Fact-checkers are not too happy with Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with Facebook’s fact-checking system. Shortly after his decision was announced, some of these individuals were quick to make their feelings known.
Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that Facebook would be moving toward a “Community Notes” model similar to X, which allows users to fact-check posts. To some, the move appeared to be a way to signal to folks on the right, who are disproportionately affected by censorship efforts, that Zuckerberg is now serious about promoting free speech.
“The fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” the Meta founder said during a video statement. He also announced that the social media platform would remove restrictions on subjects like immigration and gender because they are “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Naturally, this announcement prompted an outpouring of wailing and gnashing of teeth from folks on the left who preferred the old brand of censorious content moderation practices.
Aaron Sharockman, executive director at PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s former fact checkers, issued a statement on X in which he whined about the decision.
“The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship,” he wrote. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision could not be less subtle.”
Sharockman pointed out that “the decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not fact-checkers. They created the rules.”
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Angie Drobnic Holan, a journalist with Poynter, also released her own statement echoing Sharockman’s sentiments. “This decision will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family,” she wrote. “Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts; it’s added information and context to controversial claims, and it’s debunked hoax content and conspiracy theories.”
Despite their protestations, fact-checkers have been instrumental in flagging posts that do not adhere to leftist narratives on various issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic. The British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2021 published a report alleging faulty practices at the Ventavia Research Group, a contractor for Pfizer’s COVID vaccine trials.
On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group. The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial.
Since the BMJ’s report did not jibe with what COVID tyrants wanted the public to believe about the pandemic, the fact-checkers flagged it without even refuting the report’s claims. This means that users who came across the article on Facebook were being told it was problematic for no valid reason.
We can’t forget the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election either. Facebook was one of several platforms that concealed the New York Post story from its users, pretending it was merely Russian disinformation. Indeed, fact-checkers labeled the content misleading.
Nevertheless, Sharockman and Holan are technically right. None of these fact-checkers ever pushed the “censor this content” button. Those decisions were made by Facebook’s censorship regime. However, the notion that their hands are clean is absurd; they clearly assisted the platform in suppressing content that went against leftist narratives.
We don’t know whether Zuckerberg will follow through on his promise or if he will bend to pressure from the authoritarian left. But this, along with Elon Musk’s impact on X, shows that times might be changing when it comes to online censorship and the left is just going to have to live in a world in which it has to refute arguments instead of silencing them.
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