Experts and journalists hope that Meta will continue to do so movement towards freedom of expression and avoid the content moderation policies that plagued Facebook under the Biden administration.
“Meta has a terrible history of censorship in the Biden era. They took the government’s lead to censor COVID-19 content; they stopped sharing the New York Post Hunter Biden story; they used fact-checkers who took the government’s word as fact and not opinion,” New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz told Fox News Digital.
She said that while it is important to be “wary” of Meta’s past mistakes, people should welcome the company’s acknowledgment that they have “done bad things and want to get better.”
“I hope Zuckerberg has seen the light and will continue to move Facebook toward freedom of expression,” Markowicz, co-host of Normal on iHeartRadio, said of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s also important to remember that there are companies, like Rumble or Telegram and then X/Twitter when Elon Musk bought it, that did the right thing even when times were tough with a hostile Biden administration. Those companies should be celebrated. .”
Meta’s announcement to restore “free speech” comes after years of investigation against the company’s fact-checking and content moderation practices. (Nicolas TUCAT/AFP/Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was introduced after the 2016 election and was used to manage “content” and misinformation on its platforms, mainly due to “political pressure,” executives said, but admitted the system has “gone too far” . far.”
An April study from the conservative Media Research Center alleged that Facebook had “interfered” in US elections dozens of times over the past few cycles.
The investigation shows that Facebook ‘censored’ 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 2022 Senate and Congressional candidates. In 2021, Facebook “deleted the account of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase” and “ramped up its censorship apparatus with a special focus on Donald Trump” and “political ads a week before the election closed’ in 2020.
“It has also artificially elevated liberal news in the Trending News section, while blacklisting popular conservatives like Ted Cruz,” the MRC wrote.
In August 2018, Facebook came under fire after the platform removed a plethora of videos from the website conservative nonprofit, PragerU. The company later reversed the decision, admitting that the content had been wrongly reported as “hate speech.”
JONATHAN TURLEY: META’S ZUCKERBERG MAKES A FREE SPEECH MOVE THAT COULD BE TRULY TRANSFORMATIONAL
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would implement a new fact-checking system, similar to Community Notes on Elon Musk’s X. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Republicans later alleged that Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied allegations that Facebook had engaged in bias against conservative accounts and content.
Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram faced backlash ahead of the 2020 election after the company restricted access to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story.
Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he had decided to do so censoring the New York Post story after the FBI warned him about “a possible Russian disinformation operation” involving the Biden family and Burisma.
“It has since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect we should not have downgraded the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to ensure this doesn’t happen again – for example, we no longer temporarily downgrade things in the US pending fact-checkers,” he said.
Last year, Meta’s CEO sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee admitting that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, particularly regarding COVID content, and even items like satire and humor.
CONSERVATIVES REJOICE OVER ‘JAW DROPPING’ METACENSORSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT: ‘HUGE WIN FOR FREE SPEECH’
The New York Times sparked controversy when it highlighted fact-checkers who objected to comments made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (Photo of the New York Times building courtesy of CAMERA | Zuckerberg photo by Kent Nishimura)
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS host Gayle King that his platform had removed 18 million posts containing “misinformation” about the virus.
In 2022, several attorneys general gathered evidence alleging that Zuckerberg worked with former director of the National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to discredit and debunk the theory that the COVID-19 virus may have suppress. originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that Meta would end its fact-checking program and lift content moderation policies to “restore free speech” on Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms.
Fact-checking organizations whose contracts were canceled by Meta said they were disappointed by the news and mocked accusations of bias. They also shifted the blame back to Meta, suggesting that the company’s policy limiting the disclosure of flagged content was the real catalyst behind the tech company’s censorship.
Experts who spoke to Fox News Digital acknowledged Meta’s culpability in suppressing information, but criticized fact-checkers for tailoring their ratings to personal beliefs and opinions.
TRUMP SAYS META ‘has come a long way’ AFTER ZUCKERBERG ENDS FACT-CHECKING ON PLATFORMS
Meta platforms are displayed on a smartphone screen and the Meta logo appears in the background in Chania, Greece, on August 9, 2024. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“These fact-checkers have themselves to blame,” said Dan Schneider, vice president of the MRC Free Speech. “They have pretended not to be biased. They have pretended to be honest brokers. All the evidence points to the contrary.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would replace fact-checking groups with a system closer to X’s Community Notes has drawn mixed reactions. While some have characterized it as a significant step forward against the potential biases of fact-checking organizations, others suggest that Meta has removed the guardrails from their content moderation ambitions.
DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former Google consultant, said that while he believes this is the “right move” for Meta and that a Community Notes-style system is an “interesting concept,” it will inevitably end up in a “cesspool “. Community Notes, a kind of ‘vox populi’, allows regular X users, via a login system, to check content and provide context or corrections.
“Maybe if Meta uses the annotations intelligently, those annotations could be used to train AI so they can then become a more robust content monitoring system, but I think that would also be a bad idea if they consider that next. reality is that the internet is full of the loudest people in the room. There are many people who just browse the internet, read content, watch the drama, but never participate in it, and therefore their thoughts are never engaged. text or video that this AI can do training,” he said.
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“What we really need if we want AI-moderating democratic content is to get content from the people who don’t create content on the internet – everyone from people who are centrist and quiet to political figures and high-level executives who don’t . But if we had, we probably would never have had these problems, and that’s why this problem is so difficult,” Toscano added.
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Marcowicz was more optimistic, calling Community Notes on
“X has been successful in using its best users to contribute to the Community Notes system and Facebook should try something similar,” she continued. “Not everyone is allowed to post Community Notes, otherwise the system can be overrun by a crowd, and that’s what makes the whole thing so useful.”
