In January of this year, Meta announced the end of its fact-checking regime, and the people rejoiced!
In the months leading to the official end in April, Meta would move to a community notes feature like X. Instead of biased “journalist” gatekeepers (opinion-checkers) deciding who was allowed to speak, hundreds of thousands of volunteers would contribute suggested corrections to incorrect information. An algorithm eliminates personal bias and rewards contributors for open and honest suggestions. Instead of silencing speech, it elevates it. Instead of punishing opposing viewpoints, it encourages conversation.
Your humble team at The Patriot Post has been no stranger to the assault on free speech from Big Tech, social media companies, and especially fact-checkers. We can cite example after example for years of the systematic assault on free speech by the self-appointed arbiters of digital truth, but according to Zuckerberg this was all coming to an end!
Or was it?
On April 7, the very day that Meta announced the official end to fact-checking in America, we were hit with this:
Ah, yes, “missing context.” Our favorite editorial catch all. What makes this one interesting is that it’s from an Italian fact-checker. It isn’t the first time we have dealt with an international outfit, but considering that fact-checking was supposed to end, the location of this source may be more significant.
Here’s what I think happened:
The EU’s Digital Service Act (DSA) was signed into European law in February 2024. It requires large social media companies to control misinformation on their platforms. I suspect this will cause Meta problems as it learns how to navigate the international legal consequences. It may be easy enough to turn off the fact-checkers in America, but isolating Americans from receiving fact-checks from international outfits may be more difficult. After all, social media posts certainly appear in feeds across the globe regardless of their origin. I have often likened the process of turning off the fact-checkers to slowing down a freight train. These are big, heavy systems that must slow down gradually to avoid crashing. While having fact-checkers should have never been a thing, we can at least appreciate that it will take time to correct the wrongdoing.
What is totally unacceptable is that Meta instantly broke the promise that there would be no more penalties within the United States:
“In the United States, we have a community-based program called Community Notes. It’s currently in its initial testing phase, and we will continue to improve it over the course of the year before expansion to other countries. Community Notes do not have penalties associated with them, nor do they impact who can see the content or how widely it can be shared. In certain countries outside the United States, we work with independent third-party fact checkers.”
In the same policy document, Meta does admit that international fact-checking will continue. But it is very clear that penalties within the U.S. are supposed to be ended.
Not for The Patriot Post!
Since receiving this fact-check on April 7, we have experienced a rapid decline in content performance on Facebook. It has dropped over 20% and keeps dropping, and this is in just a week.
So, it seems that our never-ending saga with Facebook and the self-appointed arbiters of digital truth continues. There has undoubtedly been a massive shift in the environment, and there is still hope where so much despair was before, but it still remains to be seen how much longer we must deal with the censors.
Till then, we press on.
