Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, announced today that it will begin testing its crowdsourced fact-checking program, Community Notes, on March 18.

The old system of third-party fact-checking has been with the company since 2016. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s new design for getting to the truth coincides with his warmer relations with President Donald Trump.

Zuckerberg also ended the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs, admitting that the former government may have put pressure on censoring content and that fact-checkers might have been “politically biased.” He went as far as to say the election of Trump was “a cultural tipping point” for free speech.

The new fact-checking look will initially be based on a ratings system used by Elon Musk’s X Corp. “This will allow us to build on what X has created and improve it for our own platforms over time,” Meta said in its announcement. While it will look similar, the company may modify how the notes are ranked and rated.

“We’re building this in the open while learning from contributors and seeing how it works in practice in our products,” Meta said. “We don’t expect this process to be perfect, but we’ll continue to improve as we learn.”

About 200,000 people have already signed up to join the program across all of Meta’s platforms. During testing, the company will regard the rating history of the contributors and assess which people usually disagree. Before choosing to publish a note, Meta will take into account its wide approval among contributors who each agree the note provides context. This consensus system, says Meta, should ensure there’s no bias.

“Community Notes allow more people with more perspectives to add context to more types of content, and because publishing a note requires agreement between different people, we believe it will be less prone to bias,” Meta explained. “This requirement is also a safeguard against organized campaigns attempting to game the system and influence what notes get published or what they say.”

As for the nuts and bolts, the company said a note won’t affect the post in terms of what the algorithm does with it. Each of the notes can be up to 500 characters long and will each link to more information. The name of the contributor won’t be on the note, and there won’t be any notes on ads, although contributors can choose to add a note to a post from a public leader, or Meta and its leaders, presumably including Zuckerberg.

Though Meta hopes to expand into many of the languages of the world, it will start the system only in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, French and Portuguese. Once the company is confident it works, the testing phase will be rolled out to the public in the U.S. and the fact-checking labels will be gone. The system will roll out to other nations at some point, but in some countries, the old system will remain.

Photo: Meta