Meta Platforms, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is set to significantly reduce the payouts that it makes to its professional ‘fact-checking partners’ in India. According to a report by The Hindu, the social media giant has cut fees for the upcoming six month period by between one third and 50%.
Notably, the company has made significant changes to its global fact-checking strategy, which has led to the possible shutting down of small fact-checking organisations in India, as they rely heavily on funding from Meta.
Fee cuts of up to 50 per cent
According to the report, in the next half year, Indian ‘fact-checking partners’ will see their payouts reduced sharply. The cuts range from 33% to 50%. For many such ‘partners’, Meta funding is the primary source of income and such a reduction will result in layoffs to sustain operations.
US programme ended after Trump’s election
Meta’s decision regarding ‘fact-checking partners’ in India is not an isolated one and follows developments in the United States. In the US, the company ended its fact-checking partnerships after the election of US President Donald Trump. Subsequently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would transition to a “Community Notes” model.
Under this system, fact checking would be crowdsourced to an ideologically diverse set of users who must agree that a particular post requires additional context before it is annotated.
Professional ‘fact-checking partners’ were first engaged by Meta in December 2016. At that time, there were intensified concerns about misinformation being shared on social media worldwide. Over the years, several organisations posing as fact-checkers mushroomed across the world. These organisations depend heavily on Meta funding.
However, ideology seeped deep into the “fact-checking” initiatives and neutral fact checking remained only on paper.
Uncertainty over global expansion of Community Notes
Meta has stated that it plans to expand its Community Notes feature to other countries. However, the company has not explicitly clarified whether this expansion would lead to the termination of professional fact-checking partnerships outside the United States.
In January 2025, the International Fact Checking Network wrote to Zuckerberg, claiming that ending the fact-checking programme may affect politically and socially vulnerable countries. It claimed that a global rollback of professional fact checking could increase the risk of misinformation-driven political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide in certain regions.
At that time, OpIndia reported how panic enveloped Indian ‘fact-checking partners’ when Meta decided to end the fact-checking programme in the US.
Fact-checkers had expressed that for various Indian entities, involvement in Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme is their only means of financial sustenance. The loss of this funding could force them to shut down their operations. Additionally, these fact-checkers depend on Meta’s platforms for visibility. Facebook and Instagram serve as the primary channels for directing traffic to their websites. The removal of their content from these platforms could drastically reduce the number of visitors to their sites.
