Mark Zuckerberg Outsources Fact Checks On Facebook To Users

Date: January 08, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, announced on Tuesday that he is ending the company’s in-house and third-party efforts toward checking facts.

Content moderation has heavily relied on in-house and third-party fact-checkers for all major social media platforms. These professionals identify false, misleading, and explicit content that often surpasses the platforms’ algorithms. However, the new-age narrative around checking which content should be displayed to who. The new content moderators and fact-checkers will be us, the general users.

Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday that he is ending the company’s long-standing moderation system of in-house and third-party fact-checkers. Instead, a new content moderation, flagging, correction, and restriction system is being built, which will be outsourced to users.

Everyday users of Meta platforms, starting with Facebook, will now identify falsehoods, provide corrections, and warn other users about misleading content. Meta is not the first-mover organization of this user-led moderation system. Elon Musk has already implemented a user-led system called Community Notes that allows users to conduct fact-checks or provide corrections to posted content.

Ever since the social media giants joined the war against spreading misinformation, especially during the election periods, content moderation has become a professional skill for many individuals. Ending this initiative from the company’s end also ends the responsibility of posting false or misleading content on these platforms.

“I think it’s going to be a spectacular failure. The platform now has no responsibility for really anything that’s said. They can offload responsibility onto the users themselves,” said Alex Mahadevan, the director of a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, about his observation of Community Notes on X.

The new owner responsible for ensuring a safe, true, and transparent timeline on social media will now be public. Essentially, millions of dollars poured till now on content moderation and correction efforts will go away as the task is outsourced to the general public. This move also signals the new presidential rule’s environment and how major tech giants will be allowed to operate. While the environment in the US seems supportive of this move, the remaining countries’ response will define the longevity of this step in ensuring a community on social media platforms.