Meta Drops Fact Checkers, Promises to Embrace Free Speech
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive had increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company would drop its third-party fact-checkers, use community notes like X, and restore free speech.
“I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Facebook. “I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.”
Zuckerberg confessed the government and media pushed too hard to censor people on Meta platforms, especially after Trump won in 2016.
However, the “complex systems to moderate content” got out of control, targeting and suppressing speech that did not harm anyone.
“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 US,” continued Zuckerberg.
Yes, free speech includes conspiracy theories, misinformation, stretching the truth, etc.
Zuckerberg promised to target “legitimately bad stuff” such as “drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation.”
Censorship sucks. The law makes it hard for someone to prove libel and slander, even more so for public figures, on purpose due to the First Amendment.
“Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people,” explained Zuckerberg. “And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
Meta will use community notes like the ones on X.
The company will also eliminate a “bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive had increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far,” Zuckerberg added. “So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
The quote popped into my head when Zuckerberg admitted Meta would likely miss some “bad stuff,” but the tradeoff is worth it because the new system will “reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts” that the company removes.
Another huge Meta move is shifting the “safety and content moderation teams out of California” to Texas.
A parting shot to California: “I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”
Ouch.
Zuckerberg even promised Meta would work with President-elect Donald Trump to push back against foreign countries that target U.S. companies.
The CEO noted that America has the best protections for freedom of speech, while authoritarian countries like China:
The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies. It has emboldened other governments to go even further.
But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it.
I can see why people will think Zuckerberg’s change of heart is political and wants to fall into Trump’s good graces. I bet he changes his mind when a Democrat takes back the White House.
Meta appointed Republican Joel Kaplan to head the policy team. UFC’s Dana White also joined the company’s board.
Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
However, in August, Zuckerberg told the world how the White House and FBI “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor COVID content and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” wrote Zuckerberg.
Remember when Biden told the press that Facebook was “killing people” by allowing the spread of COVID misinformation? I do!
The CEO revealed the company ultimately decided when and what to censor, and all of them “own our decisions.”
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” continued Zuckerberg. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make it today.”
I do not trust any of them, even Elon Musk. I won’t trust any of them until I see some consistency.
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Yes, prove it first, then trust
I think he was between a rock and a hard place. The threats by the Democrats to ruin his business are real so he played ball to the extent he had to.
It’s almost like he fears retribution….
http://www.nurembergtwo.com
So Zuck admits the feds have been pushing censorship the last four years. No surprise of course, but how do we fix this? Even assuming Trump/DOGE stop it now, and can identify and fire the people involved, what’s to stop it from happening again? SCOTUS has been no help, and even if they eventually rule favorably in a future case, the courts are too slow to respond to censorship in real time. It takes years, and in the meantime the damage is done. The judicial branch was not designed to provide checks and balances against an extra constitutional administrative branch of government.
It wasn’t just the last four years. Censorship has been Facebook policy for much longer.
I still see no need to join the Facebook crowd.
Removing the feds’ ability to give money to people/organizations would fix a huge chunk of this.
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
Or, honestly, most of the things our fedgov does.
(The only thing money should be appropriated for would be goods and services, and salaries/wages.)
End the flow of $ via grants or contracts for ‘services’ to NGO. Couple that with an explicit statutory bar for Federal government to ‘outsource’ any action the Feds are prohibited from directly performing. Set high civil and criminal penalties and grant standing to State Gov’t to file civil suit.
Meta fact check:
There are no longer three stooges. Only one left. He’s in the White House. He will be gone in 13 days.
Facebook has been around how long and had to slowly come to this after Musk fixed twitlandia ages ago?
I also don’t like that Facebook and Instagram know your info and broadcast too much of it to the rest of the world.
Thank Heaven for person voting. If Harris had won, they would only be doubling down on censorship.
* In-Person voting
Gotta call out Mr. Z on his statement…..
“I started building social media to give people a voice.”.
He may have switched to that (and making $$$) later on but I’ve read that his initial proto of Facebook (called FaceSmash) was a “hot or not” app which allowed Harvard students to grade fellow students based on their “hotness”.
Harvard shut it down because it got too popular, overwhelming one of their servers, because it violated student privacy (the photos were pirated from Harvard’s servers) and because it was sexist as sh@t.
His next iteration, called TheFaceBook built on his previous smash hit, allowing more interaction (still including little black book type posts) and had a lot of fellow students sharing notes on the Harvard dating pool.
So….. still kinda sexist piggish.
You skipped the part where he stole the work he was contracted to do for the Winklevoss twins and their site.
What a curious and evocative time to make such a major course change. It must be migration season for weasels.
Noli me tasere, frat’.
The term that best applies to this situation?
Getting ahead of the curve.
Upvoted for the Latin. 🙂
But… whose free speech?
Hopefully to protect everyone’s speech and especially the offensive and disruptive sort.
But you were stomping all over free expression then and have continued to do so right up until today.
In fact, it’s far worse. FarceBook wasn’t just against “free expression”, FarceBook was against any actual TRUTH being expressed that FarceBook thought would harm the left, in any way. “Free expression” is about opinions and non-factual things – being allowed to express ones feelings about something. But to stomp all over straight-up FACTUAL discussion is something altogether different. You have to go another 20 steps forward from that to even get to the doorstep of “free expression”.
I don’t trust FarceBook as far as I can throw a Fat Lizzo.
Oh, I don’t trust Zuck either, yet he knows which way the wind is blowing, and that’s a good sign.
Even if I cared about facething, I would say never forgive and never forget
Expect a liberal meltdown and a mass exit off their platform. I agree with the last line of the article. Be careful who you trust.
LOL.
“accidnetally”. … Yeah.
FarceBook only managed to correctly censor about 1% of posts.
Wasn’t there all manner of kiddie porn connections going around FarceBook for which they basically did nothing? I seem to remember a few stories to that effect.
I thought Zuck was spending all of his time burning cash at $10 billion/year on their stupid metaverse stuff? Has he lost interest in that? I never see him wearing the stupid goggles … though I have seen a few of the laughable ads they run for it, with idiots acting out in public with their meta-masks on. If anyone thought that people talking on speaker phone in public was annoying … meta is advertising for people to put their virtual goggles on and act like complete idiots in public. Loudly, too. In the commercials, everyone around looks so interested in what the retard with the goggles is doing jumping around and yelping at nothing … uh … yeah …
They’ve been censoring, shadow banning, and outright banning for 20 years.
Don’t trust this slimy little weasel for one second.
Until he unbans all the conservatives that were banned over the last 10 years, its all just BS he’s spewing hoping he can avoid any actual accountability or policy change.
Thanks, Yucky-Zuck, but it’s a little late. No, it is a not late.
The only reason you are Zucking up to Trump is because you’re concerned that maybe, just maybe, bad things will happen to you if you continue to lie, steal and cheat your way towards $1 trillion.
If Zuckerberg were serious then he would follow Twitter in another way – release the files for reporters to go through and detail to the public exactly what had been happening behind closed doors with respect to their censorship policies and their interactions and collaborations with government and government representatives/cut-outs.
Unless FarceBook allows for a release of information similar to the Twitter files with Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger then there is nothing even half serious about this.
To be fair, it was NEVER a “movement to be more inclusive”.
Zuck got suckered, willingly so, and has gradually begun waking up.
Mark Zuckerberg’s post-election conversion rings hollow to me. After all, Zuckerberg suppressed the “Laptop from Hell” story from the New York Post and put $400,000,000 into critical districts in the 2020 Presidential Election. I doubt anyone did, or could have done, more to hurt President Trump’s reelection bid in 2020.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) should be repealed. This provision of the law no longer serves a useful purpose. Internet Service Providers are no longer nascent companies in a nascent industry. Today Internet Service Providers are huge, financially secure, and have the legal resources to protect their interests. They need to be held accountable for their meddling in politics (taking sides), and for their disgraceful behavior during the Covid 19 pandemic.
Better yet, because Internet Service Providers are so large and powerful (and have a bevy of high-priced lawyers willing to fight for their interests) I suggest legislation which would expose them not just to actual damages for defamation, but to presumptive damages and legal fees akin to the legal fees’ provisions of 42 U.S.C. §1988. That would encourage our colleagues in the legal community to bring lawsuits, and it would also encourage Internet Service Providers to be strictly platforms for the exchange of ideas by others.