The social media censorship-industrial complex is over
The only people left defending this dystopian cottage industry are ideologically-driven or collecting checks
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of significant changes to Meta’s content moderation policies across platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. These changes represent a major shift in Meta's approach to content management and free speech and affects billions of users, so this is a big deal (they’re by far the largest social media company).
The key changes, in case you missed Zuck’s talk (watch it if you haven’t yet) include:
End of fact-checking program: Meta is discontinuing its third-party fact-checking program, which was implemented after the 2016 election. Zuck even noted his fact checkers in California were politically-biased (he’ll be moving this team to Texas).
Introduction of community notes: The fact-checking system will be replaced with a "Community Notes" model similar to the one used on X (formerly Twitter).
Policy revisions: Meta is modifying its content moderation rules, particularly those deemed too restrictive on sensitive topics like immigration and gender issues.
Algorithmic adjustments: The company will alter its recommendation algorithm to reinstate civic and political content that had previously been restricted.
You can think this is due to political pressure or not, it doesn’t really matter (and if you view everything in life through this lens, the media has honestly broken you). It’s a great development and should be applauded. As my friend and industry analyst Eric Seufert describes, this is not a “right wing” policy, it’s a return to sanity.
My feed on Twitter/X mostly got the reaction right. I’m writing this post today because over on LinkedIn, there were completely insane reactions to this by people in my sector. That Meta would dare take steps to defang the censorship-industrial complex and try to build a more neutral place. It was pretty clear most of them just saw red and didn’t even listen to the announcement (Zuck said they’re doubling down on removing actually problematic and illegal content, which is great). I shared a few comments, which were just the tip of the iceberg, perhaps you’ve seen similar discussions. There’s a quote somewhere about “when you’re used to preferential treatment, equality can feel like oppression.” And that’s about what’s happening.
The thing is, community notes is a far superior approach to this problem. It simply doesn’t involve employing people with clear bias to nanny state the forum. We do not need this paternalistic infantilization (and manipulation) of our information ecosystems, it only makes things worse. If the internet does one thing well, it’s use the wisdom of crowds, and communities are far superior at getting at unvarnished reality than so called “fact-checkers.”
In Think Twice: Harnessing The Power of Counterintution, Michael J. Mauboussin postulates that a diverse crowd will always predict more accurately than the average person in the crowd. He takes social scientist Scott Page’s diversity prediction theorem (collective error = average individual error — prediction diversity) a step further to identify the three conditions which must be in place to know when crowds will predict well.
Those conditions are: diversity, aggregation and incentives: Each condition clicks into the equation. Diversity reduces the collective error. Aggregation assures that the market considers everyone’s information. Incentives help reduce individual errors by encouraging people to participate only when they think they have an insight. The web brings diversity, aggregation and incentives together in a way that is instantly accessible and useful.
This is how search engines work today, and how Google knows to surface the best results for your query at the top of the results page. It’s part human, part machine, harmonized together. Social media should work this way too. The community notes feature simply productizes fact checking on social.
Imagine for a second how great this feature would be on LinkedIn, you’d see things like this pushing back against spammers and grifters:
Community Notes: John did not actually scale the company to $200M. He has been unemployed for 4 years and has never worked at Apple. His entire profile is made up. His profile picture is a stock photo.
They’d never implement it, because that product isn’t really about us sharing ideas. It’s a glorified HR database users voluntarily keep updated, the posting is secondary. I hope I’m wrong and they consider it.
Anyway, back to the fact checkers, the headlines pushing back on this couldn’t be better parody if you had The Onion or The Babylon Bee write them, such as this one in the NYT.
Remember, this is an entire cottage industry of people, nearly all of whom lean left, and with dystopian-sounding organization names straight out of an Orwell novel.
Fact checking has a mess of problems. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey revealed a significant partisan divide in how fact-checkers are perceived: 70% of Republicans believed fact-checkers tend to favor one side, while only 29% of Democrats held this view.
A 2023 study from Duke University analyzed partisan trends in fact-checking using data from PolitiFact. The research found a selection bias toward fact-checking Republicans more often and that Republicans on average receive worse ratings.
The bias here is pretty much just in one direction, as is the mainstream media coverage, as are many of our institutions (ivy leagues colleges were tacitly endorsing protests supporting terrorists just recently, if you need a giant blinking societal alarm).
With social media companies having outsized influence, it’s important they remain neutral, and certainly not stoke activist causes and aggressions against western civilization. If you think this is “all fine” because your party was favored, you should do some soul searching. In America, we care about reality and health of the country, not (covertly or otherwise) hyping a given party. As, what happens when the party you don’t like is in control?
For the people who defend fact checkers, let’s look at a very short list of things they’ve gotten wrong, many of which the crowd got right. It’s easy to see more, just do a Google search or ask an AI of choice to list them, along with citations.
1. COVID-19 Origins and Lab Leak Theory
Initial Claim: Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, fact-checkers labeled the theory that COVID-19 could have originated from a lab in Wuhan, China, as a "conspiracy theory."
Reassessment: Over time, credible scientists and government agencies, including the FBI, acknowledged the lab leak theory as a plausible hypothesis worthy of investigation.
Criticism: Fact-checkers were accused of dismissing legitimate questions, leading to debates about scientific uncertainty and political bias influencing early assessments.
2. Hunter Biden Laptop Story (2020)
Initial Claim: Reports from The New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents were dismissed as “Russian disinformation” by some fact-checkers and social media platforms.
Reassessment: Later investigations verified the authenticity of the laptop and its contents.
Criticism: The suppression of the story before the 2020 U.S. presidential election raised concerns about media censorship and lack of transparency.
3. The Steele Dossier and Trump-Russia Collusion (2016–2019)
Initial Claim: Many outlets and fact-checkers treated claims from the Steele Dossier about Trump’s connections to Russia as credible and verified.
Reassessment: Subsequent investigations, including the Mueller Report and the Durham Report, found no evidence of collusion and discredited many of the dossier’s claims.
Criticism: Media outlets were criticized for amplifying unverified information, leading to years of political and public mistrust.
4. Nicholas Sandmann and the Lincoln Memorial Incident (2019)
Initial Claim: Fact-checkers and media portrayed Sandmann, a high school student, as aggressively confronting a Native American protester based on selectively edited video footage.
Reassessment: Full video footage revealed Sandmann remained calm and did not provoke the confrontation.
Criticism: Media outlets settled defamation lawsuits, acknowledging misrepresentation of events.
5. Biden’s Inflation Claims (2022)
Initial Claim: Fact-checkers supported claims that inflation during Biden’s presidency was transitory or caused entirely by external factors like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.
Reassessment: Later economic analyses indicated that domestic policies contributed to rising inflation, contradicting initial fact-checks.
6. Fact-Checking Satirical Content
Examples: Satirical sites like The Babylon Bee have had articles flagged as “false information” despite being clearly labeled satire.
Criticism: Critics argue that fact-checkers sometimes fail to distinguish between humor and misinformation, undermining their credibility.
7. Biden’s Mental and Cognitive State (2020–Present)
Initial Claim: Media outlets and fact-checkers often supported the claim that President Joe Biden was "mentally sharp" and fit for office, citing medical evaluations and reports from his physician. These assessments stated he was "fit for duty" with no cognitive impairments.
Reassessment: Critics pointed to gaffes, memory lapses, and verbal missteps during speeches and interviews as evidence of cognitive decline, arguing that the media and fact-checkers downplayed these incidents. Calls for more transparency, including cognitive testing, increased.
Criticism: Opponents argued that fact-checkers shielded Biden from scrutiny by relying on official medical reports rather than independent evaluations, leading to accusations of bias and selective reporting.
Eventually reality is documented, but frequently the damage is already done.
There’s many others we could list, but you get the point. Fact checkers are biased humans, like everyone else, and are not immune to manipulation, authoritative commands, incentives, etc. They are also frequently funded by organizations or donors with clear ideological affiliations. And look, a newspaper having fact checkers for their own stories makes sense, but for a social media company to implement this at the macro level in the way Meta was doing does not. Community notes is an internet-centric approach, for an internet problem. It never made sense to do any of this like traditional media might, it just doesn’t scale, and social media is not a newspaper, or even necessarily a news source (although it can be this at times).
Wrapping this together…
A less moderated internet is the natural state of things, and heavy moderation on forums leads to biases of mods determining the telos of the community. Many have become used to safe spaces, and seeing ideas or people they do not agree with has become something to run from versus collaborate with. These people will never be happy or even enjoy a forum unless it is perfectly pristine (confirming all their biases) and all other ideas are suppressed. I think the 2010s conditioned them the world should be this way, but it clearly is a bad idea and everyone else is moving on.
The previous method was a terrible way to run the large social media companies, and thus the future will look different than the present (and be better). The crowd working together alongside technology and AI will be how we determine what is true online. It’s just not something anyone should want placed in the hands of biased individuals or organizations.
What it boils down to is there’s a group of people who badly want internet services to lean on centralized narrative control, which is the antithesis of how a healthy internet functions. They are used to institutions wielding a heavy hand over their information environments and a paternalistic world. This only works in theory, and it could be fine for small periods of time or perhaps was more so in the past before a party became infiltrated by extreme activists. But we have seen over sufficient timeframes that the desire to bias to one side or the other is too great, and thus exploited.
We should not wish for the left or the right to have this power. Near 100% of the people upset about these changes are left-leaning, because they are the ones who have controlled our popular media institutions for some time. I already shared why dems lost the presidency, and many people couldn’t understand these reasons. So I expect the same types won’t understand this post. I’m still not sure how to get through to them, but hopefully they’ll do some reflection.
Long rant, but I feel it's necessary. Part of the value that fact-checkers provide is that they often give context to a piece of misinformation or lie.
For example, this statement, which I assume is coming from ChatGPT:
"3. The Steele Dossier and Trump-Russia Collusion (2016–2019)
Initial Claim: Many outlets and fact-checkers treated claims from the Steele Dossier about Trump’s connections to Russia as credible and verified.
Reassessment: Subsequent investigations, including the Mueller Report and the Durham Report, found no evidence of collusion and discredited many of the dossier’s claims.
Criticism: Media outlets were criticized for amplifying unverified information, leading to years of political and public mistrust."
This seems just flat wrong. Why? Because the Muller team "didn't evaluate 'collusion' with the Russian government" during the course of its investigation. It simply wasn't a thing they looked into because collusion isn't a legal term (https://www.politico.eu/article/mueller-refutes-trumps-no-collusion-no-obstruction-line/). That context — which is crucial to understanding the story — is missing.
But even the premise of the claim — that "Many outlets and fact-checkers treated claims from the Steele Dossier about Trump’s connections to Russia as credible and verified," — is misleading. Again, the Mueller team didn't include the Steele Dossier in their investigation because they conducted their own investigation with primary sources.
The Mueller team didn't discredit the dossier because it wasn't in the scope of their task. This is akin to asking why a line chef didn't personally deliver a dish to a table. As for media outlets, that's how a news story evolves throughout its lifecycle (more on that in a minute).
The last line, "Media outlets were criticized for amplifying unverified information, leading to years of political and public mistrust," is just childish. Of course news organizations often run with unverified information in their stories. They even get facts wrong in their initial coverage!
This is because not all information is available to a journalist at the outset of a story. You have an allegation. You investigate. You publish that story and you keep investigating and publishing additional stories as the investigation evolves. You correct the story as new information is introduced. That's how news works. It's hard! And it's made even more difficult when there are a lot of competing interests in suppressing or spinning information — such as almost literally anything related to the Trump administration.
At this moment, I have two central issues with removing third-party fact-checkers. First, it places the onus of fact-checking on a community that's inherently media illiterate (https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/21/us/teaching-media-literacy-in-schools/index.html), which can easily lead to a sustained spike in disinformation.
Two, the trust that community notes add up to anything is entirely reliant on the social media network in the first place (see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/30/elon-musk-x-fact-check-community-notes-misinformation/ AND https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/25/twitter-deletes-fact-check-of-musk-connecting-bronny-james-cardiac-arrest-to-covid-vaccine/). If someone like Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in promoting a partisan narrative over verifiable information (read abstract: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119), then how is a casual user to get information from a reliable source in the first place? And, crucially, isn't weighing an algorithm a type of censorship to begin with?
This leads me to a tangential issue: social media networks are built to be manipulated since they're built for engagement over veracity. Facebook and Twitter make money off of selling ads — not by facilitating honest conversation. How can you easily sell more ads? By having your algorithms favor posts and media that drives engagement over the mundane truth. Which is sad.
I guess, in sum, this is a bad but predictable move by Facebook. It does nothing beneficial for its users while offering a fig leaf towards gaming engagement via algorithms.
Addendum:
Here's a good interview with three Mueller team members on the investigation writ large: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/g-s1-24189/mueller-investigator-says-russia-interfered-in-2016-and-in-the-2024-election-too
Relevant bits:
ZEBLEY: Well, in that instance, we said we did not find sufficient evidence of a conspiracy to charge a conspiracy. Collusion is not really a criminal violation. So we applied that term to mean conspiracy. And we ultimately said, look, we didn't find sufficient evidence to say there was a conspiracy. But we did say that the Russians interfered in the election with the intention of favoring Donald Trump because they perceived there'd be a benefit from a Trump presidency, and they interfered in a way to harm the other candidate, Hillary Clinton. And we also found evidence that the Trump campaign perceived it would benefit from some of the Russian conduct. For instance, they perceived they would benefit from the releases by Wikileaks, and at the time, Wikileaks was releasing information that the Russians had stolen from the Clinton campaign.
GROSS: There was also the infamous Trump Tower meeting where a Russian proposed to Don Jr. that this Russian had damaging information about Hillary Clinton that the Trump campaign could use and offered to have a meeting to hear about it. And Don Jr. agreed to do it. And so Don Jr., Eric Trump, and Paul Manafort, who was the campaign manager at the time, met with a couple of Russians. As it turns out, the Russians had their own agenda, but the fact that the Trump sons and campaign manager were willing to have that meeting, in terms of information, what did that tell you?
(made some edits in my post for clarity)
I hesitate to take Meta at face value on anything, but I agree that the fact-checking industry has been distorted and overextended from the very specific (and valuable) role it's long had in journalism and other publishing. And it's quite possible the downstream effects of this reputation harm are worse than if there had never been high-profile fact-checking operations.
Obviously, the idea of fact-checking satirical content is ridiculous and pointless, as someone with a vested interest in this! (https://substack.com/@jamescooperdasilva/note/c-84443777)
I'd also argue that Biden's cognitive health (or Trump's in his 1st term) is an area where fact-checking isn't well-suited. It's one thing to accurately convey official doctor's records, etc., as is always done with presidents, but the armchair diagnoses over the past 8 years have been guesses at best, not factual analyses.
As for the inflation and COVID origins situations, those illustrate how fact-checking is used prematurely for ongoing situations. It's one thing to say, for instance, "So-and-so claimed China did COVID, of which there's not proof. Here is what we know about the possibilities." But too many of these went further, as you note, as if there wasn't more to learn.