Meta will shutter fact-checking programs across Facebook, Instagram and threads on Monday, showing a major shift in the company’s content moderation strategy.
The announcement follows a January pledge by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which will retreat censorship and restore “free speech” on a meta-owned platform. In the future, Meta will adopt a system modeled after X’s “Community Notes” allowing users to paste context into posts without penalties or content suppression. (Related: Zuckerberg’s right-wing pervert still has a long way to go)
“By Monday afternoon, the fact-checking program in the US will officially close,” Joel Caplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote X:
By Monday afternoon, the fact-checking program in the US will officially close. In other words, there are no new fact checks or fact checkers. In January, it announced that it would abolish the program and remove penalties. Instead of the actual check, the first community note will be launched…
– Joel Kaplan (@joel_kaplan) April 4, 2025
The program’s end comes after meta’s third-party fact-checking partners (including groups such as politics and lead stories) have backed off against conservatives who conspired with ideological bias and government agencies to curb opposition. Meta maintains these fact checkers, which operate independently, but critics pointed to repeated cases involving Covid-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and censors of stories related to election integrity.
The move to replace Zuckerberg’s fact-checking framework with community notes shows a major break from previous models. Like the X system, new features in Meta allow validated users to post “memos.” This is evaluated for the usefulness of a wider user pool. Notes are published if they are deemed useful by an ideologically diverse evaluator.
“Changing content filters to require greater reliability and accuracy will actually reduce the majority of censorship mistakes we make,” Zuckerberg said in a January interview with Joe Rogan. “Deleting the fact checker and replacing it with community notes is a good step forward, as a very small percentage of content is fact-checked first. I think it’s a positive step.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k1ehae0bdu
Meta began testing community notes last month, and now appears “gradually” on major platforms that do not have algorithm throttle, takedowns or warnings attached.
Internationally, meta continues to rely on existing frameworks of fact-checkers outside the US. According to on that website.
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