Tech Policy Press, January 2025
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on January 7 that Meta was jettisoning the network of independent fact-checkers it had relied on for much of the last decade. Moving forward, he stated, it would replace fact-checking with a system like X’s “Community Notes.” In the words of Joel Kaplan, a longtime Meta policy executive and its newly appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer, the move would allow the “community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context.”
We are part of a team of independent researchers that had unprecedented data access to Facebook and Instagram during the 2020 US election. We led the most comprehensive research to date evaluating the likely effects of content moderation on the diffusion of information, including posts fact-checked as false. Given what we learned about Meta’s content moderation machinery, we are very skeptical of the changes Zuckerberg announced. We are also concerned about the fact that no one outside of Meta will know what effects this change in policy will have on the information users see.
