(Photo Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Meta will shutter its fact-checking program across Facebook, Instagram and Threads on Monday, marking a major shift in the company’s content moderation strategy.
The announcement follows a January pledge by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to dial back censorship and restore “free speech” on Meta-owned platforms. Going forward, Meta will adopt a system modeled after X’s “Community Notes,” allowing users to affix context to posts with no penalties or content suppression — effectively ending the era of third-party fact-checkers rating and flagging information.
“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer at Meta, wrote 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.”
The program’s demise comes after mounting backlash from conservatives who long accused Meta’s third-party fact-checking partners — including groups like PolitiFact and Lead Stories — of ideological bias and collusion with government agencies to suppress dissenting views. While Meta maintains those fact checkers operated independently, critics pointed to repeated incidents involving censorship of stories related to COVID-19, Hunter Biden’s laptop and election integrity.
Zuckerberg’s move to replace the fact-checking framework with Community Notes signals a significant break from the previous model. Similar to X’s system, Meta’s new feature allows verified users to write “notes” adding context to posts, which are then rated for helpfulness by a broader pool of users. If deemed useful by ideologically diverse raters, the note is published.
“Changing the content filters to have to require higher confidence and precision is actually going to be the thing that reduces the vast majority of the censorship mistakes that we make,” Zuckerberg said in a January interview with Joe Rogan. “Removing the fact-checkers and replacing them with Community Notes is a good step forward — like, a very small percent of the content is fact-checked in the first place … I think it’ll be a positive step.”
Meta began testing Community Notes last month and says the tool will now begin “gradually” appearing across its major platforms — with no algorithmic throttling, takedowns or warnings attached.
Internationally, Meta will continue to rely on its existing framework of fact-checkers outside the U.S., according to its website.
