Meta has officially stopped using third-party fact checkers, relying instead on Community Notes

Back at the beginning of the year, Meta announced that third-party fact checking would become a thing of the past on its platforms. The company revealed plans to go down a similar route to X and use Community Notes to allows for crowd-sourced fact-checking instead.

After a short period of testing -- less than a month, in fact -- Community Notes are now starting to appear on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Meta has also confirmed that, with immediate effect, there will be no new fact check labels on content in many parts of the world.

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Rather than making a big announcement about the launch of Community Notes, Meta has instead opted to update an old blog post with the news. The newly added text states: “Starting today, we’re ending our third-party fact checking program in the United States, and Community Notes will start to appear on Facebook, Instagram and Threads”.

Meta goes on to say:

This means that we will no longer show new fact check labels on content in the United States. Instead notes, written and rated by the growing community of contributors, will be published gradually as we continue to test our algorithm and internal systems in the coming weeks and months. 

Outlining how the new system works, Meta makes no secret of the fact that X’s approach was a big inspiration for its own platforms: “Many of you will be familiar with X’s Community Notes system, in which users add context to posts. That’s the broad approach we are adopting”.

The company provides further details about how Community Notes work:

• Meta won’t decide what gets rated or written -- contributors from our community will. And to safeguard against bias, notes won’t be published unless contributors with a range of viewpoints broadly agree on them.
• This isn’t majority rules. No matter how many contributors agree on a note, it won’t be published unless people who normally disagree decide that it provides helpful context. 
• Community Notes will have a limit of 500 characters and will need to include a link to support the note.
• To start with, notes won’t have author names attached to them. We want notes to be rated based on whether the context they add is helpful, not on who wrote them. 
• Contributors need to be over 18, have an account that’s more than 6 months old and in good standing, and either have a verified phone number or be enrolled in two-factor authentication.
• The Community Notes feature will be available in 6 languages commonly used in the United States to start, including: English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese, and we will expand to other languages with time.
• To start with, contributors will not be able to submit notes on advertisements. They can, however, write and submit notes on almost any other forms of content, including posts by Meta, our executives, politicians and other public figures.

Meta claims that “we expect Community Notes to be less biased than the third party fact checking program it replaces”. Time will tell whether this is the case or not, but it is unlikely to be something that will be viewed through an objective lens.

Image credit: Nataliia Kotliar / Dreamstime.com