Meta's Oversight Board warns against replacing professional fact-checkers with crowdsourcing

What is the dispute about?

Meta’s Oversight Board has formally urged the company not to scrap its professional fact-checking partnerships in favour of crowdsourced "Community Notes", warning that volunteer-led moderation is no substitute for trained specialists.

The intervention follows Meta’s launch of a pilot programme on Wednesday across 16 Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, including Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. Under the trial, users of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads can sign up to write context notes for posts, which currently remain invisible to the wider public while the company tests the system. Brazil, the region's largest market, has been excluded because it is Portuguese-speaking.

The crowdsourcing model, heavily inspired by the system popularised on Elon Musk's X, is designed to eventually replace the verification work currently outsourced to accredited newsrooms and fact-checking agencies. But in a statement released on Thursday, the Oversight Board—the quasi-independent body funded by Meta to review its content decisions—warned that the two approaches serve entirely different functions.

"We urge Meta not to consider community notes a direct replacement for fact-checking," the board said, adding that volunteer notes often rely on professional fact-checkers to function in the first place. While the board acknowledged that community contributions can help broaden public debate, it warned they can also "contribute to real-world harms" that Meta has a duty to prevent.

Why is Meta making the shift?

The policy change is part of a broader retreat from professional content moderation by Meta's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. Last year, shortly before Donald Trump took office for a second term as US president, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would end its US fact-checking partnerships, pitching the move to crowdsourcing as a return to free expression.

The Latin American pilot comes at a politically sensitive moment for the region. Several countries have recently elected right-wing leaders who favour digital deregulation and rely heavily on social media to build support. In some cases, these political operations have been accused of deploying coordinated "troll armies" to simulate online consensus—a tactic that critics worry could easily co-opt a volunteer-run moderation system.

In March, the Oversight Board had already raised concerns that a global rollout of crowdsourced notes could lead to human rights abuses in highly polarised societies or during high-stakes elections.

How has the industry responded?

The move has drawn fierce criticism from professional fact-checking organisations, many of whom currently partner with Meta to verify content.

Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said a crowdsourced program alone is "simply not adequate" to counter harmful online falsehoods. Meanwhile, LatamChequea, a coalition of 47 regional fact-checking initiatives, called on Meta to use community notes to complement professional verification, rather than replace it entirely.

Meta has not set a firm date for a global rollout, stating only that it will expand the programme once it is confident the system works.