‘Fact-checkers’ melt down over Facebook free speech move

Censorship industry panics over Zuckerberg’s announcement that platform will no longer use it

Social media baron Mark Zuckerberg has admitted the so-called ‘fact-checkers’ his Meta Facebook and Instagram platforms use are ‘politically biased’ and says they will be replaced by a ‘community note’ system similar to that used by the ‘X’ platform. The decision has sent the censorship industry, which grew up around the Establishment’s need to prevent ordinary people from hearing inconvenient truths, into a meltdown.

Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook’s censorship is ‘accidental’ should be taken with a big pinch of salt, because it has long been clear that the supposedly neutral firms and think-tanks Facebook and Instagram uses – or used – are overwhelmingly right-leaning, pro-war and pro-Israel and Facebook even employs a ‘policy head’ to liaise with Israel and communicate its wishes to Meta.

But the decision appears to have caused panic among the so-called ‘fact-checkers’ whose business models and profits now risk becoming unsustainable – especially if other platforms follow suit.

In his article ‘Bad news/Selling the Story of Disinformation’, Joe Bernstein wrote that what he termed ‘Big Disinfo’ had:

found energetic support from the highest echelons of the American political center, which has been warning of an existential content crisis more or less constantly since the 2016 [US presidential] election

leading the US and UK ‘elites’ to turn their attention to ways to force tech companies to toe the Establishment line and filter out news and information that threatens elite interests.

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton insisted just last autumn that laws needed to change to punish social media companies that allow free speech that threatens the ‘total control’ of government over information. Former US secretary of state John Kerry was even more explicit, telling the World Economic Forum that freedom of speech and people’s ability to decide for themselves where to find their news is a ‘major block’ to the state ‘hammering [dissenting opinion] out of existence’:

For the most part, since at least 2017, most social media platforms appear to have been enthusiastic about acting as censors for the Establishment – Skwawkbox and other left news sites have been frequent targets along with other pro-Palestinian or Palestinian pages exposing Israel’s genocide – but Zuckerberg’s announcement may herald a change of approach that ‘Big Disinfo’ fears might spread, threatening its livelihood and its control.

Zuckerberg’s announcement prompted an ’emergency meeting’ of the so-called ‘International Fact-checking Network’ (IFCN), owned by the Poynter Institute which is funded by the US government through the CIA-adjacent ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ (NED), about the loss of revenue and control of information that the decision of their biggest single funder to terminate their contracts represents.

Nina Yankowicz, who now runs her own ‘fact-checking’ organisation, The American Sunlight Project, but was appointed by US president Joe Biden in 2022 to run the Department of Homeland Security’s short-lived ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, fumed that the decision was ‘the final nail in the coffin’ of journalism, claiming instead that ‘fact-checkers’ are only ‘perceived’ as biased:

Let’s be clear—the fact checkers have not “been” politically biased as Zuck suggests, but have been perceived as such because of politically motivated efforts to smear them, one that Zuck is now participating in and capitulating to.

Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism and this will be the final nail in the coffin. Zuck’s announcement is a full bending of the knee to Trump and an attempt to catch up to Musk in his race to the bottom.

Ms Yankowicz, whose qualifications as a fact-checker appear to hinge upon a period spent working with the Ukrainian foreign ministry and for the NED-funded ‘National Democratic Institute’ – which has worked on NED programmes serving US interests in Chile, Venezuela and Ukraine among other nations – on Russia and Belarus, is not happy and neither is the primarily government-funded ‘Big Disinfo’ industry.

Whether Meta’s change of approach will genuinely serve free speech remains to be seen, but it is at least a potential prospect of something better than the mass state disinformation and censorship of independent news that has become the norm since at least 2017.

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