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Experts and journalists hope Meta continues Towards free speech and avoid the content moderation policies that plagued Facebook under the Biden administration.
“Meta has a terrible history of censorship in the Biden era. They followed the administration’s directive to censor COVID-19 content; they shut down the sharing of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story; they used people who were fact-checked” “The administration views this as fact, not opinion,” New York Post columnist Carol Markovich told Fox News Digital. “
She said that while it’s important to be “vigilant” about Meta’s past mistakes, people should cheer the company for admitting they “did bad things and wanted to do better.”
“I hope Zuckerberg has seen the light and will continue to push Facebook in the direction of free speech,” Markovich, co-host of iHeartRadio’s “Normal,” said of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg Shi said. “It’s also important to remember that some companies, like Rumble or Telegram, and X/Twitter after Elon Musk’s acquisition, are struggling even with the advent of a hostile Biden administration, but they are still These companies should be commended for doing the right thing.”
Meta’s announcement to restore “free speech” comes after years of scrutiny of the company’s fact-checking and content moderation practices. (Nicholas Tuukat/AFP/Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was implemented after the 2016 election largely out of “political pressure” to “moderate content” and misinformation on its platform, executives said, but admitted the system “has Outdated”. Far away. “
A study in April Sources from the conservative Media Research Center claim that Facebook has “interfered” in U.S. elections dozens of times over the past few cycles.
The study said Facebook “vetted” 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2022 Senate and congressional candidates. In 2021, Facebook “removed the account of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase,” “increased censorship with a particular focus on Donald Trump,” and shut down political ads a week before the 2020 election.
“It also artificially inflates liberal news in the Trending News section while blacklisting popular conservatives like Ted Cruz,” MRC wrote.
In August 2018, Facebook was criticized for removing a large number of videos. Conservative nonprofit, PragerU. The company later reversed that decision, acknowledging that the content had been incorrectly reported as “hate speech.”
Jonathan Turley: META’s Zuckerberg makes a free speech move that could be truly transformative
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that his company will adopt a new fact-checking system similar to Elon Musk’s community annotations. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Republicans later claimed Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied accusations that Facebook had biased against conservative accounts and content.
Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram faced backlash ahead of the 2020 election after restricting access to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story.
Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he decided Censorship of the New York Post The story comes after the FBI warned him about a “potential Russian disinformation operation” involving the Biden family and Burisma.
“It has since become clear that the report was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect we should not have downgraded the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We have changed our policies and processes to ensure that this is the case It won’t happen again—for example, we’re no longer temporarily downgrading things in America while we wait for fact checks.”
Last year, Meta’s CEO sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he acknowledged that he was feeling pressure from the Biden administration, specifically Regarding COVID-19 content, Even things like sarcasm and humor.
The New York Times sparked controversy when it highlighted fact-checkers’ objections to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks. (Photo of the New York Times Building provided by CAMERA | Photo of Zuckerberg provided by Kent Nishimura)
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS anchor Gayle King that his platform removed 18 million messages containing “misinformation” about the virus of posts.
In 2022, several state attorneys general gathered evidence alleging that Zuckerberg worked with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to “discredit and suppress” the possibility that the COVID-19 virus was contagious theory. Originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that Meta would end its fact-checking program and roll back its content moderation policies in an effort to “restore free speech” on Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms.
The fact-checking groups whose contracts were terminated by Meta said they were disappointed by the news and ridiculed Allegations of bias. They also shifted the blame back to Meta, suggesting that the company’s policy of limiting the exposure of flagged content was the real catalyst behind the tech company’s censorship.
Experts interviewed by Fox News Digital acknowledged Meta’s responsibility in suppressing information but criticized fact-checkers for adjusting ratings based on personal beliefs and opinions.
Trump says Meta has ‘come a long way’ since Zuckerberg ended fact-checking on platform
The Meta platform is displayed on a smartphone screen on August 9, 2024, with the Meta logo appearing against the background of Chania, Greece. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“These fact-checkers are asking for trouble,” said Dan Schneider, the MRC’s vice president of free speech. “They pretend they are unbiased. They pretend they are fair brokers. All evidence to the contrary.”
Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would replace the fact-checking group with a system closer to X Community Notes sparked mixed reactions. While some see this as a significant step forward for the fact-checking organization’s potential bias, others believe Meta has escaped the shackles of its content moderation ambitions.
DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former Google consultant, said that while he thinks it’s the “right move” for Meta and that the community notes-style system is an “interesting concept,” it It is destined to become a “cesspool”. Community notes are a “vox populi” that allow regular X users to moderate content and provide context or corrections via a registration system.
“Perhaps if Meta uses these notes intelligently, these notes can be used to train artificial intelligence, and then they will become a more powerful content monitoring system, but I think if this is the next goal they consider, this will also be A bad idea. The reality is that the internet is filled with the loudest people and there are a lot of people who just lurk on the internet and read the stuff and watch the drama but never engage in it so their minds are never put into words that could train this. Or video AI,” he said.
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“If we want a democratic content moderation AI, what we really need is to get content from people who don’t make content on the internet — from centrists and quiet people to politicians and top executives. But what if we had Time using the internet, we probably wouldn’t have had these problems in the first place, which is why this problem is so difficult,” Toscano added.
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Marcowicz was more optimistic, calling community annotations on X a “brilliant” approach and suggesting the new system was unlikely to be worse than Facebook and Instagram’s current models.
“X has successfully leveraged its best users to contribute to a community notes system, and Facebook should try something similar,” she continued. “Not everyone can post a community note or the system could be overrun by a mob, which is why the whole system is so useful.”
