After Trump won in 2016, Hillary and congressional Democrats blamed Facebook and demanded tight censorship of dissenting views. These programs that put the media in charge of ‘fact checking’ and suppressing ‘misinformation’ often guided by government diktats were the worst incidence of American government systemic censorship in the last 70 years.
Facebook and even Twitter never really wanted to do most of that censorship. Released correspondence showed even some of the woke employees at both companies pushing back at the aggressive demands from the Biden administration.
But the net result was that conservative commentary and links were throttled by Facebook to such a degree as to effectively shut it down as a platform for conservatives.
Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted toward allowing political content (your mileage may vary) and is officially dismantling the fact-checking program.
“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, said in a post on social platform X. “That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers.”
“In place of fact checks, the first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” he added.
Joel Kaplan was George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff so this pivot is extremely deliberate.
That said, fact-checking had largely fallen off even a few years into the Biden administration. Zuckerberg got tired of paying the media to censor and the censorship wasn’t working anyway.
Community notes is an improvement over active censorship, but they’re all too easily gamed and they’re an unnecessary intrusion. I find them as annoying as I do YouTube popping up messages about COVID safety guidelines on random videos.
Either material is bad enough (pornography, terrorism, Nazism, Communism, scams, gambling) that a platform can choose not to host it, or it should just be left alone.
But an era of censorship has ended. And that’s a good thing for everyone who fell victim to it ( and I suspect that’s many of us) to see.
