Meta AI’s Biggest Unlock

Meta wants you to edit pictures, plan trips, and do all sorts of fancy things with Meta AI. But perhaps Meta AI’s most important use-case is something they’re not really talking about: verifying information.

Meta AI’s Business Model

For months, it wasn’t quite clear what the end goal was for that blue ring that’s appeared on your WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. You could interact with an AI, sure, but what was the point?  A harmless experiment?

Now we know.

Effective December 16, 2025, Meta AI will become an ad personalization engine for its 1 billion users. Ask Meta AI to help you plan a vacation to Japan, and suddenly you’re seeing ads from Japan Airlines, hotel deals in Tokyo, and travel gear recommendations. Talk recipes, get cookware ads.

Your Data is Safe, or is it?

Meta is investing billions to make AI ubiquitous. Zuckerberg envisions a world where you talk to Meta AI throughout the day while browsing content, where AI is "ever-present" across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. He wants it to become your "leading personal AI”.

But I believe trust is the blocker to his "AI everywhere" future. And Meta knows this. They've been pushing campaigns around safety and trust, offering better privacy controls, promoting end-to-end encryption on WhatsApp, and other tools to help manage your personal data. The big question on my mind is, how does Meta straddle the safety and trust claim with an AI that knows your business and uses it to serve you ads? What about that feels trustworthy? Meta can’t have an AI that knows everything about you while also convincing you it’s not exploiting that knowledge.

Fact-Checking Could Be The Unlock

And WhatsApp needs it most. Any communication channel can spread misinformation, but WhatsApp has become one of the main platforms where it spreads particularly fast. With over 3 billion monthly users and easy forwarding, false information moves faster than anyone can respond. A 2024 Washington Post investigation into election misinformation found that WhatsApp has become a primary channel where voters can find unchecked conspiracy theories. The platform's structure, built around private, encrypted conversations, makes it nearly impossible for traditional fact-checking to work at scale. Unlike public social media where misinformation can be flagged and corrected in view of everyone, false claims on WhatsApp spread person-to-person, with no intervention. The trust dynamics amplify the problem. When misinformation arrives via WhatsApp from someone you know, you're more likely to believe it. And when you forward it to others, they trust it because it came from you. This creates a chain of credibility that has nothing to do with whether the information is actually true.

This is where Meta AI could break the chain. Unlike external fact-checkers who can't see into encrypted conversations, Meta AI is already built into WhatsApp. It respects encryption and can verify information when asked.

Meta’s recent switch from third-party fact-checkers to Community Notes is directionally right, but this barely works at scale. As of September 2025, Meta's own data shows only 6% of Community Notes written actually get published, and research shows they’re too slow to catch misinformation in its most viral stage.

Meta AI could solve this. It can gather existing information from its corpus and fact-check based on what’s available. However, current usage skews toward convenience: generating images, asking questions, planning trips. This misses an untapped segment of users who care about information accuracy, who’ve watched misinformation spread for years, and who want tools that make platforms safer. 

Verification could be the gateway use case. A user asks “Is this true?” about a forwarded health claim. Meta AI helps. They trust it a little more. Then maybe they ask it to plan that trip to Japan. 

Fact-checking shows Meta AI isn’t just another ad-targeting mechanism and that potentially makes Zuckerberg’s “AI everywhere” future possible.

Grok Shows How This Could Work

Grok is integrated into the X platform and can provide real-time context and fact-check information. This makes it less a plaything and more a trusted assistant, which drives adoption. Meta could take inspiration here by making fact-checking visible in places where users spend their time and in activities they engage with most. At the individual level, users should see Meta AI when they are about to forward messages - “Verify this with Meta AI?”. In group chats, Meta AI could become a silent moderator, enabling users fact-check information in-situ so others could learn how Meta AI works and interact with it privately. 

Grok proves that context and verification build trust. Meta could prove they can do it at scale.

Show, Don't Tell

I get it. Meta is a business. They prioritize use cases that directly tie to revenue, and they have more than enough data to know exactly what's worth pushing.

But it’s also clear that Meta’s recent campaigns about safety and trust show they care about perception. Emphasizing Meta AI's ability to verify information is the perfect opportunity to both help users and manage perception. It won't directly add to Meta's revenue, but it could change how people feel about Meta using their data to personalize ads.

If I'm being cynical? Meta profits when people engage, and misinformation drives engagement. Why would they voluntarily reduce it? That's the thought I'm wrestling with.