As of Monday, April 7, the era of Facebook, Instagram and threads using fact checks to verify information on its platform is over, according to META's chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan. “By Monday afternoon, our fact checking program in the United States will officially end. This means there are no new fact checks, and no fact checkers,” he said in an article on X.
Fung Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in early January that the company will use a third-party fact checker approved by the international fact-checking network to gradually lower its decade-old plan to verify Facebook and Instagram posts, including videos and images.
Meta will now use community notes generated by the user itself. “Based on fact checks, the first community notes will start to appear gradually on Facebook, Threads & Instagram without collateral penalties,” Kaplan said in his post.
Meta's announcement in early January came weeks before U.S. President Donald Trump's second term. This is part of a huge shift among some of the top tech companies, including Apple, Amazon and Google, to get closer to the new administration’s agenda. X boss Elon Musk responded to Kaplan’s post on X with “Cool”.
The impact of the change is not yet clear
X launched community notes in 2021, but has not canceled fact checks other than fact checks after Elon Musk purchased the platform (formerly Twitter) in 2022.
It is not clear whether they are more effective than professional fact checking, but they are against an increasing wave of misinformation, regardless of the method used. Anjana Susarla, who specializes in topics such as AI and social media at Michigan State University's vast business school, said the two biggest challenges in opposing disinformation on these platforms are the posts to be processed and whether users are involved in the solution.
She said: “It’s not that community notes are not helpful, it’s because of the scale and quantity that exists on these very large platforms, but the quantity that is debunked… Can you debunk at the same rate (fact check)?
Susarla said that if readers don’t trust community notes or fact checks, they are unlikely to interact with that information and there is not enough data yet to be more useful or preferable to users.
“The evidence is mixed, and we don't have much large-scale research on it,” she said.
Another of these two approaches, she said, is something Wikipedia does similarly: relying on crowdsourcing to get information, but also including community editors to help verify information. It is unclear whether this approach can work on such a large platform and whether it helps build trust among users, she said.
Susarla noted that the Meta shut down fact checks on the same day that financial markets’ concerns about global tariffs melted. “If you're going to Facebook to learn about the stock market, it's not necessarily a good time,” she said.
