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Slate Technology

What Happened After Meta Fired Its Fact-Checkers

Slate Technology

Slate

History, Technology, Society & Culture

4.6636 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was moving from employing professional fact-checkers to letting its users fact-check each other. If you’ve heard that it’s going perfectly, then you, too, have been exposed to misinformation.

Guest: Geoffrey Fowler, tech columnist with the Washington Post

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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Ethan Oberman, and Patrick Fort.



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Transcript

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0:00.0

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See victory rules.com. U.K.

0:45.7

Last April, the Vatican held the funeral of Pope Francis. The funeral was huge, a very solemn and important event for Catholics across the world.

0:49.4

But a scuttle online started to overtake the ceremony.

1:02.3

I saw a meme going around in the liberal social media spheres that Donald Trump was so terrible that he fell asleep during Pope Francis's funeral.

1:06.6

And they were like, and he called Joe Biden's Sleepy Joe, and look at him here.

1:08.2

And they claimed to have evidence of it.

1:11.6

That's Jeffrey Fowler, a tech columnist with The Washington Post.

1:17.0

Just weeks before Jeffrey saw those posts about Trump, he had actually signed up to be a volunteer community notes poster for META.

1:19.9

And because something felt off about those posts, Jeffrey jumped into action.

1:24.5

I said, you know what?

1:25.6

There is this tool that Mark Zuckerberg created for us to

1:30.3

counter these kinds of untruths on social media, on Instagram and threads and Facebook.

1:36.4

And I used it. It's called Community Notes. And I said, I'm going to go find the truth and I'm

1:41.3

going to try to correct the record.

...

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