Meta will use fact checkers outside the US ‘for now’

Meta Platforms Inc. will continue to use its fact checkers outside of the US “for now” even as the Instagram and Facebook owner does away with the practice at home, the company’s head of global business Nicola Mendelsohn said.

Meta, which said it will replace third-party fact checkers in the US with a community notes system, will see how the change plays out before deciding about a transition in other regions, Mendelsohn said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Monday.

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said this month that he decided to pull back on the practice, which was set up almost a decade ago to combat viral hoaxes spreading on the platform, because the complex systems were making “too many mistakes” and unfairly censoring users. That will be more difficult outside of the US where there are more stringent laws regulating how digital services police misinformation. The European Union requires large platforms to actively cull deceptive political content and disinformation or risk heavy fines under the Digital Services Act.

“We’ll see how that goes as we move it out over the year,” Mendelsohn said. “So nothing changing in the rest of the world at the moment, we are still working with those fact checkers around the world.”

Zuckerberg also said that the company would work with Donald Trump, who is being sworn in to the presidency later on Monday, to push back on countries that restrict free expression, blaming the US government under the outgoing Biden administration for pushing for “censorship.”

Trump, who was temporarily banned from Facebook after the Jan. 6, 2021 US Capitol riot and has called the platform “the enemy of the people,” welcomed the move and said Meta had “come a long way.”