Facebook’s substantial and political fact-checking program will be replaced by a community notes system based on Elon Musk’s X reforms, according to Metaa CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday.
Some people may hail the choice as a win for free speech because Zuckerberg claims the change may encourage the Big Tech giant to “focus on reducing errors, simplifying our plans, and restoring completely expression on our programs.”
But Meta doesn’t just get a carefully crafted apology video to end years of political censorship. Zuckerberg blames “governments and legacy media” for encouraging censorship, but his tech giant willingly complied, throttling dissent at the behest of the federal government. Meta still has the authority to “reduce the distribution of certain hoax content” and issue strikes.
On Meta’s policy enforcement blog, Meta states,” When Pages do share something that has been flagged False by a fact-checker, we notify them that their shared post will be demoted, regardless of whether they are the original publisher of that content.”
Only when pages” stop sharing misinformation” does Meta “restore their distribution and ability to monetize and advertise”.
Facebook has used punitive “fact-checks” to inflict reputational and financial harm on outlets like The Federalist for publishing counter-narrative information. After a year of being subject to censorship from other tech platforms for our reporting on Covid-19 mandates and government lockdowns, The Federalist received its first fake fact check from Facebook in 2020. Shortly after the 2020 election and events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, we noticed an increase in censorship attacks on our publication, including a large dip in Facebook traffic and interactions.
The harm that censorship causes to a media outlet, whose existence is predicated on reaching an audience, is hard to quantify. In the era of Facebook censorship, publishing true reporting has come at a high price. Every “missing context” label comes with the threat that “people who repeatedly share false information might have their posts moved lower in the News Feed so that other people are less likely to see them”
Zuckerberg is still one of the bad guys until he makes up for every single time Facebook uses its fake fact-checking tool to lower our reporting for partisan reasons.
1. Counter-Fact-Check on Georgia Ballot Counting
Weeks after the 2020 presidential election — in which Mark Zuckerberg meddled to the tune of$ 419 million, by the way — Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway published a story challenging a “fact-check” about Georgia ballot counting by an outfit called” Lead Stories”. The allegations that Lead Stories debunked the testimony of Republican lawmakers who were alarmed by spooky events at a Fulton County ballot-counting place were disproven. Hemingway claimed that the surveillance video in question didn’t at all dispel their worries.
As soon as Hemingway’s story was published on Facebook, it was marked with a text bubble declaring it to be” Partly False Information”. The story had been” checked by independent fact-checkers”, the label said. Who were the “independent fact-checkers”? Lead Stories, of course!
2. Fact-Checking Facts About Masks
Facebook flagged a Federalist article about the ineffectiveness of masks against Covid after one of its sketchy third-party “fact-checkers” deemed it “inaccurate” and “misleading”. Even though” Danish researchers found that there was no statistically significant difference between wearing a mask or not in preventing people from contracting COVID-19,” according to a statement in an email to the Federalist, the article was misrepresented in the findings of the study.
3. Green energy is governed by ingraining interference.
A Texas power grid failure in February 2021 left millions of people dead and hundreds of others without power, so Facebook ran two separate “fact checks” on a Federalist article that directly connected the Lone Star State’s electricity struggles to green energy initiatives. The tag made use of articles written by Politifact and the Chinese-funded Lead Stories, which claimed the Federalist article was “missing context” and” could mislead people.”
After a word salad of blaming natural gas plants for the widespread blackouts, Politifact acknowledged that the wind farms, which Federalist author Jason Isaac criticized, “ran at about half of what was expected,” which did contribute to the electricity shortage. The Lead Stories link plastered on The Federalist’s post did not even address Isaac’s argument directly. Instead, it scrutinized an unrelated Facebook , post , from a user who noted the green energy sector’s failures during the Texas power crisis.
4. Fact-Checking an Opinion About the Chauvin Murder Verdict
Facebook claimed that her article was “missing context” when The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann wrote a piece in which she claimed Americans couldn’t trust the outcome of the murder trial for ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin due to the partisan media frenzy surrounding George Floyd’s death. A USA Today article that stated that that opinion “ignores the steps taken to ensure the trial was indeed fair” was included as a giant warning to anyone who attempted to click on the link that sent him to The Federalist website.
As Pullmann noted, USA Today “uncovered not one single factual error” in her story. In fact, the USA Today “fact-check” was aimed at another post “expressing a similar opinion”. Facebook used it to justify limiting the writing of Pullmann and other Federalist authors.
5. The Federalist was Jail on Facebook because he said something that “60 Minutes” was permitted to say.
Under the pretense that the Federalist story” Pentagon Develops Microchip Detects COVID-19 By Tracking Your Blood” was “missing context,” Facebook throttled it. One of Big Tech’s shady third-party “fact-checkers”, Science Feedback, argued in an article overshadowing The Federalist post that” calling the hydrogel sensor a microchip is inaccurate”.
The “60 Minutes” report The Federalist highlighted and quoted in its article, however, remained untouched by Facebook’s censorship claws.
6. Adding’ Context’ to Fauci’s Masking Flip-Flop
Prior to the Covid-19 response, Dr. Anthony Fauci oversaw a federal push for healthy Americans to wear paper masks over their faces when they interact with others. In June 2021, emails revealed that he had admitted that” the typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out]a ] virus.” These emails were published in The Federalist’s” Emails Show Fauci Knew Masks Weren’t Very Effective Before Pushing Universal Masking,” according to the headline.
Facebook flagged the article and linked a “fact-check” by a foreign news group, which added the” context” that” Fauci’s email reflected the consensus at the time among US health experts”.
7. Covering for Buttigieg’s Bike Blunder
Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was filmed mounting a bike that appeared to have just been unloaded from a Secret Service SUV in April 2021. He then followed behind him. While The Federalist’s Madeline Osburn made fun of the stunt under the headline” Clown Show: Pete Buttigieg’ Bikes’ To Work After SUVs Drive Him Part Of The Way,” Buttigieg was praised by legacy media for his display of carbon consciousness.
Facebook flagged a video version of the story posted on The Federalist’s page as” False Information”. Lead Stories claimed without supporting any doubt in a linked “fact-check” that” Pete Buttigieg Did NOT Stage A Short Bike Ride For A Photo Op.” The video’s creator claimed that Buttigieg himself shared it, and that “it seems unlikely that he would have chosen to share it” if it had been staged, as evidenced by Lead Stories. A representative from the Transportation Department claimed Buttigieg had actually “biked both to and from a Cabinet meeting at the White House,” according to the fact-checking organization.
He biked to and from the cabinet meeting, Osburn said at the time. No stories dispute this fact, because the , whole point , of Buttigieg’s stunt was to be seen riding to and from the White House on his bike”.
8. Censoring Criticism of Censorship
The Federalist published a story in December 2021 by mRNA pioneer Dr. Robert Malone, professor of immunology Dr. Harvey Risch, and professor of immunology Dr. Byram Bridle titled” Forcing People Into COVID Vaccines Ignores Important Scientific Information.” In their first sentence, the three experts condemned tech censors ‘ “attacks on free speech and science”.
Facebook flagged the story as “missing context,” provided a link to a Lead Stories “fact-check” of a completely different story, and provided a label for it. According to Jordan Boyd, Lead Stories did not “actually address The Federalist article or any of the claims made in it.”
9. Threatening Restrictions on Election Reporting
In March 2023, Facebook , affixed , a “fact-check” from Politifact to a Federalist , post , titled” How Georgia Became Democrats ‘ Test Site For Their 2024 Private Takeover Of Election Offices”, which detailed the infusion of millions of dollars into Democrat areas in exchange for their participation in the U. S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The organization was connected to a nonprofit that Mark Zuckerberg himself used to fund to Democratically Bloc in 2020. Facebook claimed the story was” Partly False” because Politifact took offense at the word “takeover” . ,
” Pages and websites , that repeatedly share false information might be restricted”, Facebook warned us.
10. Flagging Reporting on FBI’s ‘ Deadly Force ‘ Authorization
The FBI agents sent by the Biden Justice Department to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in search of classified documents from his presidency were permitted to use “deadly force” if necessary, according to court documents released in May by The Federalist and other outlets. Facebook affixed a notice to the post, claiming that “independent fact-checkers reviewed the information and said it was lacking context and could mislead people.” A “fact-check” linked by Facebook claimed such reporting “misrepresent]ed ] the Justice Department’s standard policies”. The fact-checkers argued that even though it was true that the FBI had the right to use deadly force on a former president at his home, it was “boilerplate language.”
11. Dismissing a police report as” no verifying evidence”
Facebook was censoring Federalist reporting as recently as September, just over a month before the 2024 presidential election. The Federalist published a police report in which a resident reported Haitians with “geese in their hands” to a police dispatcher after residents of Springfield, Ohio expressed concerns about Haitian noncitizens on temporary parole allegedly capturing and eating small animals in public parks. Although the source of the story was a police report and audio recording, Lead Stories claimed there was” no verifying evidence” in the story, and Facebook labeled it as “false information” on the report.
The Federalist staff writer and host of The Federalist Radio Hour, Jordan Boyd. The Federalist’s editor of elections is Elie Purnell.
