Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will officially end its fact-checking program Monday, a top company official said.
“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a post on social platform X. “That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers.”
“In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” he added.
Meta announced broad changes to the company’s content moderation policies in January, including the elimination of its third-party fact-checking program in favor of a community-based program like X’s Community Notes.
“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time.
The announcement came just weeks before President Trump took office. Zuckerberg appeared keen to repair his relationship with the incoming president, after incurring Trump’s ire for banning him from Meta platforms in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, riots.
Following the election, Zuckerberg visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration fund. He later joined other prominent tech leaders, including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai, in attending Trump’s swearing-in ceremony.
Meta began testing its new Community Notes feature last month, initially using X’s open-source algorithm for the rating system that will ultimately determine whether notes get published.
“Once Notes begin to appear publicly, no new fact check labels from third party fact checkers will appear in the United States, though fact checkers are free to become Community Notes contributors alongside other users of our platform,” Meta said in mid-March.
