Experts and journalists hope that Meta will continue to do so Moving towards freedom of expression And avoid the content moderation policies that have plagued Facebook under the Biden administration.
“Meta has a terrible history of censorship under Biden. They were directed by the government to censor COVID-19 content; they shut down sharing of the New York Post Hunter Biden story; and they used fact-checkers who accepted his word,” New York Post writer Carol Markovich told the network. Fox News Digital: “Management is a fact, not an opinion.”
She said that while it was important to “beware” of Meta's past mistakes, people should take heart from the company's admission that they “did bad things and want to be better.”
“I hope Zuckerberg has seen the light and will continue to move Facebook in the direction of freedom of expression,” Markovich, who co-hosts the Normally podcast on iHeartRadio, said of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It's also important to remember that there are companies, like Rumble or Telegram and then X/Twitter once Elon Musk bought them, that were doing the right thing even when it was difficult under a hostile Biden administration. These companies should be celebrated.”
Meta's announcement to restore “freedom of expression” comes after years of scrutiny against the company's fact-checking and content moderation practices. (Nicholas Tokat/AFP/Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Executives said Meta's fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to “moderate content” and misinformation on its platforms, primarily due to “political pressure,” but they admitted the system “went too far.” . far.”
April study The Conservative Media Research Center has claimed that Facebook has “interfered” in the US elections dozens of times over the past few cycles.
The study said Facebook censored 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 2022 Senate and congressional candidates. In 2021, Facebook “deleted Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s account,” and “strengthened its censorship apparatus.” With a special focus on Donald Trump” and “closed political ads one week before the election” in 2020.
“It also artificially elevated liberal news in the trending news section while blacklisting popular conservatives like Ted Cruz,” the center wrote.
In August 2018, Facebook came under fire after the platform deleted a large number of videos from… Conservative nonprofit, PragerU. The company later reversed the decision, admitting that the content had been wrongly reported as “hate speech.”
Jonathan Turley: META's Zuckerberg is making a free speech move that could be truly transformative
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company will adopt a new fact-checking system similar to the Community Notes system on Elon Musk's X device. (Chris Unger/Zova LLC/Jonathan Ra/NoorPhoto/Andrew Harnick/Getty Images)
Republicans later claimed that Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied accusations that Facebook engaged in bias against conservative accounts and content.
Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram faced backlash ahead of the 2020 election after the company restricted access to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story.
Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he had decided Censorship of the New York Post The story came after the FBI warned him of a “potential Russian disinformation operation” regarding the Biden family and Burisma.
“It has since been clarified that the report was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have discounted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again — for example, we're no longer temporarily demoting us in the US while we wait for fact-checkers,” he said.
Last year, Meta's CEO sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he admitted that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, especially Regarding coronavirus content, And even elements like satire and humor.
Conservatives rejoice at 'disturbing' censorship announcement: 'A huge win for free speech'
The New York Times sparked controversy when it highlighted fact-checkers' objection to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comments. (New York Times Building image courtesy of CAMERA | Zuckerberg image by Kent Nishimura)
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS anchor Gayle King that his platform removed 18 million posts containing “misinformation” about the virus.
In 2022, several state attorneys general collected evidence alleging that Zuckerberg coordinated with former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to “discredit and suppress” the theory that COVID-19 might be having an effect. It originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that Meta will end its fact-checking program and lift its content moderation policies to “restore freedom of expression” across the Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms.
Fact-checking organizations whose contracts Meta terminated said they were disappointed by the news and ridiculed it Accusations of bias. They also redirected the blame to Meta, suggesting that company policies limiting disclosure of flagged content were the real catalyst behind the tech company's censorship.
Experts who spoke with Fox News Digital acknowledged Meta's guilt in suppressing information but criticized fact-checkers for tailoring their assessments to personal beliefs and opinions.
Trump says Meta has “come a long way” after Zuckerberg ended fact-checking on platforms
Meta pads are displayed on a smartphone screen, with the Meta logo visible in the background in Chania, Greece, on August 9, 2024. (Nicholas Kokovelis/Noor Photo via Getty Images)
“These fact-checkers brought this on themselves,” said Dan Schneider, vice president of the Human Rights Center for Freedom of Expression. “They pretended to be impartial. They pretended to be fair mediators. All the evidence suggests otherwise.”
Zuckerberg's announcement that Meta would replace fact-checking groups with a system closer to X's community feedback drew mixed reactions. While some call it an important step in countering the potential biases of fact-checking organizations, others point out that Meta has removed barriers to its content moderation ambitions.
DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former Google consultant, said that while he believes this is “the right move” for Meta and that a community feedback-style system is an “interesting concept,” it is bound to turn into a “cesspool.” “. Community feedback, a kind of “vox populi”, allows regular X users, through a scoring system, to monitor content and provide context or corrections.
“Maybe if Meta used feedback intelligently, this feedback could be used to train an AI that would then turn into a more powerful content moderation system, but I think that would also be a bad idea if this was something they were considering as a next step. The truth is, the internet is full of over the top people.” “In the room there are a lot of people who are simply lurking online, reading content, watching drama, but never participating, and thus their ideas are never taken into account by a text or video that can train this AI.” He said.
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“What we really need if we want to democratize AI-edited content is to get content from people who don't make content online — everyone from the middle and quiet people to the political figures and high-level executives who don't,” Toscano added. “We have enough time to use it.” Internet, but if we had that, we might not have had these problems in the first place, which is why this problem has become so difficult.”
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Markovich was more optimistic, calling community feedback on
“Company X was able to leverage its best users to contribute to the community feedback system and Facebook should try something similar,” she continued. “Not everyone can put up community feedback, or the system can get overrun by a mob, and that's what makes the whole thing so rewarding.”
