Flashback: Meta’s “history of censorship” and the Trump, Biden administration’s fact-checking woes

Experts and journalists hope Meta can continue its move towards free speech and avoid the content moderation policies that have plagued Facebook under the Biden administration.

“Meta has a terrible history of censorship in the Biden era. They followed government directives to censor COVID-19 content; they shut down the New York Post’s sharing of Hunter Biden stories; they used people who fact-checked “The administration views this as fact, not opinion,” New York Post columnist Carol Markovich told Fox News Digital. “

She said that while it’s important to be “vigilant” about Meta’s past mistakes, people should cheer the company for admitting they “did bad things and wanted to do better.”

“I hope Zuckerberg has seen the light and will continue to push Facebook in the direction of free speech,” Markovich, co-host of iHeartRadio’s “Normal,” said of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. “It’s also important to remember that some companies, like Rumble or Telegram, and X/Twitter after Musk’s acquisition, are still doing the right thing even as they struggle with a hostile Biden administration. thing.

Experts say META’s decision to scrap fact-checking system and adopt Musk-like policies is a ‘victory’ for free speech

Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was implemented after the 2016 election largely out of “political pressure” to “moderate content” and misinformation on its platform, executives said, but admitted the system “has Outdated”. Far away. “

An April study by the conservative Media Research Center said Facebook had “interfered” in U.S. elections dozens of times over the past few cycles.

The study said Facebook “vetted” 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2022 Senate and Congressional candidates. In 2021, Facebook “removed the account of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase,” “increased censorship with a particular focus on Donald Trump,” and shut down political ads a week before the 2020 election.

“It also artificially inflates liberal news in the Trending News section while blacklisting popular conservatives like Ted Cruz,” MRC wrote.

In August 2018, Facebook was criticized for removing a large number of videos from the conservative nonprofit PragerU. The company later reversed that decision, admitting that the content had been wrongly reported as “hate speech.”

Jonathan Turley: META’s Zuckerberg makes free speech move that could be truly transformative

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that his company will adopt a new fact-checking system similar to Musk X’s community comments. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Republicans later claimed Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied accusations that Facebook biased conservative accounts and content.

Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are facing backlash ahead of the 2020 election after restricting access to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story.

Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he decided to censor the New York Post’s reporting after the FBI warned him about a “potential Russian disinformation operation” involving the Biden family and Burisma.

“It has since become clear that the report was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect we should not have downgraded the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We have changed our policies and procedures to ensure this situation was not It will happen again—for example, we no longer temporarily downgrade things in the United States while we wait for fact-checking.”

Last year, the Meta executive wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he acknowledged that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, especially regarding COVID-19 content, even content such as satire and humor.

Conservatives rejoice over ‘eye-popping’ meta-censorship announcement: ‘A huge victory for free speech’

The New York Times sparked controversy when it highlighted fact-checkers’ objections to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks. (New York Times Building photo provided by CAMERA | Zuckerberg photo provided by Kent Nishimura)

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS anchor Gayle King that his platform had removed 18 million messages containing “misinformation” about the virus. post.

In 2022, several state attorneys general gathered evidence accusing Zuckerberg of working with former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci to “discredit and suppress” the COVID-19 virus’ possible origins in the Wuhan experiment Room Theory, China.

Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that Meta would end its fact-checking program and eliminate its content moderation policies in an effort to “restore free speech” on Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms.

The fact-checking groups terminated by Meta said they were disappointed by the news and scoffed at accusations of bias. They also shifted the blame back to Meta, suggesting that the company’s policy of limiting the exposure of flagged content was the real catalyst behind the tech company’s censorship.

Experts interviewed by Fox News Digital acknowledged Meta’s responsibility in suppressing information but criticized fact-checkers for adjusting ratings based on personal beliefs and opinions.

Trump says Meta has “made great progress” after Zuckerberg ended fact-checking on platform

The Meta platform is displayed on a smartphone screen on August 9, 2024, with the Meta logo appearing in the background of Chania, Greece. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“These fact-checkers are asking for trouble,” said Dan Schneider, the MRC’s vice president of free speech. “They pretend they are unbiased. They pretend they are fair brokers. All evidence to the contrary.”

Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would replace its fact-checking team with a system closer to X’s community notes sparked mixed reactions. While some see this as a significant step forward for the fact-checking organization’s potential bias, others believe Meta has escaped the shackles of its content moderation ambitions.

DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former Google consultant, said that while he thinks it’s the “right move” for Meta and that the community note-taking system is an “interesting concept,” it’s doomed It will become a “cesspool”. Community notes are a “vox populi” that allow regular X users to moderate content and provide context or corrections through a registration system.

“Maybe if Meta uses these notes smartly, these notes can be used to train artificial intelligence, and then they will become a more powerful content monitoring system, but I think if this is the next goal they consider, this will also be A bad idea. Text or video,” he said.

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“If we want a democratic content moderation AI, what we really need is to get content from people who don’t make content online — from centrists and quiet people to politicians and top executives. But what if we had Time using the internet, we probably wouldn’t have had these problems in the first place, which is why this problem is so difficult,” Toscano added.

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Marcowicz was more optimistic, calling community annotations on X a “brilliant” approach and suggesting the new system was unlikely to be worse than Facebook and Instagram’s current models.

“X has successfully leveraged its best users to contribute to a social note-taking system, and Facebook should try something similar,” she continued. “Not everyone can post a community note or the system could be overrun by a mob, which is why the whole system is so useful.”