The announcement took them by surprise. When Mark Zuckerberg posted a video coupled with a press release on Tuesday, January 7, announcing the end of Meta's fact-checking program in the US, the main media partners working on the subject with Facebook's parent company tripped over themselves.

Launched in late 2016 after Donald Trump's first presidential election victory, the program paired Facebook (now Meta) with newsrooms around the world, giving them the power to label content as false or problematic and add a contextual link. Le Monde, and more specifically its data and fact-checking department, Les Décodeurs, contributed until 2022, checking potentially misleading messages posted by French-speaking users of the social network.

In the US, according to the latest list of Meta partner fact-checkers, 10 media outlets or organizations have now seen their collaboration terminated without notice. Among them, the US branch of Agence France-Presse (AFP), the US daily USA Today, the British news agency Reuters. Other websites whose activity is entirely devoted to fact-checking are also affected, sometimes employing only a few journalists to publish verification articles and distribute them on partner platforms. "We didn't know that this move was happening and it comes as a shock to us," Jesse Stiller, editor-in-chief of Check Your Fact, told Reuters. "This is definitely going to affect us."

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