Meta’s recent decision to end its third-party fact-checking program has been described as “pragmatic” by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who characterized the move as abandoning an ultimately unviable initiative.
The announcement came in January, shortly before Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a series of major policy changes, including the replacement of third-party fact-checking with a community-based system.
“It was a very pragmatic change,” Ohanian stated during an interview at Web Summit in Qatar. “It is impossible to do fact-checking at scale, let alone in real-time, as Facebook was trying to do.”
The Reddit co-founder didn’t mince words about the program’s fundamental flaws. “In many ways, I think they were just winding back something that was a bad idea from the start because it was untenable,” he added.
Changes to Meta’s Global Fact-Checking Program
Meta’s global fact-checking initiative, launched in 2016 to combat misinformation, established partnerships with fact-checking organizations across more than 100 countries. The company has stated the rollback will begin in the United States before potentially expanding to other regions.
Ohanian, who created Reddit in 2005 when MySpace dominated social networking, also shared his vision for social media’s future.
“I think we’ll get to a place where we as users get to choose our algorithms,” he predicted, explaining that platforms are “incentivized to have the best possible algorithm” to keep users engaged.
Reddit itself has navigated content moderation challenges throughout its history, eventually banning revenge porn and addressing racism and misogyny across its communities.
Now valued at $6.4 billion after going public last March, the platform boasts over 70 million daily active users and implements “community-specific rules” across its various subreddits.
Meta Ends Fact-Checking, Adopts Community Notes Model
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, detailed the shift in a post about the company’s updated content moderation approach: “Starting in the US, we are ending our third-party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model.”
He added that Meta would “take a more personalized approach to political content so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.”
The community notes model has already been implemented by Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), which describes its goal as “creating a better-informed world by empowering people on X to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts.”
Kaplan acknowledged X’s success with this approach, noting, “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.”
Kaplan, a prominent Republican who succeeded Nick Clegg at Meta, emphasized that “Meta’s platforms are built to be places where people can express themselves freely. That can be messy. On platforms where billions of people can have a voice, all the good, bad and ugly is on display. But that’s free expression.”
Following Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg joined several major American companies in discontinuing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
The Meta CEO recently expressed regret regarding some company decisions in a letter to Congress, claiming the Biden Administration had pressured Meta to censor certain COVID-19 content.
