Meta to hold off on dumping fact-checkers outside the US for now: Report

“We’ll see how that goes as we move it out over the year,” Meta’s head of global business Nicola Mendelsohn was quoted as saying by Bloomberg on the sidelines of the ongoing World Economic Forum (WEF) Summit in Davos.

“So nothing changing in the rest of the world at the moment, we are still working with those fact checkers around the world,” Mendelsohn added.

In response to criticism over the spread of misinformation on Meta-owned platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, the company had set up a system that let fact-checkers certified by the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to flag and debunk fake news across its apps.

However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major overhaul of content moderation strategies in January this year. He said that the company would be switching out fact-checks from fact-checkers in the US with a crowdsourced Community Notes model already in place on Elon Musk-owned X.

Meta’s Community Notes transition in the US had raised concerns among fact-checkers in India. “This is possibly the biggest existential threat many fact checkers will have to contend with,” a senior executive from a fact-checking organisation had told The Indian Express.

The company has also reportedly updated its Hateful Conduct policy to remove restrictions on content that denigrates members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Meta’s drastic shift in its content moderation approach was seen as a move to appease the White House administration under Donald Trump, who was sworn in as the 47th US president on Monday, January 20.