The same day the US banned anti-disinformation activists, Meta quietly extended contracts for fact-checkers
Meta's Third-Party Fact-Checking program was supposed to end. Instead, it got one more year, everywhere except the United States.
On December 23rd, the same day the US government announced travel bans against anti-disinformation activists and former European Commissioner Thierry Breton, a number of European newsrooms received a long dreaded email from Meta.
The organizations, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would probably describe as being part of the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex, were part of Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking (3PFC) program, a global information integrity initiative under which certified fact-checking organizations were tasked to identify mis/disinformation on Facebook, Instagram and Threads and would receive compensation in return from Meta.
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But almost exactly one year ago, on the 7th of January 2025, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook video that the company was killing the 3PFC program in favor of a Community Notes styles initiative modelled after X. Zuckerberg’s announcement focused on the US, but most fact-checkers in Europe and elsewhere were expecting for the entire program to be shut down. Existing contracts were set to expire at the end of 2025 so the ecosystem assumed that was how long they had left.
Meta’s program was quite generous. As we wrote last year, “rumor has it some outlets earned as much as $700 per fact-check. In most contexts, that’s far more than the cost of production, making Meta the primary financial backer of anti-disinformation efforts worldwide.” This financial support was, of course, no longer in-line with the direction of US domestic politics and Meta’s effort to cozy up to the executive branch and the wider MAGA movement, which equated most, or perhaps all anti-disinformation efforts with censorship. With Meta leaving the scene, a devastating collapse of the global information integrity ecosystem was all but inevitable.
So imagine the surprise of fact-checkers outside the US, when they opened the email a day before Christmas, and found out that while the US government is banning people for their anti-disinformation work, Meta is actually willing to extend their contracts.
In this edition we’ll discuss:
What we know about the terms Meta is offering to the newsrooms
How European regulators perceive the new deal
How Meta is using the Oversight Board to buy time and spread responsibility
And how newsrooms are thinking about the future of the program