Tuesday night, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads may be eliminating their heavy-handed censorship laws and moving towards a” group notes” model for police information like X. This includes terminating the company’s” third gathering factchecking program,” which paid legacy media companies to “fact test” content on the website before using those findings to delete it.
There is little evidence to support Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that he can actually make up for what he did to defame traditional papers. But, on the surface level this is a major PR win for free speech and, unsurprisingly, Facebook’s truth checking companions are not taking it properly. This defamatory letter was really posted on X by Aaron Sharockman, the senior director of PolitiFact, one of Facebook/Meta’s original fact-checking partners going again eight years. Some of the features:
The choice to outlaw independent journalists from Facebook’s material restraint system in the US has nothing to do with censorship or free speech. Mark Zuckerberg was impossible to be less subtly simple. …
Social and Meta were the only creators of the warning labels and layers that consumers saw as well as the penalties publishers faced. Social and Meta were the creators of a system that made it possible for regular people to see their posts removed but made it impossible for politicians and political leaders to do the same. In case it needs to be noted, journalists from PolitiFact and the United States ‘ fact-checking organizations did not play any part in the decision to remove Donald Trump from Facebook. …
When we make an problem, there is a procedure to correct those errors. Additionally, there is a procedure to ensure that Facebook and Meta receive the correct knowledge. The data pattern is supposed to operate in this manner.
If Meta is upset it created a device to judge, it may look in the mirror.
PolitiFact has been a genuinely deceptive and contemptible business since its commencement, but this is a specially dishonest and self-serving justification, yet for them. And I do so because I am aware of my subject. After years of extensive reporting on the deceit of so called “fact checkers”, the release I worked for, The Weekly Standard, made the decision to be, like PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s standard point checking partners. And I can share a few things about this arrangement with you that will produce your blood boil if you care about free conversation and literary dignity.
The first is that Facebook paid its fact-checking partners for participating in this program; in PolitiFact’s situation, Meta provided more than 5 % of their annual income. In training, this meant that media companies such as PolitiFact, USA Today, and, yes, The Weekly Standard, participating in this system were taking a huge amount from one of the country’s largest and most influential companies. Given that these same papers were also given the responsibility of covering Instagram in the reports, this was a significant conflict of interest. Which was a bit.
Now, news organizations were hesitant to use Facebook because the demise of the print media and the subscription model made them rely heavily on Facebook to direct traffic their way to earn money through digital advertising. When you took funds directly from Twitter, they had you over the barrel in numerous ways. These magazines were biting the hand that was giving them if there was reason to criticize Facebook’s policies regarding banning information or any other issue.
The second is that Facebook’s fact-checking policy was purposefully meant to defame left-leaning media. Here’s an extract from Manipulated: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Votes by an artist named Hemingway:
Shortly after the]2016] vote, BuzzFeed was reporting,” Facebook employees have formed an illegal activity power to issue the part their company played in promoting false news in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s victory in the US election next week”. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who claimed that the notion that Facebook had wrongfully tilted the vote in Trump’s prefer was” crazy,” was how the party was conducting its business in plain defiance of Zuckerberg. According to a previous journalist who worked on the project, Zuckerberg had now come under fire before, in May 2016, when Gizmodo reported that” Facebook employees regularly suppressed news stories of interest to conventional readers from the social network’s influential’trending’news section.”
By December 2016, Zuckerberg had caved. Twitter adopted a new policy of trying to combat the reported “fake information” that stressed Facebook’s left-wing workers. The software giant would commence paying media sources to “fact-check” information on the site. When respected news organizations signed up to participate in the fact-checking program, media revenue began to decline gradually, in large part because Facebook had fundamentally altered the standard journalistic business models. Given the authority to decide all the news that was appropriate for publication, media outlets that were supposed to be covering Facebook were now on Facebook’s payroll.
Whether or not the tech companies wanted to admit it, the majority of Silicon Valley’s anger over Trump’s victory was due to their inability to influence American opinion.
Third, it’s unbelievable anyone would try to make the claim that PolitiFact or any of Facebook’s media fact checking partners were blameless for participating in Facebook’s censorship and stifling free speech.
The Weekly Standard’s participation in the Facebook’s fact checking program in the summer of 2018 was undoubtedly the most awkward staff meeting I’ve ever had in the eight years I worked there. I covered this incident extensively ( and in this book ), but what really happened is that the young journalist The Weekly Standard hired who had previously written fact sheets for Facebook said he was uncomfortable with the responsibility:” I don’t like that.
He explained that whenever he wrote one of his fact checking columns, he would enter information into a unique portal in Facebook’s backend for the mercenaries who would check his information. When he entered a claim that was “false,” he was asked to enter the URL of the story where he had discovered it; at this point, Facebook, in their own press releases, would then kill 80 % of the global internet traffic to that story. Our fact checker explained this was making him uncomfortable. Some of these fact checks were complicated, and he felt his judgment wasn’t absolute.  ,
In the staff meeting, it was a record-breaking scratch. You mean to tell me, that a single journalist has the power to almost erase a news story from the internet, I said after a beat. It dawned on me and more than a few others in the room that whatever influence our failing publication had was now being used to act as part of a terrifyingly effective censorship regime controlled by a hated social media company run by one of the world’s richest men. Whereas our publication had once taken pride in challenging the dishonesty and bias of the corporate media.  ,
Suffice it to say, this all came to an end when one editor at the magazine raised his voice in a way that made everyone in the room feel a little uncomfortable. Imagine that you are a writer for a conservative magazine and you are a participant in a program where a centi-billionaire pays a number of established media outlets to disproportionately censor politically awkward news stories on the right. Although I was aware that not all of my coworkers found this to be unacceptable, I was alarmed. However, The Weekly Standard was hemorrhaging subscribers by this point and was discontinued a few months later. Alas, the more animated editor in that meeting doesn’t appear to have learned from the episode.
Alumni of The Weekly Standard started a new publication called The Dispatch after it was shut down. Being a Facebook fact checking partner was one simple way for a new publication to earn money, in spite of what had transpired at our illustrious previous employer, I suppose. Anyway, it wasn’t long before this new arrangement prompted controversy. According to a fact-check conducted by the Dispatch, Susan B. Anthony List’s two advertisements “partly false information.”
According to the allegedly false information, the Susan B. Anthony List claimed Joe Biden and the Democrat Party supported late-term abortion. It was irrelevant that this assertion wasn’t even particularly controversial because Biden and the Democrat Party blatantly support late-term abortion.
After a lot of online controversy, the publication promised to review and correct their error, claiming that one of the big names at The Dispatch was David French, an alleged evangelical pro-life stalwart turned Kamala Harris voter. Despite the public promise, you should not be surprised to learn that, either through negligence by The Dispatch or Facebook, the “process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information” touted above got no results. In the crucial weeks leading up to the 2020 election, which was decided by only 40, 000 votes, Susan B. Anthony List and its election ads were banned from Facebook.
Mind you, this is all based on my comparatively unimportant experience with a censorship program whose flaws were readily apparent to anyone. It would be impossible to hold back a group like PolitiFact, which, by their own admission, conducted thousands of fact checks for Facebook to permit their direct censorship of common people and significant political voices.
Like I said, I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations, let alone the restitution he owes conservative publications like this one, which were suppressed and censored. Regardless of how we got to this point, Facebook’s admission that what they were doing was wrong and the end of their fact-checking program are significant concessions to the reality that regular Americans hold and desire free speech.
Although it’s difficult to accept that you’ve been the villain all along, Sharockman and PolitiFact don’t get it both ways. Although PolitiFact acknowledges that they seized Facebook’s funds, it doesn’t mean they are in any way accountable for Facebook’s use of censorship to justify its services. No, PolitiFact was aware that they were willing to provide the bullets for Facebook’s gun because they liked the person Facebook was aiming at.
We’ll see if Facebook sticks to its word on how to be less censorious, but Sharockman’s hackneyed justifications are impossible to read without anticipating the day when self-appointed fact-checkers are ostensibly irrelevant to what Americans are permitted to say.
