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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he would roll back fact-checking operations designed to censor speech on his company’s online platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, two of the world’s largest websites.
“We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Tuesday morning. The Facebook founder celebrated the new initiative, revealed weeks before President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration, as an effort to return “back to our roots around free expression.”
“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” the tech chief said, blaming the company’s complex algorithms for routine censorship of viewpoints that differ from those held by far-left censors in Silicon Valley.
“We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” said Zuckerberg.
But are Zuckerberg’s revised moderation programs a good-faith effort to restore integrity to the 21st-century public square? Or are they a desperate effort to save face with the new administration, which was thwarted by the company’s censorship four years ago?
Facebook started coming down hard on conservative publications by suppressing content after the 2016 election and accelerated censorship at the start of the coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. But one of the company’s most prominent (and arguably most consequential decisions of censorship) came within the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election when America’s oldest daily newspaper, the New York Post, published blockbuster stories related to the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes.
After former Vice President Joe Biden had repeatedly denied discussing business with his son “or with anyone else” for the past decade, the Post published a series of emails from an abandoned laptop revealing the contrary. Hunter Biden, in fact, had brokered meetings between foreign business partners and his father while the elder Biden operated at the highest level of the federal government. But the stories were promptly suppressed by Facebook and other platforms determined to boost Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
Shortly after the Post’s first piece dropped, Facebook announced through a company spokesman who had previously worked for congressional Democrats that the company would be limiting the story’s reach until third-party fact-checkers could review it.
Facebook never made the findings from its fact-checkers public or named which groups did the apparent “fact-checking.” Zuckerberg did, however, admit on Joe Rogan’s podcast that “fewer people saw it than would have otherwise” after “5 to 7 days” of significant censorship.
A study commissioned by the Media Research Center weeks after the 2020 election surveyed Biden voters across seven swing states and examined their knowledge of several news stories the group felt the media had not fairly or adequately covered, including the laptop scandal. Of those surveyed, 17 percent said they would not have voted for Biden had they known of just one of the eight stories presented. Biden narrowly carried six of the seven states polled, including Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
Trump would have won had he just captured 45,000 more votes across those three states — a number that he could have easily reached, based on how many Biden voters said learning about the Hunter laptop would have shifted their votes. Nearly 80 percent of Americans surveyed in another poll said they believe the outcome of the 2020 election would have been different if the public had not been lied to about the laptop.
Zuckerberg expressed remorse about the suppression of the Hunter Biden stories in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last year, and he pledged his company would refrain from the same kind of censorship — before once again engaging in said censorship last fall.
“We made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” Zuckerberg wrote in August. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
By September, Facebook was censoring Federalist coverage of Haitians hunting geese in Springfield, Ohio. In other words, Zuckerberg has done this dance recently where he promotes plans to roll back his aggressive censorship regime only to turn around and engage in more censorship.
Zuckerberg preceded Tuesday’s announcement with a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund in December. If he’s paying back restitution to those his company sought to discredit over eight years, that leaves at least $399 million more to distribute in reparations. Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway reported in her book on the 2020 election, Rigged, that Zuckerberg and his tech empire poured $400 million into the race against Trump to complement his platforms’ censorship.
“Most of those funds — colloquially called ‘Zuck Bucks’ — were funneled through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a group led by three Democrats with a long history of activism,” Hemingway wrote. CTCL was Zuckerberg’s operation to gin up turnout for Democrats by doling out grants to election officials in deep blue areas. “It was a genius plan. And because no one ever imagined that a coordinated operation could pull off the privatization of the election system, laws were not built to combat it.”
Zuckerberg deliberately manipulated the 2020 election and irreparably damaged conservative media in the process as outlets were pummeled by a dystopian censorship regime. That much cannot be ignored as Americans move forward under a new administration.
