Autor Ryan Morgan via Epoch Times,
President Joe Biden has shared his outrage at Meta’s decision to abandon the current social media fact-checking program.
This week, Meta, which owns social media platforms for Facebook and Instagram, announced that it will stop using its third-party fact-checking program to review U.S.-based content.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he made the decision because the existing fact-checking program has become “too politically biased,” resulting in censorship and a loss of trust.
“It’s time to return to our roots around free speech on Facebook and Instagram,” he said in a Jan. 7 video statement.
Asking his opinion on the movement at a Jan. 10 press conference, Biden said, “It’s just completely at odds with everything America says.”
Until this week, Meta had partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to run its third-party fact-checking service. The IFCN is operated by the Poynter Institute, which also administers PolitiFact’s fact-checking publication.
“The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, from this point on, we’re not going to fact-check anything’, and you know, if you have millions of people who read, go online to read this stuff, that’s – anyway, I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said.
Meta doesn’t lose fact-checking bluntly. Rather, Zuckerberg said, Meta platforms are moving toward a “more comprehensive community notes” style system similar to that used by social media platform X. He is starting a new model in the United States.
Instead of relying on a fact-checking organization, such as an IFCN, to review content, X’s Community Notes feature allows users to weigh directly. X user may suggest a fact-checking note about controversial posts on the platform and then provide feedback on whether the suggested fact-checking note is itself accurate and necessary for a particular post. Posts tagged with sufficient community input are accompanied by a fact-checking note that explains why a particular post is inaccurate or may be missing from an important context.
Zuckerberg also announced that the Meta content moderation team would be moved out of California to Texas, “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Zuckerberg and other Meta officials have defended the move as needed to restore free speech on their platforms.
In a Jan. 7 blog post, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global relations, said that with as good intentions as their previous fact-checking efforts had been, “They’ve expanded over time to the point where we’re making too many mistakes, disappointing our users, and too often hindering the free speech we intended to allow.”
“Too much harmless content is censored, too many people mistakenly find themselves locked in Facebook jail, and we’re often too slow to react when they do,” Kaplan said.
Meta’s fact-checking and content moderation decisions were a contentious issue during the 2020 presidential election cycle.
In October 2020, Meta platforms reduced the scope of posts that cited articles in The New York Post about a laptop that then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had allegedly abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware. New York Post articles detailed the contents of the laptop, including documents showing that Elder Biden interacted to some extent with his son’s foreign business partners.
In a Jan. 10 interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg claimed that Biden administration officials contacted Meta regularly demanding that they remove or suppress certain content, including memes and satirical posts.
“Basically, these people in the Biden administration would call on our team and as if yelling at them and cursing,” Zuckerberg said.
The Epoch Times reached out to the White House for comment, but received no response, according to press time.
