Let's keep Facebook's move in perspective

Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash

Years ago, my friend wrote a piece about then-vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris. She’d just been named as Biden’s pick for VP and he wrote about her anti-gun history, including favoring gun bans.

He included numerous links and direct quotes regarding her anti-gun agenda.

When the story dropped on Facebook, it was hammered with a fact-check that claimed absolutely none of what he wrote was accurate.

The crew from corporate came out swinging, asking for the fact-check to be removed and illustrating why the so-called fact-check was such an issue, and they eventually got it.

Unfortunately, by that point, the story didn’t have legs anymore.

To say that colored my opinion of fact-checkers is to put it mildly.

Now, though, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is putting an end to its fact-check experiment.

Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to "restore free expression" across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have "gone too far."

"We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video posted Tuesday morning. "More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, joined Fox News Channel’s "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning for an exclusive interview to discuss the changes.

"This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression. As Mark says in that video, what we're doing is we're getting back to our roots and free expression," Kaplan told "Fox & Friends."

Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to "manage content" and misinformation on its platforms, largely due to "political pressure," executives said, but admitted the system has "gone too far."

Of course it went too far, as the above-mentioned experience noted.

It also was ridiculous because it resulted in obvious jokes being fact-checked all the time, making the entire program a laughing stock.

Right now, a lot of people are celebrating Meta’s decision. They’re thrilled to see it and are pointing to it as a sign that we’re entering a new era.

I’m not remotely interested in giving them a pass.

Sure, this is a positive development, but why did it take them eight years to make it happen? Why did they allow third-parties to dictate their content moderation strategies that resulted in numerous people catching so many bans on the platform that they started collecting them like they were Pokemon?

Former NFL sideline reporter had this to say about the move:

Tafoya appeared on OutKick’s "Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich" to talk about Zuckerberg’s decision. Dakich asked her what gave Zuckerberg the right to do the about-face now.

"Absolutely nothing. This is not unique to Facebook. I had a guest on my podcast yesterday, Gad Saad, a professor out of Canada, so much has gone on up there under the Justin Trudeau administration that has been really similar," Tafoya said. "People being absolutely wiped out of their professions. We’re talking doctors, researchers, professors, medical experts because they either said something kind of cutesy that someone was uncomfortable with.

"This suppression of human thought, this suppression of human opinion, is completely antithetical to America and free speech. People don’t see it happening or they’re OK with it. This should be massive, flashing red light.

"Mark Zuckerberg knows what he did was wrong, and now he’s going to try and fix it and hope we just say, ‘Oh, good for you, you fixed it, Mark.’"

Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan argued that a community notes-like approach was better than third-party fact-checkers because it ends “relying on so-called experts who bring their own biases into the program.”

But that bias isn’t new. That bias was there the whole time. The bias didn’t change or anything of the sort since the program launched in 2016.

No, what happened is that people just got sick of it.

This wasn’t a principled move. This was a PR move made because the 2024 election showed that most Americans just weren’t buying the BS being pushed by the media, including that pushed by fact-checkers.

I talked about this back in 2020, and it wasn’t exactly new then, but Meta did nothing.

Now, though, their side got its butt kicked and so they figure that since fact-checking doesn’t work as advertised, they’re going to stop doing it before the end up losing far bigger things than elections.

They’re worried that Trump might well decide to get revenge if they don’t start making changes, even if they’re clueless as to what that revenge might look like.

I’m not interested in giving them a pass on this one because I’ve seen nothing at all to suggest they’ve changed.

They never had to ban people like they did. They never had to go so far down the leftist rabbit hole that they looked like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the DNC. That was Zuckerberg and company’s choice.

I’ve seen nothing to make me think they’ve had a change of heart.

That means it’s just a matter of time before they start censoring people once again, even if it’s driven by community notes and not some third-party nonsense.

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