Meta Ends U.S. Third-Party Fact-Checking, Moves to Community Notes
Meta, based in Menlo Park, San Mateo County, California, announced on January 7, 2025, that it would end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and begin moving to Community Notes, a system written and rated by users. The change was announced in a post titled "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes" by Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer.
Meta launched its third-party fact-checking program in 2016, with independent organizations rating content that was then labeled and demoted. Kaplan wrote that experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives, and that a program intended to inform had too often become a tool to censor.
Under the new approach, modeled on X, Community Notes will be written and rated by contributing users and will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives; Meta will not write the notes or decide which ones appear. The program is to be phased in in the United States over the next couple of months. During the transition, Meta will get rid of its fact-checking controls, stop demoting fact-checked content, and replace full-screen interstitial warnings with a much less obtrusive label.
The same announcement changed enforcement: Meta said that in December 2024 it removed millions of pieces of content every day, and that one to two out of every ten of those actions may have been mistakes. Its automated systems will now focus on illegal and high-severity violations such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud and scams, while less severe violations will largely rely on user reports. The trust and safety teams that write content policies and review content will move out of California to Texas and other U.S. locations. Meta also said it would take a more personalized approach to civic content, so people who want to see more political content in their feeds can.
(Source: Meta)
Source: Meta
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于加利福尼亚州门洛帕克的 Meta 总部园区航拍（2019年）。（Pi.1415926535 摄，CC BY-SA 3.0，经 Wikimedia Commons） / Photo: Aerial view of Meta's headquarters campus in Menlo Park, California (2019). (Pi.1415926535, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
