Community Notes Alone Won't Beat Disinformation: Why Fact-Checkers Are Essential
When Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously announced that his company would be ditching professional fact-checking in favor of X-style community notes in the US, many were wondering: Is this a good idea? The data (as so far it is available) paints a clear picture: it is not.
In a post on Threads, Meta’s chief information security officer said that 900 Community Notes became visible in the first six months of its rollout in the US, a figure that looks even less impressive when you realize that, over a similar period, Meta put fact-checking labels on around 35 million Facebook posts in the European Union alone.
Meta’s announcement is part of a broader shift in corporate priorities following the 2024 US election: Several influential platforms have unsubscribed from key fact-checking commitments under the EU Code of Conduct on Disinformation; Google has divested significantly from the information integrity ecosystem in Europe; the prevalence of misinformation is high on most platforms.
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Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.