Meta ends fact-checking programme on Facebook, Instagram

Social media platform, Meta, has announced that it will bring an end to its third-party fact-checking programme, which allows users to comment freely across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

According to Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, the company will now move to a Community Note programme, the same approach adopted and now popular with Elon Musk’s X.

Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, announced this yesterday via a blog post, noting that the Community Note programme would start in the U.S.

Kaplan said the intention of the fact-checking programme was to have independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read. He, however, noted that that has not played out the way it was intended as it has led to censorship and “too much content” being fact-checked.

“Over time we ended up with too much content being fact-checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. “Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A programme intended to inform too often became a tool to censor,” he said.

Highlighting the success Community Note has had on a platform like X, formerly Twitter, Kaplan said: “We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third-party fact-checking programme in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes programme.

“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.

“We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that is less prone to bias.”

Kaplan added that once the programme is up and running, Meta won’t write Community Notes or decide which ones show up. They are written and rated by contributing users.

Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings. He said Meta intends to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in its apps, and working on the right way to share this information.