Facebook’s controversial factchecking program has lost one of its major US partners. The news website Snopes.com announced on Friday it was cutting ties with the social network.

The departure of Snopes, which has collaborated with Facebook for two years to debunk misinformation on the platform, doesn’t come as a surprise. Numerous journalists working for Facebook’s factchecking initiative have said the partnership was failing to have an impact.

Snopes, which was paid by Facebook, announced in a short post that it had been evaluating the ramifications and costs of providing third-party factchecking services. “We want to determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication and staff,” it said.

Facebook’s factchecking collaboration with various newsrooms began after the 2016 presidential election led to significant concerns about propaganda and false news polluting the site. Facebook has since experimented with different tools to stop the spread of misinformation, including limiting the reach of articles debunked by journalist partners.

Studies and analyses of the initiative have repeatedly raised questions about whether the partnership was making a difference, and Facebook has refused to release meaningful data. Over the last year, journalists also increasingly raised ethical concerns about accepting money from the scandal-scarred company. Some critics said the financial arrangement compromised newsrooms that report on Facebook.

“This all could have been avoided if they had not taken money from Facebook to begin with,” Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, told the Guardian on Friday. Binkowski has long been outspoken against the partnership and while at Snopes advocated against it. Facebook paid Snopes $100,000 in 2017.

“It was a huge conflict of interest,” Binkowski said, adding: “You cannot speak truth to power if you’re being paid directly by power … We cannot pressure Facebook for transparency if we’re their employees.”

ABC News, another initial partner in the program, was an early US newsroom to drop out. The Weekly Standard, which joined in 2017, recently shut down.

PolitiFact and FactCheck.org remain a part of the initiative in the US, and Facebook continues to work with more than 30 news outlets across the globe. A recent survey of the partners estimated that factcheckers may have debunked a total of more than 30,000 links to false content as part of the partnership, but many of the newsrooms reported they were uncertain whether the work had helped reduce the reach of viral hoaxes.

A Facebook spokesperson said Friday that factchecking partners now review content in 16 languages and that it plans to expand the program this year.

“We value the work that Snopes has done, and respect their decision as an independent business. Fighting misinformation takes a multi-pronged approach from across the industry. We are committed to fighting this through many tactics, and the work that third-party fact-checkers do is a valued and important piece of this effort,” Facebook said in a statement.

Snopes did not respond to requests for comment, but its managing editor, Doreen Marchionni, told Poynter that factcheckers had raised concerns about the partnership on multiple occasions. Snopes’ announcement said it was not ruling out working with Facebook in the future.

Political propaganda remains a significant problem on social media. Facebook and Twitter announced on Thursday that they had taken down hundreds of accounts with suspected links to influence operations from Iran, Russia and Venezuela.