On Friday, Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer for Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) announced that Meta is shutting down its fact-checking apparatus. It will be replaced by a Community Notes format, similar to that of X:

According to NPR, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in January,

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg said. “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”

Huo Jingnan, Shannon Bond, Bobby Allyn, “Meta says it will end fact-checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump,” January 7, 2025

The ex-fact-checkers are not happy

Also from NPR:

“It was particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers because he knows that the ones that participated in his program were signatories of a code of principles that requires that they be transparent and nonpartisan,” said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network. He founded PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook’s third party fact checker’s program, which he left in 2020.”Prepares for Trump”

That’s interesting. Here’s a link to a Mind Matters News article for which Facebook deleted the post with the link. And here’s our “Community Note” about that: “I had to deal with Facebook’s fact-checkers/censors on a number of occasions over the years, whether as the Facebook account owner, a moderator, or a poster. Generally, I found the fact checkers obtuse. But one recent incident really stands out. A link to a post here at Mind Matters News was removed on November 20 of last year for violating community standards.”

Some think Community Notes won’t make much difference

Omar Gallaga reports at computer-savvy site CNET,

It’s unclear if they are any more or less effective than professional fact checking, but whatever method is used, they have both been up against an ever-increasing tidal wave of misinformation. Anjana Susarla, who specializes in topics including AI and social media at Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business, said the two biggest challenges for countering false information on these platforms are the volume of posts to be dealt with and whether users engage with the solutions.

“It’s not that Community Notes are not helpful,” she said, “it’s that the scale and the volume that exists on these very large platforms, the volume of debunking… can you debunk things with the same speed (as fact checking)? Second, will engagement be lower if you have these Community Notes? How effective are they?” “Facebook, Instagram Fact-Checking Has Ended: What That Means for You,”

For others, handwringing about “misinformation” sets off alarm bells

The underlying assumption Susarla seems to be making is that the censoring establishment is never a source of misinformation itself. But — during the Covid years, for example — it was often precisely that.

And it wasn’t just Covid either. The censorship circus around the Hunter Biden laptop scandal should have put to rest any doubts that politics played a key role in some critical censorship decisions. And in 2022, the U.S. federal government was seriously considering a Disinformation Governance Board, which would certainly have put it on a collision course with any traditional ideas about a free society.

According to People, Kaplan has even admitted the political bias:

In an appearance on Fox News’ Fox & Friends on Tuesday, Meta’s new global policy chief Joel Kaplan explained that there was “too much political bias” in the current fact-checking program, according to the The New York Times.

Anna Lazarus Caplan, “Meta Says It’s Ending Fact-Checking on Facebook and Instagram — Here’s What That Means,” January 7, 2025

How Community Notes is different

For the social media user at X, the advantage of a Community Notes approach is that the volunteer contributors address specific claims, not overall worldviews. Also, the post is not removed. For example, see the X post at right:

Whatever view we readers take of tariffs, we would all want to know if the claim is substantiated or not. It will be interesting to see if a similar approach helps Meta be more of a community news service. As legacy media continue their decline, we need sources of verification for the new media that are replacing them.

You may also wish to read: Why misinformation comes from the top as well as the bottom. At Big Think, Cameron English asks us to look at the incentives for academic scientists to publish questionable research that gains widespread attention. When the incentive structure in science rewards clickbait claims, Establishment wars on “Misinformation” become a form of corruption. In the real world, there is no pristine source of Correct Information. Nor is there any reason to believe that those who insist that their motive is to prevent Misinformation are entirely motivated only by a sincere devotion to truth. Many may also be protecting an organization, philosophy, or private interest, whether or not they recognize the fact.