Meta’s official fact-checking regime will come to an end today on its Facebook, Instagram and Threads platforms.
Meta heralded the change on Friday. In place of fact-checking, Meta platforms will use a community-note model similar to the one employed by Twitter after Elon Musk took over the social-media giant in 2022.
“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” said Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global-affairs officer, in a post on X.
“That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.”
From today, fact-checkers will not be able to rate new content, and older fact-checks will no longer be matched with new content. Users who have been fact-checked since January will not receive any penalty or demotion, and users who have strikes or demotions on their accounts related to fact-checks will have them removed today.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the change in January, in a move that was widely seen as an attempt to curry favor with the new Trump regime.
The move drew praise from President Trump, who was banned from Meta platforms in the wake of the Jan 6th “insurrection.”
“They [Meta] have come a long way,” Trump said in January.
The switch to community notes has also been praised by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, who called it a “good step in the right direction.”