Facebook will make one of its biggest changes in a decade today: It will officially end its fact-checking program in the United States. In its place is the community notes feature popular on the former Twitter Platform X. And it's not just happening on Facebook: Instagram and Threads are also doing away with fact-checking.

  

"On Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the U.S. will officially end," Joel Kaplan, Meta's new policy director, announced in a post on

In January, on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s third-party fact-checkers were too politically biased and were destroying more trust than they created. Therefore, they will be replaced by CommunityNotes.

Zuckerberg said at the time that Notes would "require unanimous buy-in from people with different viewpoints" to prevent bias.

Meta began accepting registration for Community Notes in February.

Crowdsourced community notes will appear in a small box below posts labeled "Reader Added Background."

Comments of 500 words or less are intended to provide corrections or clarifications to posts that may be misleading, confusing, or inaccurate. Comments must include links to reliable sources.

Meta writes that contributors can rate comments as useful and unhelpful. The system's algorithm detects whether people give different ratings over time, so if enough contributors (who have given different ratings in the past) find a community note useful, there's a greater chance it will be published.

To become a CommunityNotes contributor, users need to live in the United States, be 18 years or older, have an account older than 6 months in good standing, and have a verified phone number or have two-factor authentication set up.

We haven't seen any community notes appear in public posts, but today's end of the fact-checking program (which was launched in 2016) suggests it's coming soon. It's unclear what Meta's plans are for community notes outside the United States, especially as some countries and the European Union have expressed concerns about the change.

Ending the fact-checking program is just one of the moves Zuckerberg is taking to appease President Trump. Meta also lifted restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, and ended its DEI program.