Meta to cut pay outs to fact-checking partners in India

Facebook and Instagram parent Meta is sharply cutting the fees it pays out to professional fact checkers in India, two people with knowledge of discussions between the social media giant and its partners told The Hindu. The amounts fact-checking organisations that are approved partners of the social media firm get paid has been reduced for the coming six month period by anywhere from a third to 50%, the people said.

Meta’s fact-checking partnerships ended in the United States following the election of U.S. President Donald Trump. After that election, the firm’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said that Instagram and Facebook would transition to “Community Notes,” a system of fact-checking that relies on an ideologically diverse group of users agreeing that a given post needed to be annotated with additional context.

Professional fact checkers were engaged by Meta in December 2016, following concerns about the spread of misinformation on the platform. The fact checkers that the firm partnered with around the world counted on revenue from Meta as a key source of survival. The cuts portend existential concerns for smaller organisations that exclusively do fact checking, as opposed to units within larger newsrooms.

One of the people aware of the discussions speculated that such smaller organisations may have to lay off some staff to continue operating. Meta did not respond to a request for comment from The Hindu on the cuts.

The firm said that it has plans for its Community Notes feature to go through an “expansion to other countries,” although the firm has not unequivocally said whether this would mean that fact checking partnerships outside the U.S. will end or not. 

A 2024 review of Community Notes as implemented on X by The Hindu showed that the feature failed in the face of polarisation, allowing blatant falsehoods to remain on the platform unannotated. “Research indicated [professionally applied] fact-check labels reduced belief in and sharing of false information,” the International Fact Checking Network, which includes members in India receiving Meta revenue, said in an open letter to Mr. Zuckerberg last January. 

“The plan to end the fact-checking program in 2025 applies only to the United States, for now. But Meta has similar programs in more than 100 countries that are all highly diverse, at different stages of democracy and development. Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places.”