In a recent announcement, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, declared that the company's social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, would be abandoning their stringent censorship policies.
Instead, they would adopt a "community notes" model for content regulation, which includes the termination of their "third party fact-checking program." This program involved the company paying established media organizations to fact-check content on the site, and the judgments made were then used to censor content.
While there is little faith that Zuckerberg can rectify the damage he has done to free speech and conservative publications, this move is seen as a significant public relations victory for free speech. However, Facebook's fact-checking partners are not taking it well. Aaron Sharockman, the executive director of PolitiFact, one of Facebook/Meta's original fact-checking partners, recently posted a defensive letter on the matter. According to The Federalist, Sharockman's letter included the following highlights:
"The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebooks content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg could not be less subtle. Facebook and Meta solely created the penalties that publishers faced and the warning labels and overlays that users saw. It was Facebook and Meta that created a system that allowed ordinary citizens to see their posts demoted but exempted politicians and political leaders who said the very same things. In case it needs to be said, PolitiFact and U.S. fact-checking journalists played no role in the decision to remove Donald Trump from Facebook. When we make an error, there is a process to correct those mistakes. And there is also a process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information. Thats how the information cycle is supposed to work. If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror."
PolitiFact's defensive stance is seen as particularly dishonest and self-serving, even by their standards. The organization has been a fact-checking partner with Facebook for years, and it is well-known that Facebook paid its fact-checking partners for their participation in the program. In PolitiFact's case, Meta supplied more than 5 percent of their annual revenue. This created a massive conflict of interest, as these same publications were also tasked with covering Facebook neutrally when it came up in the news.
The inception of Facebooks fact-checking program was explicitly political and intended to suppress right-leaning news by design. This is evident in an excerpt from Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Hemingway:
"Soon after the [2016] election, BuzzFeed was reporting, Facebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trumps victory in the US election last week. The group was operating in open defiance of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said the idea that Facebook had unfairly tilted the election in Trumps favor was crazy. Zuckerberg had already faced criticism earlier, in May 2016, when Gizmodo reported, Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social networks influential trending news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.
By December 2016, Zuckerberg had caved. Facebook adopted a new policy of trying to combat the alleged fake news that troubled Facebooks left-wing employees. The tech giant would start paying media outlets to fact-check news on the site. With media revenue steadily declining in no small part because Facebook had radically disrupted the traditional journalistic business models once reputable news organizations signed up to participate in the fact-checking program. Media outlets that were supposed to be objectively covering Facebook were now on Facebooks payroll, given the power to determine all the news that was fit to print."
The idea that PolitiFact or any of Facebooks media fact-checking partners were blameless for participating in Facebooks censorship and stifling free speech is seen as a dubious and offensive argument. The Weekly Standard, a publication that was once a Facebook fact-checking partner, had a young journalist who openly expressed his discomfort with the responsibility of the fact-checking role. He explained that whenever he entered a claim of false, Facebook would then kill 80 percent of the global internet traffic to that story. This revelation led to a realization that the publication was part of a highly effective censorship regime controlled by a social media company run by one of the world's richest men.
The Weekly Standard was shut down a few months later, and alumni from that magazine started a new publication known as The Dispatch. Despite what had happened at their previous employer, The Dispatch became a Facebook fact-checking partner. This new arrangement prompted controversy when a Dispatch fact check claimed two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List contained partly false information. The allegedly false information was that the Susan B. Anthony List was claiming Joe Biden and the Democrat Party supported late-term abortion. Despite the public promise to review and correct their error, Susan B. Anthony List and its election ads were banned from Facebook in the critical weeks right before the 2020 election.
The flaws of Facebook's censorship program were readily apparent to anyone. Organizations like PolitiFact, who by their own admission did thousands of fact checks for Facebook to enable their direct censorship of ordinary citizens and important political voices alike, deserve contempt. Zuckerberg's motivations may be suspect, and he owes restitution to conservative publications that told the truth only to be suppressed and censored. But Facebooks statement that what they were doing was wrong and the termination of their fact-checking program are important concessions to the reality that ordinary Americans believe in and want free speech.
Sharockman and PolitiFact don't get to have it both ways. They took Facebooks money, but that doesnt mean they share any responsibility for Facebook justifying censorship with the services they provided? No, PolitiFact knew full well they were providing the bullets for Facebooks gun, and they were happy to do it because they liked who Facebook was aiming at.
As we wait to see if Facebook follows through with its promise to be less censorious, it's impossible to read Sharockmans justifications without looking forward to the day where self-appointed fact checkers are irrelevant to what Americans are allowed to say.
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