When PolitiFact won a Pulitzer in 2009, it put fact-checkers on the map. Donald Trump’s MAGA movement gave them plenty of work. Now, Meta’s fact-checking retrenchment threatens to hollow out the industry.

As I weigh Meta’s decision to break up with American fact-checkers, I keep returning to this: The censorious fact-checking program Meta described is not the fact-checking program I know. On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a five-minute video he was going to "get rid of fact-checkers" and replace them with a crowd-sourced model akin to Community Notes on X.

Mark Zuckerberg’s new edgy vibe has extended to shrugging off the need for independent Facebook and Instagram fact-checkers. But