicated fact-checkers. It is now adopting a more community-driven approach across its platforms, including Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.
Kaplan made the announcement on X. He disclosed in his post that Meta will be terminating its contract with current fact-checkers in the United States. He added that the company will no longer be recruiting new fact-checkers. Kaplan admitted that the new Community Notes feature that Meta will be adopting for its content moderation is inspired by the success of a similar feature on Elon Musk’s platform X. The feature involves users helping to choose when posts need additional clarification.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X,” he said, “where they enable their community to decide when posts need more context and are potentially misleading.” Community members help determine the accuracy of content for the benefit of other users. This helps in ensuring the veracity of content on the site.
The decision to end the fact-checking program was first revealed in January 2025, before the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, expressed concerns over “too many mistakes and too much censorship” under the existing system at the time. He emphasized a return to Meta’s foundational principles of free expression. He stated, “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.”
How The Meta Fact-checking Program Came About
Meta’s fact-checking program began in 2016, following criticism of Facebook’s role in disseminating false information during the US presidential election that year. However, the program faced backlash over implementation errors and accusations of excessive moderation.
What is Community Notes?
Similar to X, Meta will be replacing fact-checkers with a Community Notes system for content moderation. The Community Notes feature was originally called BirdWatch. It was introduced as a prototype in 2021 and became quite popular in 2023. The purpose of this tool is to identify and draw attention to potentially false content on the site.
Posts on X that have been tagged as possibly false or misleading will have the ‘Readers offered context’ boxes beneath them. Any X user can drop a community note inside the box. These notes usually provide an explanation or correction, along with a link to a reliable web source that backs up or refutes the claim.
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