MENLO PARK, September 13 — Meta is testing a system that hands fact-checking to users across Latin America, according to a France 24 report in its “Truth or Fake” segment. The trial, reported by the French broadcaster, marks a shift in how the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp approaches verification in the region. Under the hood, the change is structural rather than cosmetic.
Meta has run a third-party fact-checking programme since 2016, in which independent organisations certified by the International Fact-Checking Network reviewed and rated content on Facebook and, later, Instagram. That programme expanded over the years to cover dozens of languages and many countries, including across Latin America, where outlets in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia took part.
Fact-checkers could apply ratings such as “false” or “altered”, and content rated false could see its distribution reduced and be accompanied by a warning label.
A model already tested at home
In 2025, Meta announced changes to its content moderation approach in the United States, ending its US third-party fact-checking programme and replacing it with a “community notes” system, in which contributing users write and rate context notes that are appended to posts. The company said at the time that it would roll the model out to other countries over time. The Latin America test described by France 24 is part of that broader expansion of the community notes approach beyond the United States.
The community notes model, pioneered on the platform X, relies on contributors who sign up to write proposed notes on posts they believe are misleading. Other contributors then rate those notes as helpful or not helpful, and a note is only published if it attracts enough agreement from contributors who have previously disagreed with one another — a mechanism intended to reduce partisan bias.
Meta has said its version of the system will work in a similar way, with notes written and rated by users rather than by professional fact-checkers.
The objections, and the counter-argument
The change has drawn criticism from fact-checking organisations and press-freedom groups, which argue that user-generated notes are slower, less reliable and less transparent than review by trained fact-checkers, and that they may fail to curb viral falsehoods, particularly in languages and countries where the pool of eligible contributors is small. Supporters of the approach say it is more scalable and less prone to accusations of political bias.
Latin America is a significant market for Meta, with large user bases in Brazil and Mexico, and the region has a history of viral misinformation around elections, public health and natural disasters. The test’s outcome in the region could shape whether Meta extends the model further across the world.
France 24’s report is part of its regular “Truth or Fake” series, which examines false or misleading content circulating online. Details of the test’s scope, the countries involved and its duration have not been fully disclosed. What to watch next is whether Meta publishes those details — and whether the contributor pools in smaller Latin American markets prove deep enough to make the mechanism work as designed.
