Meta's announcement it will end professional fact checking on Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. has left fact checkers elsewhere around the world uncertain about their futures.
"The end of this program represents a lack of transparency and a lack of the value of the work, the journalism, in the world and the work of fact checkers," said Natália Leal, CEO of Agência Lupa, a Brazilian fact-checking organization that partners with Meta.
Meta said the rollback is "starting in the U.S." but does not apply to other countries "at this time." It's a stark reversal in the policies the company has crafted in recent years to address the spread of falsehoods, misleading claims, and manipulation on its platforms. The move comes as the U.S. is diverging sharply from governments in the European Union and Brazil when it comes to regulating social media.
Meta spun up its third-party fact-checking program after Russia used Facebook and other platforms to influence American voters during the 2016 election. Today, Meta funds more than 90 fact-checking organizations that work in more than 60 languages around the world.
"It pretty much built the global fact-checking industry into what it is right now," said Alan Duke, editor in chief and co-founder of Lead Stories, an international fact-checking organization that is one of Meta's partners in the U.S. "It's pulling the rug out from under us and undoing all of that work."
Fact checkers say they were blindsided by Meta's decision, which appears to have been made very quickly. Duke said Lead Stories signed a new contract to work with Meta in 2025 just two weeks ago — only to wake up Tuesday to the news the program was being scrapped. The New York Times reported on Friday that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to overhaul his company's approach to online speech after meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late November.
Michael McConnell, co-chair of Meta's Oversight Board, said in an interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly on Friday that Zuckerberg's decision "certainly looks like this is buckling to political pressure."
"I would have liked to have seen these reforms laid out in less contentious and partisan times, so that they would be considered on the merits rather than…Donald Trump is president and now they're caving in," McConnell said. He said he was speaking for himself and not the board, a group of experts in law, human rights and journalism from around the world, which Meta convened and funds through an independent trust.
In a video announcing the change, Zuckerberg said fact checking contributed to "censorship" on Meta's platforms and that fact checkers were too "politically biased." Fact checkers point out it is the company, not them, that decides how to police posts on Facebook and Instagram.
"I'm just a simple European but…the United States seems to be the only country in the world where adding information is seen as censorship," said Maarten Schenk, Lead Stories chief operating officer and co-founder.
"Far from censoring, fact-checkers add context," said Laura Zommer, co-founder and CEO of Factchequeado, a nonprofit, Spanish-language fact-checking site that is not part of Meta's program. "We never advocate for removing content. We want citizens to have better information so they can make their own decisions," she added.
In the U.S., Meta said it will move to a "Community Notes model" similar to what Elon Musk's X uses, which crowdsources context and corrections from the platform's own users.
"We will continue to improve it over the course of the year before expansion to other countries," Meta said.
Meta is also changing speech rules globally
Fact checking is just one of the changes Zuckerberg announced. Another is the way Meta automatically reviews content, which makes it difficult for people to post about certain subjects. Zuckerberg said automation had led to over-enforcement of the company's rules and too many mistakes. Going forward, Meta said it will rely less on automated review outside of "illegal and high-severity violations" such as terrorism and child sexual exploitation. Those changes will apply around the world.
The Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund has accused the company of banning the hashtag "Sikh" from Meta's platforms at the request of the Indian government. Neither Meta nor the Indian government responded to those accusations, but the group's Jyot Singh said the apparent ban was lifted after several weeks.
"[Zuckerberg is] actually acknowledging some real problems that exist. But then, of course, the issue is [that] his solution is to get rid of fact checking," Singh said. In places like India, where the government has more propaganda firepower than civil society, he said, "It's going to make the platforms easier to abuse for coordinated actors who want to spread disinformation for political gain."
Globally, Meta is also loosening rules on what users can post. It has updated its policies to permit referring to women as "household objects or property" and to gay or trans people as mentally ill. Internal training material leaked to The Intercept – which has not been independently confirmed by NPR – appears to show that examples of newly allowed speech include calling immigrants feces and using slurs to refer to transgender people.
In his video announcement, Zuckerberg said that the previous filters were "out of touch." If something can be said in Congress, it should be allowed on the platform, a press release from Meta's head of global affairs, Joel Kaplan, said.
Obstacles to ending fact-checking outside the U.S.
Meta may face obstacles rolling out these changes outside of the U.S. In the European Union, for example, regulations require tech companies to more actively combat online harms, including disinformation.
Zuckerberg slammed those rules in his announcement, saying "Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there."
In Brazil, prosecutors are demanding more information from Meta about its plans. The country's supreme court aggressively regulates social media and briefly banned X last year. The judge who led that decision said this week that tech companies "will only continue to operate if they respect Brazilian legislation, regardless of the rant of Big Tech managers," Reuters reported.
While not namechecking Brazil, Zuckerberg said "secret courts" in Latin America are problems he wanted the American government to deal with, along with what he described as censorship in Europe and China. (Meta platforms do not operate in mainland China, which has tightly limited access to the global internet.)
A Meta spokesperson told NPR that "before rolling out any changes to our fact-checking program outside of the US, we will carefully consider our obligations."
Politicians around the world are taking note of Meta's actions in the U.S., said David Kaye, who studies free speech at the University of California, Irvine
"That is the biggest kind of global takeaway," he said. "You can pressure the company and the company will ultimately respond."
Fact checkers fear for a future without Meta
Fact checkers worry about the viability of their industry without Meta's support.
"Meta has provided millions of dollars to fact checkers all over the world that has enabled fact checkers not just to provide fact checking for Facebook and Instagram, but also to raise the visibility of fact checking and to enable fact checkers to hold public officials accountable for what they say. That's huge," said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network and founder of PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook's third-party fact checking program.
Leal, of Brazil's Lupa, said her group has a contract with Meta to continue fact checking in 2025. And even if that goes away, she said, Lupa isn't solely dependent on Meta's funding.
"Since we started to work with Meta we knew this moment [was] coming," she said. "We [are] always thinking about not depending on this work in terms of sustainability of our business."
But she worries that's not true for other fact-checking groups, some of which were launched specifically to work with Meta.
"The end of the program will be the same [as] the end of fact checking in some regions," she said. That would mean "we have an open space for lies, conspiracy theories and polarization…This could be very, very dangerous for the digital environment."
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