Flashback: Meta’s ‘research history’, fact-checking under the Trump, Biden administrations

Experts and journalists hope that Meta will continue to move toward free speech and avoid the content moderation policies that plagued Facebook under the Biden administration.

“Meta has a bad audit record in the Biden era. They took government direction to vet content for COVID-19; they blocked sharing of the New York Post Hunter Biden story; they used fact-checkers who accepted the administration’s word as fact and not opinion,” New York Post Karol Markowicz told Fox News Digital.

He said that while “recognizing” Meta’s past mistakes is important, people should appreciate the company’s acknowledgment that they “did bad things and would like to be better.”

“I hope Zuckerberg has seen the light and will continue to move Facebook to a place of free speech,” said Markowicz, general manager of iHeartRadio, referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s also important to remember that there are companies like Rumble or Telegram and then X/Twitter when Elon Musk bought it, that did the right thing even when it was difficult and the bad treatment of Biden. Those companies should be celebrated. .”

META DECISION FOR FACT CHECKING AX, MUSK-LIKE POLICY FREE SPEECH’S BIG ‘WIN’: EXPERT

Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was launched after the 2016 election and was used to “manage content” and misinformation on social media, mostly due to “political pressure,” executives said, but acknowledged that the program had “gone too far.”

An April study from the conservative Media Research Center said Facebook has “interfered” with US elections several times over the past few cycles.

The study claims that Facebook “vetted” candidates for the 2024 presidential election, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 2022 Senate and candidates. In 2021, Facebook “removed Amanda Chase’s account,” and “increased its research resources with a special focus on Donald Trump” and “banned political advertising one week before the election” in 2020.

“It also promoted liberal issues in its Trending News section while listing popular conservatives like Ted Cruz,” MRC wrote.

In August 2018, Facebook became embroiled in controversy after the platform removed a number of videos from the conservative nonprofit, PragerU. The company later reversed the decision, admitting that the content was falsely reported as “hate speech.”

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that his company will implement a new fact-checking system similar to the social notes on Elon Musk’s X. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Republicans later said Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied allegations that Facebook was involved in selecting conservative accounts and content.

Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram faced backlash leading up to the 2020 election after the company forced access to Hunter Biden’s famous laptop story.

Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he decided to investigate the New York Post story after the FBI warned him of a “possible Russian assassination operation” involving the Biden family and Burisma.

“It has since been clarified that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have dropped the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and procedures to make sure this doesn’t happen again – for example, we’re no longer suspending things in the US while we wait for fact-checkers,” he said.

Last year, the CEO of Meta sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee where he admitted that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, especially regarding the content of COVID, even things like satire and jokes.

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The New York Times sparked controversy when it highlighted fact-checkers disputing the comments of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (New York Times building photo courtesy of CAMERA | Zuckerberg photo from Kent Nishimura)

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS anchor Gayle King that his platform had removed 18 million posts containing “false information” about the virus.

In 2022, several federal attorneys gathered evidence that Zuckerberg contacted former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to “discredit and suppress” the idea that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.

Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced that Meta will end its fact-checking program and propose content moderation policies to “restore free speech” across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms.

Fact-checking organizations whose contracts were terminated by Meta said they were disappointed by the news and scoffed at allegations of bias. They also redirected the blame at Meta, suggesting that the company’s policies limiting the display of flagged content were the real motivations for the tech giant’s investigation.

Experts who spoke to Fox News Digital agreed that Meta is guilty of suppressing information but criticized fact-checkers for mixing their ratings with personal beliefs and opinions.

TRUMP SAYS META ‘GOES A LONG WAY TO GO’ AFTER ZUCKERBERG’S COMPLETE FACT CHECK ON PLATFORMS.

Meta platforms are shown on a smartphone screen, with the Meta logo in the background in Chania, Greece, on August 9, 2024. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“These fact-checkers brought this on themselves,” said MRC Free Speech Vice President Dan Schneider. “They pretended to be impartial. They pretended to be fair brokers. All the evidence is wrong.”

Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta will replace fact-checking teams with a system closer to X’s Community Notes has generated mixed reactions. While some see it as an important step away from the potential bias of fact-checking organizations, others suggest that Meta has backed away from their desire to moderate content.

DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former consultant to Google, said that while he believes it’s “the right move” for Meta and that a Community Notes-style system is “an interesting concept,” it’s bound to go “in the cesspool.” A type of “vox populi,” Public Notes allows regular X users, through a subscription system, to access police content and provide context or corrections.

“Maybe if Meta uses notes smartly, those notes can be used to train the AI ​​to become a strong content monitoring system, but I think that would be a bad idea if that’s what they’re thinking of as the next thing. The truth is that the internet is full of loud people in the room. There’s a lot of people who just listen.” online, read content, watch drama, but never interact, so their thoughts are not included. text or video that can train this AI,” he said.

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“What we really need if we’re going to have a democratic content moderated by AI is to get content from people who don’t make content online – everyone from very focused and quiet people to politicians and high-level executives who don’t. We’ve had time to use the internet but if we had that, maybe we wouldn’t have had these problems in the first place, that’s why this problem is so difficult,” added Toscano.

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Marcowicz was more optimistic, calling Social Notes on X a “very good” approach and suggesting the new system would be no worse than the current model of Facebook and Instagram.

“UX has been able to use its best users to contribute to the social notes system and Facebook should try the same,” he continued. “Not everyone can enter Public Notes, or the system can be overwhelmed by the crowd, and that’s what makes the whole thing so useful.”