Meta will continue to use fact checkers -- for now, at least, and only outside of the US
When Mark Zuckerberg announced recently that Meta was ditching fact checking on Facebook and Instagram in favor of X-style community notes, the response was very mixed. While hardly a clean line between the two camps, those with conservative political leanings tended to see this as a good thing, while those of a more liberal bent voiced concerns about the potential for misinformation.
The recent announcement about moving away from fact checking was widely seen as Zuckerberg trying to curry favor with Donald Trump, now installed as the 47th president of the USA. Now a new pronouncement from the company makes it hard to shake the notion that stepping away from fact checking was a politically motivated move.
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While it remains true that Meta is implementing a community notes system for reporting fake news and misleading content on its platform -- a sign of Zuckerberg cosying up not only with Trump but also Elon Musk -- it will only be the case in the US.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Meta's head of global business, Nicola Mendelsohn, expanded on the company's plans, revealing an interesting detail. Speaking about the removal of fact checking in the US she said:
We'll see how that goes as we move it out over the year. So nothing changing in the rest of the world at the moment, we are still working with those fact checkers around the world.
So it seems that the US is being used as a testing ground to see how relying on users rather than fact checking organizations pans out. For the rest of the world, it will be business as usual.
As TechCrunch points out, however much Meta may like the idea of dropping fact checking on a global basis, it is something that will prove very difficult because of legislation in some regions.
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