Facebook retreats from 'fact checking'

 National Review:

Meta announced this week that it will switch to a community notes style of fact-checking, abandoning its existing third-party fact checking program, which the social media giant now acknowledges was plagued by political bias.

The original fact-checking system, deployed in 2016 as Trump took office, essentially outsourced the job of verifying the veracity of popular narratives to partner organizations, most of which were legacy media outlets. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in announcing the end of the program this week, Meta (then Facebook) decided to launch the fact-checking initiative in response to pressure from the mainstream media about the spread of “misinformation” online and the resulting harms to democracy. The outlets that applied the pressure ultimately reaped financial rewards as Facebook paid them to do the fact checking.

While Facebook did partner with some conservative outlets — including, for a brief time when the program first launched, National Review — the bulk of the fact-checking was done by ideologically homogenous outlets that instinctively targeted high-profile right-wing users and publications, leading to the suppression of claims that ultimately proved true around topics like Covid, Biden family misdeeds, and climate change.

Around the time the fact-checking program was launched, a former Facebook employee accused the platform of omitting conservative topics from its trending bar, though the platform denied the allegations. The worker said Facebook bumped stories about CPAC, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from the trending section.
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Two years later, then-congressman Matt Gaetz filed a criminal referral against Zuckerberg, claiming the Facebook CEO had made false statements to Congress while under oath when he asserted the website did not engage in bias against conservative speech. Zuckerberg testified before Congress in 2018 and “repeatedly and categorically denied” Facebook engaged in bias against conservatives, but a Project Veritas investigation reportedly found the “overwhelming majority” of content that the platform’s artificial intelligence filtered was in support of then-President Trump and other conservative figures and topics.

But perhaps the greatest test of Facebook’s free speech policies came in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic, as Facebook and other sites faced pressure from the Biden administration to censor critical information regarding so-called Covid-19 misinformation.

Zuckerberg acknowledged in an August letter to the House Judiciary Committee that “senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Meta to “censor” content related to the pandemic in 2021.

But even before President Biden took office, Facebook was among several social media sites that banned discussion of the lab-leak theory in spring 2020. It wasn’t until May 2021 that Facebook announced it would no longer remove posts that suggested Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Fast-forwarding to the next year: When vaccines against the virus became widely available, Facebook began to censor claims that Covid vaccines didn’t prevent infection.

Even The BMJ, a leading medical journal, was not safe from Facebook’s censorship; in November 2021, the journal sent a letter to Zuckerburg that said readers reported a variety of problems when trying to share a BMJ article by journalist Paul D. Thacker that alleged there had been “poor practice” at one of the companies involved in the phase III evaluation trials of the Pfizer vaccine.

While some users were unable to share the article, others said their posts were flagged with a warning that read, “Missing context . . . Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Users who tried to post the article received a warning from Facebook that users who repeatedly share “false information” can have their posts moved lower in the newsfeed.
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Most publishers edit their content.  It is what the news business has always done.  Facebook was a different type of media that posted content provided by others with little editorial oversee.  It is something that the internet has made possible.