Not everyone is happy about the sweeping changes implemented at Meta by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. CNN writes that Meta's fact-checking army has been trying to fight wildfire misinformation as the LA fires tear through neighborhood after neighborhood. They quote fact-checking founder of Lead Stories, Alan Duke, which had a four-year career suppressing and censoring speech on Facebook. "Cutting fact checkers from social platforms is like disbanding your fire department," Duke said.
Fact-checks on Facebook result in penalties from Meta to "significantly reduce that content's distribution so that fewer people see" it. In cases of actual falsehoods where an account repeatedly posts false information, the logic behind that kind of censorship is apparent. However, the fact-checkers have often been referred to as having a leftist bias. In the case of fact-checks for news outlets, many fact-checks have required that additional information be added to an article. During Covid, the fact-checks were particularly egregious, and on trans and gender ideology, they were substantially harmful to the efforts of those who were trying to get the word out about the harms of sex changes for minors and others.
Last week, Zuckerberg announced major changes at Meta, parent company of Instagram and Facebook. He removed the third-party fact-checkers that he brought in to police users' speech and content in 2020, he's moving the content moderation team out of Silicon Valley to Texas, and he's doing away with many of the DEI initiatives at the company—including removing tampons from men's bathrooms.
CNN notes that fact-checkers did the work of debunking user content that claimed to show looters, the Hollywood sign on fire, and "false claims promoted by President-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform sought to blame the Democratic Party for the wildfires." These assertions from Trump have to do with California policies that have prioritized environmental concerns over human ones, such as allowing 95% of rainwater to run off into the ocean, or protecting rare plants rather than "cleaning" the forest floor, avoiding controlled burns, and other issues.
For Duke, the problem with these and other claims is that they "create distrust of emergency agencies that are actively responding to the disaster, making it more difficult for them during the crisis." The Los Angeles Fire Department has been attempting to put out fires, yet when they arrive in residential neighborhoods and try to tap into fire hydrants they find them bone dry. Who should people distrust in that scenario? Mark Zuckerberg? Gavin Newsom? Donald Trump?
In defending the job as "professional fact-checkers," Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network said "Professional fact-checkers can tackle a wider variety of complex conspiracy theories and political claims, while community-based systems excel mainly at flagging obvious visual misattribution."
It was in 2020 that Facebook announced its plan to partner with third-party fact-checkers to police speech on the platform. Their reasons were "to reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users." They said that "The focus of this program is to address viral misinformation – provably false claims, particularly those that have the potential to mislead or harm."
Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that during the pandemic, "everything was shifting around." He went on to say "This really hit the most extreme I'd say, it was during the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program." He said, "I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative, but I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it."
After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, it became clear through the release of the Twitter Files that the same kind of shenanigans were going on at Twitter. Founder Jack Dorsey had been pressured, prior to his handing off control to a successor, to censor, suppress, and stifle Americans' speech on the platform. People were routinely banned for calling men who dressed like women men, or for saying that a person cannot actually change sex. When people posted about their own negative experiences with Covid vaccines, that was suppressed as "malinformation," which is classified as true information that sows distrust in institutions and government.
"And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly, were true," Zuckerberg told Rogan. "They basically pushed us in and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down."
The Intercept, a far-leftist outlet, has their own complaints about the changes at Facebook. They worry that users on Facebook and Instagram will now be permitted to post all kinds of previously censored things, such as "Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of sh*t," "Gays are freaks," or "I'm a proud racist." The slur "tranny" will also now be permitted, rails The Intercept's Sam Biddle.
A document reviewed by The Intercept shows "the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted," they report. That document provided hypothetical examples to content moderators to help them decide what to "allow" and what to "remove."
"We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms," Meta’s newly appointed global policy chief Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.
The Intercept calls these changes "moves to lick the president-elect's boots," while The Verge reports that the changes were a request of Trump's incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr. Marc Andreesen, a Silicon Valley investor, in a meeting with Trump at Bedminster prior to his throwing his full support behind the incoming president, said that content moderation was a key problem with social media platforms. Trump is a vocal proponent of innovation in the tech industry without undue government influence. Many fact-checks have been made, of course, about Trump and his comments, not just as regards wildfires but damn near anything he says.
One claim made by Trump has been repeatedly fact-checked as fake news, notably by the ladies of The View. At issue are Trump's comments about Gavin Newsom. Trump blamed Newsom for pulling down dams on the Klamath River and "returning" land to the Shasta Indian Nation, a project which California completed in October 2024. The View's Sunny Hostin said "I'm sorry, this is stolen land, first of all, okay, California is stolen land. Second of all, that's part of what always happens, these dams, there's preservation of the dams. So that was just complete, not only was it misinformation, but it was racist. And I think we need to also call stuff like that out."
CNN made the same fact-check, saying that Trump made a false claim that Newsom "refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way." CNN says that 'there never was a 'water restoration declaration.'"
But they go on to say that Newsom, in 2020, after the Camp Fire killed 85 people in 2018, "did mount a legal challenge to a Trump plan to deliver more water from Northern California to farmers in the state’s Central Valley agricultural hub, saying he was seeking 'to protect highly imperiled fish species close to extinction' in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the north." CNN says that wasn't officially a "water restoration declaration," so, y'know, Trump lied.
CNN also notes that "Southern California does not have a shortage of water for fighting the fires" despite the water hydrants being dry. They cite an expert of some kind who said that the water in the northern part of the state "has nothing to do with the fires in Southern California. There’s nothing."
These are the kinds of fact-checkers that CNN is propping up as heroes. These are the "falsehoods" that CNN wants called out. But with fact-checkers like these, who distort truth until it glimmers like lies, who make their own false claims based on rhetoric and misinterpretation, there's no need for liars at all. Unless there are fact-checkers who can discern their own bias from truth, social media platforms are better off with as much “malinformation” as users dare to post.
