Meta's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he would scrap a longstanding fact-checking program and replace it with X-style community notes from users.

The first time Lead Stories fact-checker Maarten Schenk learned of Meta’s plan to scrap its partnership with independent journalists was the social networks’ press release. “We were not notified in advance so it was just, boom this is ending,” Shenk told Forbes.

Others — some who’d worked to fight misinformation and abuse on the company’s various platforms for almost a decade — were given less than an hour’s notice. They were blindsided by the move, as were some organizations that had signed fact-checking contract extensions with Meta just weeks earlier.

Meta told fact-checkers that contracts with American news organizations like USA Today, Reuters Fact Check, AFP and not-for-profit Politifact would end in March, according to several fact-checkers involved in the discussions. Deals with international newsrooms and charities running fact-checking projects from Australia to Zambia are expected to run until the end of the year.

The shuttering of the Meta’s fact-checking program across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp will likely have a deleterious effect on some newsrooms and not-for-profits who’d relied on it for income. Meta claimed in 2022 to have spent $100 million on the program since 2016 and extended it to some 115 countries. Meta did not respond to a request for comment by the deadline.

The company’s decision to trade independent fact checking for community content policing was announced on Tuesday in a blog post by Joel Kaplan, the company’s new global policy chief. He wrote that some of Meta’s content moderation policies had been developed “partly in........

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