Meta is entering its post-truth era on Monday
Early this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be ditching its long-running fact checking program, claiming that it has enabled too much “censorship” on the company’s apps. Now, Meta has set an end date for fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram and Threads (at least for its US users).
“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” Meta’s recently elevated policy chief Joel Kaplan announced in a post on X. “That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers.”
Instead, Meta has been slowly ramping up Community Notes. Meta began allowing potential contributors to sign up in February. It began testing the system, which will initially be powered by the same algorithm as Community Notes on X, earlier this month. But the crowdsourced fact checks have yet to appear publicly on posts. It sounds like that’s also about to change with the official end of Meta’s existing fact checking partners. “The first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” Kaplan said.
Though Meta has said it wants to eventually end fact checking entirely, the company …read more