Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is moving away from third-party fact-checking organizations to a Community Notes user-based fact-checking model.
President Joe Biden has expressed disapproval of Meta’s decision to do away with its current social media fact-checking program.
This week, Meta, which owns the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms, announced that it would stop using its third-party fact-checking program for U.S.-based content review purposes.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he made the decision because the existing fact-checking program has become “too politically biased,” resulting in censorship and a loss of trust.
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said in a Jan. 7 video statement.
Asked for his opinion on the move at a Jan. 10 press conference, Biden said, “It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about.”
Up until this week, Meta had partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to run its third-party fact-checking service. The IFCN is administered by the Poynter Institute, which also operates the PolitiFact fact-checking publication.
“The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way from this point on, we’re not going to fact-check anything,’ and you know when you have millions of people reading, going online reading this stuff, it’s—anyway, I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said.
Meta is not doing away with fact-checking outright. Rather, Zuckerberg said Meta’s platforms will move toward a “more comprehensive” system similar to the community notes system employed by social media platform X. He said the new model will start in the United States.
Rather than relying on a fact-checking organization such as the IFCN to review content, X’s community notes feature allows users to weigh in directly. X users may suggest a fact-checking note on controversial posts on the platform and then provide feedback on whether a suggested fact-checking note is itself accurate and necessary for the particular post. Posts that have been flagged with sufficient community input display an attached fact-checking note explaining why the particular post is inaccurate or may be missing important context.
By Ryan Morgan
