The 2025 Australian federal election will take place in May, and Meta has vowed to combat all forms of misinformation, including deepfakes, on its platforms ahead of voting in an attempt to prevent election interference. Ironically, Meta announced that it plans to do this with the help of the exact methods CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced just a few months ago were not worth the company’s time in the U.S., namely the use of third-party fact checkers.
“We have developed a comprehensive approach to help ensure the integrity of elections on our platforms: one that gives people a voice, supports participation in the civic process, and combats voter interference and foreign influence,” Meta’s head of policy in Australia, Cheryl Seeto, said in a blog explaining how the company is preparing for the country’s upcoming election. “We continue to work with Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Australian Associated Press (AAP) to independently review content. We are also partnering with AAP on a new media literacy campaign to help Australians critically assess the content they view online, which will run in the lead-up to the election.”
Infamously, Zuckerberg announced in January in a video and blog titled “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes” that the company is ending its third party fact-checking program, starting in the US, and moving the a Community Notes model like the one used on Elon Musk’s X. The Community Notes model was rolled out in the United States last week.
“There’s been widespread debate about potential harm from online content,” Zuckerberg said in the video. “Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political.”
Zuckerberg’s position that this alleged political push for censorship from legacy media and governments doesn’t appear to be a problem in Australia at the moment, which is relying on the Associated Press and AFP to debunk and fact check content on Meta that the company will then reduce in reach and attach warning labels to. Again, the strategy it is using in Australia is the same model that it just got rid of in the United States.
“We are also partnering with AAP on a new media literacy campaign to help Australians critically assess the content they view online, which will run in the lead-up to the election,” Seeto said in her blog.
When reached for comment, Meta told 404 Media that changes to its third party fact checking are initially only happening in the US and that at the moment there are no changes to the program in other countries. It also said that it’s rolling out Community Notes in the US and will continue to improve over the course of the year before expanding to other countries. The company also pointed us at a recent update to how Community Notes is being rolled out in the US.
The implication here is that Meta still plans to make similar changes in other countries, but that hasn’t happened yet. It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that Meta continues to use fact checking from media outlets that are “clearly political” in other countries, just not the one where Meta is based, where the president has declared the press to be an enemy of the people, and where its CEO is making clear overtures to win the president’s favor.
