Zuckerberg admitted the fact checkers he paid for 8 years destroyed more trust than they created, replacing them with Community Notes after calling them too politically biased. Facebook launched the program right after Trump’s 2016 win, paying outlets like PolitiFact to rate posts and slap reduced reach plus warning screens on anything they marked false. Musk took the opposite path when he turned Birdwatch into Community Notes, where notes only surface after people who normally disagree both rate them helpful. TikTok and YouTube later rolled out their own crowd written versions. Professional fact checking was pitched as the fix for misinformation, but once its biggest client walked away, the industry’s rivals started copying the model instead.