In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, Silicon Valley time, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, announced sweeping changes to the company. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” he declared. Meta would loosen its filters, unleash more political content, and eliminate its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the United States. The last of these would slash an effort begun in 2016 following Donald Trump’s election—an investment of more than a hundred million dollars—and replace it, on the eve of his return to the White House, with “community notes,” a system by which account holders on Meta’s platforms will decide what’s misleading. “The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased,” Zuckerberg said, “and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” When I awoke to the news, I thought first of my former colleagues at an Indian outlet called The Quint, one of around a dozen newsrooms in the country with which Meta has partnered on fact-checking.
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Source: India’s Fact-Checkers React to Meta’s Policy Change – Columbia Journalism Review