The company previously worked with 3rd party fact-checking organizations to fight disinformation on their platforms. They killed the program at the beginning of the 2025 Trump administration. It's still operating outside of the USA (for now).

It was a rare case of aligned incentives between tech giants and civil society organizations. Facebook (now Meta) had a disinformation problem, having famously contributed to Donald Trump's election in 2016 through its lackluster moderation of rampant political disinformation and personal harassment over the course of the campaign (not to mention the political weaponization of its advertising infrastructure). In response to global backlash, Meta instituted fact-checking programs, funding accredited third-party factchecking organizations to help take on some portion of their platform's rampant misinformation in various markets. This program became an immediate target of the right, which was already deep in its campaign to work the referees and claim censorship anytime their hate speech and anti-vaccination messaging was taken down. As President Trump took office again in 2025, Mark Zuckerberg executed a series of sacrificial lambs to get back in his good graces. (Which surely had nothing to do with the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust case against Meta's anti-competitive practices of crushing or acquiring competitors.) Zuckerberg's 2025 moves included ending its diversity and inclusion programs, moving the company from California to Texas, and, in the US only (for now), shutting down their fact-checking partnerships, despite having renewed some of the contracts only weeks prior. It's questionable how much of a dent the partnerships made on the multi-billion user platform to begin with, given the company's cover-your-ass attitude towards it. In 2018, The Guardian quoted former Snopes editor Brooke Binkowski saying "They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR. They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck." I’ve long expressed my own doubts about the relative efficacy of atomic-level factchecks against a broader context of global and regional disinformation campaigns. But honestly, factchecking being first on the Trump Administration’s execution block makes me reconsider that view. Facebook's support provided critical funding for groups fighting disinformation. In 2022 Meta accounted for over 45% of Poynter's fact-checking funding, via the International Fact-Checking Network and PolitiFact (The Verge). Zuckerberg's decision to lean into the Community Notes approach, where truth is determined by what the most "engaged" users vote for, is clearly another major loss in the broader effort to contain disinformation from poisoning our democracies. This is a scary development, given the clear evidence of harm on even one recent disinformation vector, vaccine skepticism, on Meta's platforms. - Matt Stempeck in Field Guide Friday