Fact-Checking Is Out, ‘Community Notes’ Are In
One Friday in April, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, announced that the process of removing fact-checking from the American versions of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram was nearly complete. By the following Monday, there would be “no new fact checks and no fact checkers” working across these platforms in the U.S.—no professionals marking disinformation about vaccines or stolen elections. Elon Musk, owner of X—a rival platform with an infamously permissive approach to content moderation—replied to Kaplan, writing, “Cool.”
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
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.
Related Knowledge Center: Social media
Social media platforms are the source of news for millions of people — and they have a fraught and ever-shifting relationship with the enterprises that provide that news.
The TikTok ban | The Meta-FTC trial