This morning, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s plan to end its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. and scale back its content moderation efforts in favor of an approach that Zuckerberg says will resemble X’s Community Notes model.

This sudden alignment with the desires of the incoming Trump administration, just days before the inauguration, is politics, plain and simple.

Today’s announcement has serious implications for Meedan and the many International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) partner organizations we work with around the world. Since 2018, our team has provided key technical and programmatic infrastructure to the majority of Meta’s third-party fact-checking partners who run fact-checking tiplines on WhatsApp.

Our partners across Africa, Asia, the EU, North America, and Latin America have demonstrated the immense impact that local, independent fact-checking and journalism initiatives can achieve when they are committed to holding power to account and have adequate resources to carry out this work. This program has leveraged professional journalists working to a code of standards to bring needed context to dangerously misleading or false content.

Our experience has shown that locally rooted fact-checking organizations working in messaging spaces and on social media platforms can make a meaningful difference for their communities by meeting people where they are finding and consuming their information. Dismantling this program will leave many of our partner organizations facing an existential crisis. And it will leave the communities they serve with even fewer resources for accessing and exchanging trustworthy news and information. 

Any rational assessment of the state of our global information ecologies must acknowledge that our infrastructures for content moderation are failing. When we rely on content moderation systems that lack adequate linguistic and cultural knowledge, the failures are profound and catastrophic, to individuals, communities, and society at large. But dismantling these programs wholesale won’t put us on a path to improving our information ecology.

The immense scale at which real-world harms and human rights abuses have arisen from speech posted on Meta’s platforms demands evolved strategies, technologies, and interventions for keeping vulnerable populations safe and all people well-informed. It is right to suggest that systems should evolve. But we challenge Meta to reimagine these systems by drawing on data from its past interventions (and releasing that data to the public), and through legitimate engagement with civil society and journalism organizations wrestling with these issues, rather than merely aligning itself with the whims of the government du jour.