Social media giant Meta scraps fact-checking for ‘community notes’
Al Jazeera
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, says allowing fact-checkers to assess content ‘became a tool to censor’.
The social media giant Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, has announced the end of its third-party fact-checking programme in the United States, saying that it will encourage “more speech” on its platform.
The move, revealed on Tuesday, comes as tech executives embrace incoming US President Donald Trump, whose right-wing supporters have long decried online content moderation as a tool of censorship.
Instead of third-party fact-checkers, Meta said it will rely on “community notes”, similar to those used on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
There, contributors draft factual corrections to posts that become visible only after being endorsed by other contributors with different points of view.
Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the previous fact-checking initiative, launched in 2016, aimed for independent experts to provide more accurate information about viral hoaxes. But, he added, that’s “not the way things played out”.
