A Meta executive announced that the social media giant will soon fulfill a January promise to abolish fact-checking. Is it too good to be true?
A Meta executive announced that the social media giant will soon fulfill a January promise to abolish fact-checking. Is it too good to be true?Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan announced Friday that the tech giant’s fact-checking program “will be officially over” by Monday afternoon. “That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers,” Kaplan wrote. “We announced in January we’d be winding down the program & removing penalties.”
Kaplan followed this remark by admitting that a different type of censorship was coming to Meta platforms: “In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached.”
MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris was glad to see that outsourced fact-checking is going away but noted that more can be done. “This is a move in the right direction, but Meta is merely doing away with outsourced ‘fact-checking’ and censorship while implementing crowd-sourced ‘fact-checking’ and censorship,” said Morris. “The end goal is much the same. Restitution is also still required of Meta for all of the people and businesses it has harmed through censorship over the years.”
In January, Meta CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to “get rid of fact-checkers,” while also making many other pro-free speech changes, such as committing to dialing back content moderation.
However, Meta has also made some new anti-free speech moves as well, including embracing Community Notes on users’ posts and recently announcing a school reporting plan for censorship on Instagram.
Related: Zuckerberg Rolls Out Community Notes After Eliminating Biased Fact Checkers
Meta will now attach commentary to disfavored speech on its platforms in apparent imitation of the Community Notes system on X. This imposition on users has resulted in arbitrary fact-checks on X, while X owner Elon Musk even warned that demonization awaits X posts with Community Notes labels on them.
Additionally, Meta’s new “School Partnership Program” would help censor content by students on Instagram. Under this program, Instagram would recruit teachers to report posts.
ICYMI! David Marcus: Twitter’s Community Notes Are Just Censorship by a Different Name
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
