Meta turns to the wisdom of the crowd for fact-checking.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

This week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some big changes to content moderation strategy.

The parent company of Facebook, Instagram, threads, and WhatsApp will no longer be contracting

with third-party fact checkers from the media and nonprofits as it has since 2016.

Instead, Meadow will follow the lead of X under Elon Musk and rely on crowdsourced community notes

to provide additional context on posts.

Here's how Zuckerberg explained Meta's pivot.

After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation

was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming

the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed

more trust than they've created,

especially in the U.S.

For more on how this change could affect META's platforms, we spoke with David Gilbert, a reporter

at Wired who covers online disinformation and extremism.

According to Mesa's announcement, it's going to end its third party fact-checking partnerships with the 10

organizations and newsrooms that they had partnered with in the US. And so that means that come

March, as far as I understand, they will no longer be looking at content on Facebook, on Instagram,

on threads that they had been up until now fact-checking.

Meta has not been clear in terms of whether it will extend that ban to third-party fact-checkers

globally.

But the indications are that if it works in the US and the new system that it brings in works properly, then

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