On Tuesday Meta announced it is ending its third party fact checking program in the United States and replacing it with Community Notes, the crowd annotation model X has been running for a couple of years. By Wednesday afternoon I had four client messages asking the same question in four different tones. Does this change anything for us?
Yes. Just not in the way the coverage is framing it.
Nearly everything written about this so far has been about speech and moderation and politics. That is the interesting fight. It is not the one that lands on your desk. The one that lands on your desk is quieter and mostly about accounting.
Meta has been paying, in money and headcount and reputational exposure, to keep a certain volume of garbage out of a feed your ads sit inside. That spending is going away. The garbage is not.
Meta did not eliminate the cost of a polluted feed. It moved that cost onto everyone who buys adjacency to it.
Community Notes is slow by design. It requires agreement across people who normally disagree, which is a genuinely clever mechanism and also the reason most proposed notes never publish at all. Fact checking was slow too, and clumsy, and got things wrong. But advertisers were never really buying truth. They were buying the assurance that somebody with a budget was standing between their product shot and the worst thing on the internet that hour.
Two practical consequences. First, your brand safety settings were calibrated against a moderation regime that no longer exists. Whatever exclusion tiers your verification vendor recommended in 2023 mean something different in 2025, and nobody is going to send you a notice about it. Re baseline them now, while it is a Tuesday task and not a crisis task.
Second, decide in writing, before anything happens, what adjacency would actually make you pause spend. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and the answer is always improvised at 4pm on a Friday with a screenshot in the chat and a VP asking what our position is. You do not have a position. You have a panic. Write the threshold down in January and the decision takes ten minutes in June.
They were buying the assurance that somebody with a budget was standing between their product shot and the worst thing on the internet that hour.
The 2020 boycott taught the industry that collective pressure moves platforms and that it moves them for about one quarter. So do not plan around outrage. Plan around the fact that the floor got lower and the sweeping is now yours.
It has rained for nine straight days here and I bought a book at Powell's about accounting fraud, which feels appropriately on theme for the week.