Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with Community Notes written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Starting in the U.S., Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact-checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact-checked.
Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.
Kaplan said the new system will be phased in over the next couple of months, and the company will work on improving it over the year. As part of the transition, Meta will use labels to replace warnings overlaid on posts that it forces users to click through.
The Associated Press had participated in Meta’s fact-checking program previously but ended its participation a year ago.
Associated Press
