The end of Meta’s Fact-Checking Program is part of a larger shift in how major platforms address—or ignore—information disorder (a term encompassing disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and more). Below, we break down the key changes and their broader implications.

The End of the Fact-Checking Program

Meta launched its Fact-Checking Program in 2016, following Donald Trump’s election, as part of an effort to rebuild public trust after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. The scandal exposed how Meta had allowed Cambridge Analytica to access the personal data of over 87 million Facebook users without their consent. This data was used to create psychological profiles and support Trump’s campaign through targeted political ads. It also enabled Russian interference in the election, raising concerns that Trump’s victory may have been influenced under unfair conditions.

To repair its reputation, Meta funded over 90 third-party fact-checking organizations worldwide over the next eight years to verify political claims and reduce the spread of false or misleading information (Jingnan et al., 2025). The company also allocated approximately 100 million dollars to support certified fact-checking organizations.

Despite these investments, and much to the surprise of many of its partners—who only learned of the decision alongside the public on January 7th—Meta is now abandoning the program in the U.S. Though the company said that this will not apply to other countries “at this time,” it is widely expected that the policy will eventually extend worldwide with significant repercussions.

The most immediate consequence of ending fact-checking partnerships, which can already be perceived, is the significant reduction in funding for these initiatives worldwide. Research from The New York Times notes that organizations such as PolitiFact in the U.S. will lose 5% of their yearly revenue due to this measure, with others expecting cuts of up to 30%.

In a broader sense, this change suggests an increase in weakened efforts to combat the information disorder. According to the Global Risks Report 2025, information and disinformation rank among the most pressing global threats, second only to armed conflict and environmental disasters. This shift could exacerbate the already growing crisis of false and misleading information online.

Finally, the financial loss is not just for fact-checkers—it also raises concerns about the broader integrity of journalism and democracy. Natália Leal, CEO of the Brazilian fact-checking organization Agência Lupa, stated in an interview with NPR: “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.”

Meta’s decision must therefore be examined not just as a business policy shift, but within the larger socio-political landscape—one shaped by the new U.S. administration and international efforts to regulate tech giants.

Replacing Fact-Checking with “Community Notes”

The second outstanding announcement from Mark Zuckerberg’s January video was that, instead of working with professional third-party fact-checkers, Meta will adopt a crowdsourced approach through a system called Community Notes. This system, similar to Elon Musk’s model on X (formerly Twitter), allows users to write and upvote or downvote notes that appear alongside posts flagged as false or misleading.

One may ask, does Community Notes actually work? On X, Community Notes contributors remain anonymous and must be approved before they can submit corrections. Eligibility criteria include: no recent violations of X’s rules, a verified phone number, and an account active for at least six months. The eligibility criteria do not mention an expected timeline for being approved.

However, before a correction is made public, it must be rated “helpful” by other contributors. As CBS News explains, “this is where things get tricky.” X’s “bridging-based algorithm” requires “ideological diversity” in votes before publishing a note. However, if an accurate correction is only supported by voters with similar ideological leanings, it may never appear publicly—even if the information is factually correct. Taking a step back, it is also unclear how exactly ideological diversity is measured by the algorithm.

The effectiveness of the program remains highly questionable. A report by Poynter found that only about 8.5% of the approximately 122,000 notes written since the program’s inception have been made public. Additionally, in 2024, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) conducted an analysis of 283 misleading posts on X and discovered that 209 of them—74%—did not have accurate Community Notes visible to all users, leaving false or misleading claims about the elections uncorrected. These findings suggest that the system may be suppressing accurate information under the guise of achieving ideological neutrality.

Moving Content Moderators from California to Texas

Zuckerberg also announced that, as part of the efforts to reduce “over-censorship”, the company’s Trust and Safety content moderation teams would be relocated from California to Texas. Unlike international contractors and outsourced workers responsible for reviewing and deleting harmful content, these teams develop policies, technology, and resources to prevent user harm—effectively guiding content moderation worldwide.

Zuckerberg justified the move by stating that it would “remove concerns about biased employees censoring content” and “build trust in places where there’s less concern about team bias.” However, content moderation teams play a critical role in ensuring users do not encounter hate speech, pornography, or violent content. Weakening these policies could expose vulnerable groups to greater harm, as explored in the next section.

Zuckerberg’s statement about relocating Meta’s Trust and Safety content moderation teams to Texas may be more symbolic than practical. According to research conducted by The Guardian, (2025), Meta has been shifting operations to Texas for over a decade, making the announcement less of a major operational change and more of a political statement. Experts suggest this move serves two key purposes: first, to align Meta with Trump’s administration, which has repeatedly criticized content moderation as a form of “censorship”; and second, to signal opposition to progressive ideologies by relocating from Democratic-leaning California to a conservative stronghold.

This shift also raises a broader question: if California is considered biased due to its progressive politics, wouldn’t Texas, a deeply conservative state, also be subject to the same critique? Yet, in the post-truth era, such contradictions often go unchallenged, reinforcing the idea that bias is framed not as an objective reality but as a political weapon wielded selectively.