Mark Zuckerberg Announces Facebook Is Getting Rid Of Fact-Checkers Because They Were Too Politically Biased

Following Elon Musk's lead. Censorship on social media has been a big problem the past few years. During President Donald Trump's first term, sites like Facebook and Twitter (as it was known at the time) went to great lengths to "fact check" claims on their platforms and limit the reach of content that they deemed as misleading or dangerous. The obvious problem, though, was that the people who were making the decisions about what was misleading or dangerous were a bunch of liberals in Silicon Valley and the content they were censoring were often just things that they didn't like or agree with politically. The issue really came to a head back in October 2020, when the New York Post published a story about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that contained not only damaging photos of then-Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden's son using drugs and having sex with hookers, but also contained emails that appeared to show that Biden was involved in his son's overseas business dealings, something the future president had long denied. With the laptop story dropping a month before the 2020 presidential election, naturally Republicans were eager to share the article and show what they claimed was corruption on the part of Joe Biden - but turns out, they couldn't share it. Social media platforms prohibited the New York Post article from being shared, claiming that it was "Russian disinformation" or that it violated the site's "hacked materials policy," despite the fact that the material on the laptop was obtained legally when Hunter Biden abandoned the laptop at a computer repair shop. Then just a few months later, after Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, platforms began limiting the reach of Trump's posts claiming election interference, before ultimately banning him altogether in the wake of the January 6th protests at the Capitol. But it wasn't just Trump who was banned from these social media sites. Several prominent conservative voices found their accounts suspended or restricted, and in March 2022 the Babylon Bee, a well-known conservative satirical site, had their account locked after tweeting a satirical article claiming that transgender US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine had been named the Babylon Bee's Man of the Year. Twitter told the Babylon Bee that in order to get their account back, they would have to delete the joke - but they refused to bend the knee and delete their tweet. In the wake of the controversy, Elon Musk reached out to the Babylon Bee, and ultimately ended up buying Twitter because of his concerns with the way the platform censored free speech. Since buying Twitter, Elon has implemented a "Community Notes" system to replace fact-checkers, allowing notes to be added to posts and voted on by users to determine whether they're helpful or necessary to the post. And now, it seems like Meta is planning on doing the same for their platforms Facebook and Instagram. In a new video, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who looks more like a SoundCloud rapper from your high school these days, but that's beside the point), announced several major changes to the way Facebook intends to moderate content going forward - even admitting that their "fact-checkers" were too politically biased, and saying that Meta would do away with fact checkers and instead implement a community notes system similar to Elon Musk's X. "After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased, and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the US." Along with the elimination of their fact-checkers, Zuckerberg says that Meta will also be changing their content policies that restrict topics like immigration and gender: "What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms." And they plan to change the way they use AI filters to scan content for violations, instead using those filters to focus on "illegal" and "high-severity" violations while relying on reports from users before reviewing whether to take action on other content that violates their policies. Anyone who's posted on these platforms has probably run into this issue at some point. Even here at Whiskey Riff, we've had plenty of problems with our content being incorrectly flagged by the filters. I posted a meme about country music a while back: Well Meta's filters flagged it as being misinformation about the war in Ukraine because apparently a viral meme had gone around using the same format. Overall, it seems like these are all positive changes - they're even moving their content moderation team from California to Texas so that there's less concern about the appearance of bias, which I'm not sure really makes a difference but at least they're aware of it - but it's really going to come down to how they implement these changes. Zuckerberg sums it up by saying that he plans to work with President Trump to help social media promote free speech worldwide, but that he hopes the platforms simplify their systems and get away from moderating political content: "We have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it. It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems that are never going to be perfect. There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove. But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing the stakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots on giving people a voice." https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1876613152223240589