New Delhi: Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is sharply cutting the fees it pays out to professional fact-checkers in India, The Hindu reported. It is believed that the fees paid to fact-checking organisations that are approved partners of the social media firm is being reduced for the next six months by at least a third to 50%, the daily reported.The development came as Meta’s fact-checking partnerships ended in the United States after the election of US President Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg, the firm’s CEO, had said that Instagram and Facebook would transition to “Community Notes”, a system of “industry-leading fact checking program” that relies on an ideologically diverse group of users, rather than what he called “politically biased” checkers, agreeing that a given post needed to be annotated with additional context.Meta had engaged professional fact checkers in December 2016, following concerns about the spread of misinformation on the platform. These professionals that Meta partnered with counted on Meta as their key source of revenue. With the cuts now, survival becomes difficult, particularly for smaller organisations that exclusively do fact checking.One of the people aware of the discussions told The Hindu that there may be layoffs in smaller organisations to continue operating. Meta has said that it plans for its Community Notes feature to go through an “expansion to other countries”.The system is inspired by X’s community notes. The micro-blogging platform claims to use what it calls a “bridging algorithm” to prevent bias. However, several reviews have shown that the feature largely failed in the face of heightened polarisation and allowed blatant misinformation to remain on the platform unannotated.Moreover, the International Fact Checking Network, which includes members in India receiving Meta revenue, wrote an open letter to Mr. Zuckerberg last January. “Research indicated [professionally applied] fact-check labels reduced belief in and sharing of false information,” it said.“The plan to end the fact-checking program in 2025 applies only to the United States, for now. But Meta has similar programs in more than 100 countries that are all highly diverse, at different stages of democracy and development. Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places,” it added.