
Meta says it will continue to utilize fact-checkers outside the U.S. "for now", despite plans to discontinue the practice at home. Meta's head of global business, Nicola Mendelsohn, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the company will observe how the new approach unfolds in the U.S. before considering similar changes in other changes, especially where stricter regulations on misinformation exist, such as in the European Union.
Mendelsohn added:
“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.”
Two weeks ago, Meta made a rather radical shift in its approach to curb misinformation by introducing X (formerly Twitter) style Community Notes. Mark Zuckerburg posted a video where he said that users will be able to freely discuss issues like immigration and gender without being censored by the company.
He added that there were many issues with the existing fact-checking system, claiming that it has made "too many mistakes" and led to unfair censorship of users.
Although Meta's Community Notes feature is definitely inspired by the one at X, it doesn't work the same way. Community Notes will work on organic posts made by users but unlike X, they won't apply to paid advertisements. So when a company runs ads that people find misleading, users won't be able to use Community Notes to point this out.
Meta still says that it will continue to refine the Community Notes feature throughout 2025, taking user feedback as well as testing the overall effectiveness on the platforms. The feature will be applicable on Facebook, Instagram as well as Threads.
Source: Bloomberg
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