The era of fact-checking is quickly coming to an end on Meta’s platforms — most prominently, Facebook and Instagram. It’s unclear whether censorship is gone for good — or whether it’ll just take another, more amorphous form.
For the moment, Mark Zuckerberg has been saying all the right words. The question is whether he can erase an ugly legacy of shadow-banning, throttling, and outright suppression.
On Jan. 7, in a video dropped in the early hours of the morning, Meta founder Zuckerberg announced that he was beginning the process of terminating his company’s relationship with “independent” fact checkers, a uniformly liberal gaggle of establishment media outlets and offshoots that held massive sway over what content got distributed and how widely since shortly after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Instead, it would be replaced by a “community notes” system similar to what’s on X.
“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said in the video.
“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’ve created, especially in the U.S. So, over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.”
So, let’s flash back, for those of you who might not have been around in the early days of the Facebook fact-checking regime: Before the left settled upon the bogus narrative that Trump-Russia collusion caused the GOP candidate to win over Hillary Clinton in 2016, “fake news” from dodgy sources with unspecified (but likely low) readership numbers was considered a plausible bogeyman for making three unthinkable words — “President Donald Trump — entirely thinkable.
Under no small amount of pressure, Zuckerberg announced a fact-checking alliance with a murderer’s row of left-leaning establishment media organs, from Snopes to PolitiFact to USA Today. (Snopes would pull out in 2019, but the rest stuck around.)
After Zuckerberg’s announcement, these organizations insisted they didn’t have the power to take content down on any of Meta’s platforms. This is technically true. It’s also true that if Meta didn’t toe the line when it came to their suggestions, all hell would rain down on them from the media and leftist legislators. (Yes, I know that’s repetitive, redundant, and repetitive, but still …)
Beyond the fact-checking regime that left-wing conspiracy theories about social media’s influence in the 2016 campaign ushered in, there was also the questionable case of Facebook’s algorithm shift just a few years later.
The January 2018 algorithm change was supposed to realign the platform’s News Feed to prioritize posts from friends, family, and groups — or, at least, that was the stated goal. What ended up happening, instead, was an across-the-board decrease in visibility for conservative or conservative-leaning news sources and a slight (but noticeable) increase in visibility and traffic for establishment and liberal sources.
A March 2018 analysis by The Western Journal found that liberal publishers gained 2 percent more traffic from Facebook after the implementation of the algorithmic changes, while conservative publishers lost 14 percent on average. For some conservative outlets, this meant 50 percent or more of their traffic was gone.
Then came the annus horribilis of 2020, where Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook and Instagram suppressed information about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the closing days of the presidential campaign thanks to not-too-subtle pressure from the FBI.
“The FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,’” Zuckerberg said in a 2022 interview with Joe Rogan.
“We just kind of thought, ‘Hey, look, if the FBI — which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s a very professional law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously,” he said, adding that it “basically fit the pattern” of Russian disinformation the FBI had warned him about.
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1
— Minds💡 (@minds) August 25, 2022
As we now know, the only thing Russian about the laptop is the nationalities of the sex workers Hunter filmed himself in the process of, ahem, reproductive activity with, and not a single file on it has yet been proven to be disinformation, malinformation, or misinformation.
There was also the censorship brought down on COVID-19 wrongthink, which didn’t just come from the fact checkers. In another appearance on Rogan earlier this month, discussing how the Biden administration reached out to the social media giant to coerce them into censoring unpopular opinions, Zuckerberg disclosed that bureaucrats would rant and rave at decision makers at Meta — including over satirical memes.
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said.
“It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna … take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.”
JUST IN: Mark Zuckerberg reveals that officials in the Biden admin called his team at Meta to “scream and curse” at them to take down certain posts during COVID.
One of the posts was this meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV with the caption, “Did you or a loved one take… pic.twitter.com/fhpMlXpztN
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 10, 2025
And it wasn’t just fact-checking that ended up censoring prominent organizations and sociopolitical voices; several major accounts associated with pro-life organizations or activists were suspended under dubious rules violations — something that’s occasioned a lawsuit where the plaintiffs are defended by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a pro-religious liberty organization.
On Tuesday, Meta restored the accounts, according to the ADF — but the specious “Community Guidelines” that led to the suspensions still remain in place, and that decision could easily be reversed in the coming months or years for the same fallacious reasoning.
So, yes, it’s good to hear Zuckerberg say that he’s anti-censorship — and acknowledge that the fact-checking regime was pure censorship — for now. It’s a step in the right direction.
However, at the risk of being a spoil-sport, aside from the switch from fact-checking dings to a community notes system, this isn’t entirely different from what Zuckerberg has said in the past while the fact-checking was going on.
“I don’t think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news,” he said in 2019, according to Fox News.
In a later interview that same year: “I generally believe that as a principle, people should decide what is credible, what they want to believe, and who they want to vote for, and I don’t think that that should be something that we want tech companies, or any kind of other company [to] do.”
Of course, this was all talk. This time, at least at the beginning, it isn’t. Whether it stays that way depends on the vigilance of those who don’t want free speech crushed by Big Tech monopolists.
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