Facebook To End Fact Check Feature

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced Friday that its fact-checking program in the United States would be “officially over” on Monday.

The news comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that the company would end fact-checking and move to restore free speech on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Starting Monday, fact-checkers will no longer be able to rate new content, and old fact-checks placed on content will no longer appear.

Instead of fact-checks, Meta will adopt an X-style community notes system where users can add context to posts, which are then rated by other users. Anyone will be able to sign up to be a contributor to community notes if they are over 18 and have had a verified account for over six months.

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, announced the changes on Friday.

“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over. That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers. We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & we haven’t applied penalties to fact-checked posts in the US since then. In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” Kaplan posted on social media.

The changes come after Meta was placed under congressional scrutiny for targeting conservative views on topics like the 2020 election, the COVID vaccine, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. Zuckerberg has pinned much of the blame for the censorship on former President Joe Biden, saying Meta was pressured to target conservative content.

Meta started testing out its community notes feature last month, allowing some 200,000 potential contributors to sign up.

In January, Zuckerberg said that the move was part of Meta’s goal of restoring free speech on its platforms.

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the United States.”

Zuckerberg said restrictions on discussions on topics like immigration and gender were “out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas,” he said.

In that same announcement, Zuckerberg said that Meta would work with the incoming Trump administration to fight censorship abroad.