• by Colin Kirkland , December 13, 2023

As Threads' user base expands and major elections loom on the horizon, including the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, Meta has decided to invite the third-party fact-checking partners that have been working with Instagram and Facebook to review and rate false content on the Threads app in the coming year.

“Currently, when a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false on Facebook or Instagram, we extend that fact-check rating to near-identical content on Threads, but fact-checkers cannot rate Threads content on its own,” the company wrote in a blog post.

With a slew of new features and over 100 million users, Threads’ popularity is on the rise. The reality of gaining more users, however, comes with added risks -- especially in the form of misinformation.

To help combat the spread of false narratives on Threads, which are expected to skyrocket throughout the upcoming election cycle, and duplicate posts across its family of apps, Meta is taking preparatory precautions. 

“We currently match fact-check ratings from Facebook or Instagram to Threads, but our goal is for fact-checking partners to have the ability to review and rate misinformation on the app,” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri in a Threads post.

In addition to expanded fact-checking, Meta has announced that Threads users will also gain more control over how much sensitive or fact-checked content they see on the app.

Threads users in the U.S. will soon have “the ability to choose whether they want to increase, lower or maintain the default level of demotions on fact-checked content in their Feed,” the company says. “If they choose to see less sensitive content on Instagram, that setting will also be applied on Threads.”

Without more details surrounding these announcements, questions and concern remain around how effective Meta’s fact-checking processes will be on Threads.

But it's worth noting that the company is attempting to provide users with what its doppelganger app -- X, formerly known as Twitter -- is lacking, which, with Elon Musk at the helm, includes the proper management of false and harmful content.