Leftist Axios is mourning the rapid decline of the censorship fact-checking industry in the United States.
The left-leaning outlet seemingly pouted about Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer data showing that media coverage of supposed misinformation and those who fact check it has declined steeply since 2022. Furthermore, the institutions which participated in the anti-free speech campaign that increased under the Biden administration are experiencing historic loss of trust. Axios admitted that the Trump administration appears to be a key factor for the change, especially by slashing or eliminating agencies and federal entities that pressured social media to censor speech.
For example, the Trump administration gutted the infamous interagency Global Engagement Center, which funded and coordinated online censorship initiatives. The new Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson is investigating Meta for anti-free speech and monopolistic practices. Donald Trump himself suspended the clearances of Homeland Security and CISA officials exposed by MRC’s 57 Biden censorship initiatives study for targeting free speech. Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation canceled its Biden-era disinformation and misinformation awards. All of this reform spells gloom and doom from Axios’s perspective, it seems.
Even Big Tech companies are beginning to move away from fact-checking to X-style Community Notes models (still censorship, but in some ways less egregious). Meta scrapped its third-party fact-checking program in America in favor of community notes. TikTok also has a new plan it calls “Footnotes” to add to its extensive anti-free speech, censorship efforts. Even insidious Google—despite not having slowed down in its efforts to spread biased results—recently told the European Union that it would not be imposing fact checks on YouTube videos and search results as required by EU law. It appears that a major shift in how tech companies police online speech is underway.
The American public’s trust in public schools and legacy media continues to drop, even as trust in the pro-free speech Trump administration stays strong, Axios reported. It cited a February YouGov poll that found American citizens are significantly more likely to trust what the Trump administration states “a great deal” or “a fair amount” at 44 percent, than to say the same about the legacy news media (28%). Trust in the Trump administration has increased slightly since 2017 as well, but trust in the media dropped by 10 points during the same period. “Even Democrats, who have for years pushed tech companies to take action against falsehoods, have begun to lose their truth-seeking appetite amid broader political battles,” Axios complained. While 58 percent of Democrat voters still support censorship, according to Pew Research Center, that figure is down from 70 percent just two years ago.
The reason, Axios opined: Fact-checking has been “politicized,” and even the media recognize the decline in support for censorship. “Mentions of the terms ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ across the country's three biggest cable news networks, MSNBC, Fox News and CNN, have declined considerably since the pandemic, according to data from Stanford's Cable TV News Analyzer,” reported Axios. The number of fact-checking sites went up a whopping 140 percent between 2016 and 2022, Axios wrote, but plateaued beginning in 2023.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Meta here and demand that it be held to account to mirror the First Amendment and provide an equal platform for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
