Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and its alter-ego Meta’s chief executive, announced that his flagship social media platform, along with Instagram and Threads, will end its longstanding (and biased, and flawed) fact-checking program, moving instead to a “community notes” system like the one employed by Elon Musk’s reinvention of Twitter.
Good. What took so long?
“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”
In truth, anyone should have been able to figure out that Facebook’s “fact checkers” were progressive, dishonest, partisan hacks. The censors included Snopes (EA dossier here) and PolitiFact (even worse dossier here), which Ethics Alarms, among many others, had marked as biased and untrustworthy years ago, indeed well before Facebook turned to them as censors. The truth is that one person’s “bad stuff” is another’s stimulating opinion or analysis. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept, but in the Age of the Great Stupid, it is. The 21st Century Left likes censorship, indeed has relied on it to hold power, and has embraced the practice on college campuses, social media, and in the news. Sad but true.
Naturally, Zuckerberg’s decision is being assailed as a grovel to Trump by critics like the Washington Post’s ex-political cartoonist…
…whom (I think) included The Zuck in that poorly-drawn group at the feet of Trump doing his William Howard Taft impression. The New York Times writes, “Meta’s move is likely to please the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and its conservative allies, many of whom have disliked Meta’s practice of adding disclaimers or warnings to questionable or false posts.” Yes, that’s because Meta tended to regard any post that didn’t advance progressive narratives, policies or elected officials as “questionable.” Zuckerberg says that “recent elections” felt like a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” Wait—when did the United States decide that free speech wasn’t a priority? The people who decided that were totalitarianism enablers like Zuckerberg.
Now, Meta has donated $1 million to support Trump’s inauguration festivities. The Horror: a company treating Trump like major corporations used to treat incoming Presidents of both parties as a matter of national pride. Last week, Zuckerberg moved a longtime conservative and the highest-ranking Meta executive closest to the Republican Party into his company’s most senior policy role. The Horror: actually seeking viewpoint diversity among a compnay’s management! Yesterday, Zuckerberg announced that Dana White, a close ally of Trump’s, will join Meta’s board. The Horror: imagine deliberately constructing a board that isn’t fully woke and full of major Democratic Party donors, like, oh, just to pull out a name at random, Harvard University.
Well! There is hope. When the new system is in place, maybe I’ll try to post this essay on Facebook again. When I linked to it on Facebook in 2018, the post was blocked and so were any links to Ethics Alarms, a ban that sunk EA’s then-growing readership and tarred my blog as “racist.” This lasted for more than a year: I almost never link to a post here on Facebook now.
On second thought—nah, a thoughtful analysis of the uses and abuses of blackface is still too much for Woke World to handle. Baby steps…
Ethics Alarms 
For all the screaming by Democrats about traditionally left-leaning institutions finally sort of committing to “playing nice” with Donald Trump (and time will tell about the seriousness of these commitments), they are refusing to see what, I (and many others) have been commenting on since 2016-2020. These is all signs of a periodic political realignment the country goes through.
Obama was the signal. Trump I the catalyst. Biden the reaction. Now Trump II is the sign that it is…believe it not…on the settling down phase of the realignment. Democrats would do themselves well to capitalize on their loss.
I mentioned when the GOP lost in 2020, regardless of how questionable the presidential loss was, the GOP had a chance to really experiment with it’s voting coalition and party platform from a position of security. I didn’t think they would do a very good job, but they apparently did, though I think they could have done better (but of course they’re always operating in a left-wing media environment). They came out of the 2020-2024 doldrums with a refreshed coalition that had many more components traditionally lacking.
Now, the Democrats are in the doldrums. Will they take this chance to re-invent themselves and shuffle off old policy demands and attitudes that were important to the previous alignment-cycle and figure out what current concerns align with their value-set? Or will they go back into insurgency mode?
I don’t know. We won’t know until 2028 or 2032 when the realignment wraps up.
But the fact that so many institutions that were rabidly and openly engaging in anti-Trump action are now obviously attempting to rein themselves in an “play nice” is a sign that at least at the market-level, they recognize a the new face of the culture isn’t tolerant of GOP hate. It’s up to the institutions on the political-level to adjust as well.
The day after the election when people were melting down on Facebook, I posted three quotes:
The first was Abraham Lincoln’s, “We are not enemies…” statement from his First Inaugural Address.
The second was Richard Nixon’s address to his staff upon leaving the White House, “Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
I had no problem with either of those posts.
The third post was Thomas Jefferson’s “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”
Facebook hid the post, marked it as false information – a first for anything I’ve ever posted on Facebook – and explained, “This is similar to information third party fact-checkers say is false. There is no evidence that Thomas Jefferson said this quote about tyranny and liberty.”
Apparently, Facebook’s factcheckers thought I attributed, “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” to Jefferson.
They are two entirely different quotes! There is nothing similar about the quotes at all. Thankfully, my Facebook friends noted that my post was fact-checked incorrectly, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. These are the fact-checkers we were supposed to trust with preventing misinformation?
Typical, more often than not. Wow. I would have quit Facebook over that—I should have over the Fred ban.
I was such a weenie. I only edited the post to call the fact-checkers morons. I have cut back on my Facebook posting considerably since that time but I have distant relatives that I only interact with there so I maintain a presence.
The reason to rejoice, or at least not to grieve, at the announcement isn’t that the curation was partisan, but that it was incompetent. I couldn’t post a link to my own blog (and neither could anyone else) for almost a year without any explanation; I’m not exactly a conservative. I can think of a dozen friends more consistently liberal than I who have reported being put in Facebook jail for alleged offenses that didn’t rise to the level of problematic, let alone censorable. Obvious jokes were treated as if they were serious. The list goes on and on.
Politifact: same thing. If you check my blog you’ll see a number of examples of screw-ups that suggested that objectively true statements were “false” or even “pants on fire.” Curiously, their groundwork was generally pretty good it was the final “ruling” that distorted reality.
Obviously, we all react when it’s our ox being gored. Fact is, the folks who run Facebook and Politifact alike are merely self-important idiots, not partisans.
Trust in Hanlon’s Razor.
I’ll buy that analysis with Facebook, but not PolitiFact, which I’ve been criticizing for a very long time, since it was a feature in a Tampa newspaper. It seem clear to me that they have made the business decision there to do “factchecks” that will please a particular market, and it’s the MSNBC market.
Don’t you think PolitiFact’s choice of “The Haitians are eating cats in Ohio!” as the “Lie of the Year” is signature significance? In the same year that we had “The border is secure” and “Joe Biden is sharp as a tack” along with constant repetitions of “Trump said there would be a bloodbath if he won!” as well as equally trivial and stupid hyperboles like the cats nonsense, such as “Trump said Liz Cheney should face a firing squad” and “his rally in Madison Sq. Garden is imitating the Nazis!”?
To be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to them of late. I’d suggest that’s for good reason. This year had a particularly bountiful crop of prevarications. The pet-eating business was as outrageous as any, though not as significant.
Further back, they conflated “uninformed” with “misinformed” to the benefit of the right. They declared a brief ad on the DCCC website (never broadcast) which suggested the Ryan plan would end Medicare (without the modifier “as we know it”) as Lie of the Year when there were plenty of worse and more frequently repeated lies out there. They decided that 188 is close enough to 800 to excuse one GOP pol’s outrageous claim and that 3% is close enough to 90% to excuse another. They sometimes are sticklers for literality and sometimes they worry about something a statement might seem to imply.
They’re incompetent. The fact that they often screw up in one direction doesn’t mean they don’t screw up in the other. It’s like saying that Angel Hernandez hated your team because that called third strike against your guy was six inches outside.
Angel Hernandez hates all teams, baseball, kittens, Santa Claus, motherhood and apple pie.
Well, we agree on that, at least.
“Fact is, the folks who run Facebook and Politifact alike are merely self-important idiots, not partisans.”
Embrace the power of “both.”
Jack wrote:
Well! There is hope. When the new system is in place, maybe I’ll try to post this essay on Facebook again.
I’m skeptical, Jack. As someone on Twitter said recently, Zuckerberg is a weathervane. The wind has blown him more conservative for now, but if the Left returns to power, well…
It’s understandable. He’s a businessman, not a free-speech absolutist. He will turn toward the government to protect his business from investigations and sanctions. Biden threatened Facebook and literally forced censorship on them or at least to the point of “twist my arm… That’s enough!!!”. Trump has threatened Facebook more than once, and Zuckerberg is right to take him seriously.
In a way, you can hardly blame Zuckerberg. Principles often stand athwart profitability. Zuckerberg is just proving his principles are as flexible as they need to be to stay out of trouble.
I wonder if this is all because of AI. The US government told the tech heads that the government would only allow a few competitors in the AI space. Those competitors allowed would be severely restricted and controlled by the government. I imagine Zuckerberg was not happy about that. He didn’t spend his life building an empire, only to become a lackey to government bureaucrats.
Without Musk’s X.com, the government could have taken complete control of AI. With its ability to manipulate and create images and video, our perception of reality would be completely in the hands of unelected government workers.
I think Zuckerberg realized that such a reality is almost upon us and no one would be safe, even him.