The trouble with the truth

Meta’s abandonment of fact-checking for community notes exposes an uncomfortable truth about ourselves

One of the first conspicuous news events of 2025 was Meta’s announcement that they would be ending their third party fact-checking program to deal with misinformation. Instead, the social platforms it operates ( Facebook, Instagram and Threads) will adopt a Community Notes approach (except for posts that are “illegal or high-severity violations”). Already in operation at Twitter/X since Elon Musk acquired the company two years ago, it relies on contributing users to identify potentially misleading or incorrect posts and adding context, based on “agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings”. The reactions split sharply along ideological lines: liberals thought it was a terrible abandonment of truth, while conservatives celebrated it as a terrific way to democratize verification. But if it is possible to establish unequivocally whether a proposition is true or false, surely we could do so for “fact checkers are superior to address misinformation than community notes”? Isn’t it odd that this was never done?

The ambiguity of truth

When we talk about truth, we can mean two very different things: something that is empirically…