Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s past comments about censorship have resurfaced after his decision to end fact-checking on its US platformsrevealing a legendary timeline of seemingly contradictory positions that brought him into conflict with his company.
While controversy arose over his refusal to fact-check political ads in 2019, Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook does not support censorship of its users, citing his belief that people have the right to “make their own decisions” based on the content they post.
“I don’t think a private company should censor politicians or the news,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with CBS at that time.
“In general, I believe that in principle people should decide what is credible, what they want to believe and who they want to vote for, and I don’t think that should be something that we want technology companies or any other kind of company to do. [to] make,” he said in an interview with Fox News that same year.
He also gave a speech at Georgetown University in 2019, criticizing China for stifling free speech online.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, arrives to testify before a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” in Washington, DC on January 31, 2024. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
In 2020, Zuckerberg doubled down on his position, stating in the following interview with Fox News: “I just strongly believe that Facebook should not be the arbiter of the truth about everything that people say on the Internet. Private companies probably shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies , they shouldn’t be in a position to do that.”
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But just a month after that outing, Zuckerberg’s company Meta, then Facebook, announced it was expanding its U.S. fact-checking program, advertising it at the time as “a key part of our strategy to reduce the spread of misinformation” on the platform.
Following the riots at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Facebook banned then-President Trump from accessing the social network. The company did not return Trump’s account until January 2023.
In April 2024 Zuckerberg admitted in the letter that the Biden-Harris administration pressured Facebook to censor Americans related to COVID-19 content. Zuckerberg said he did not support the decision, despite the admission, and expressed regret for bowing to pressure from Biden officials.
The tech mogul’s previous comments were thrust back into the spotlight this week after he announced that Meta was lifting speech restrictions to “restore freedom of expression” on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta platforms by ending its third-party fact-checking program, admitting that their content moderation practices they went “too far”.
Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was first implemented after the 2016 election and has been used to “manage content” and misinformation on its platforms, largely due to “political pressure,” executives said.
Meta platforms are displayed on a smartphone screen with the Meta logo appearing in the background in Chania, Greece, on August 9, 2024. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
At the time of Zuckerberg’s announcement on Tuesday, ten prominent fact-checking organizations were working with the company to moderate political content in the US
Reuters, USA Today, The Dispatch, PolitiFact, Agence France-Presse US, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, Science Feedback and ElDetector Univision made up the team of third-party fact-checking partners, Facebook confirmed to Fox News Digital.
They were told to favor “demonstrably false claims, especially those that are timely, trending, and consequential. They do not favor claims that are trivial or contain only minor inaccuracies,” according to Meta 2024 press release.
Many of those organizations complained about Zuckerberg’s decision to end their program on Tuesday, criticizing his attempt to avoid Internet bias as misguided and sudden.
Lead Stories editor Maarten Schenk expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the move, stating that he was only informed of the termination of the partnership through media reports of Zuckerberg’s decision to end the program.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., Friday, Jan. 31, 2020. (George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed when it first learned through media reports and press releases of the end of Meta’s third-party fact-checking partnership that Lead Stories had been a part of since 2019,” he said. he wrote on Tuesday.
Facebook’s fact-checker, which employs several former CNN alumni, including Alan Duke and Ed Payne, has become one of the more prominent fact-checkers used by Facebook in recent years.
PolitiFact similarly mocked the move that ended their eight-year partnership with Meta, stating that Meta first hired them “to identify false information and fraud on its platforms.”
Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, the journalism nonprofit that owns PolitiFact, called Zuckerberg’s statement “disappointing.”
“She perpetuates a misunderstanding of her own agenda,” Brown said of Zuckerberg’s statement. “Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers have never censored anything. And Meta has always held the cards. It’s time to stop invoking inflammatory and false language in describing the role of journalists and fact-checkers.”
AFP, a global news agency based in Paris, said it also learned that Zuckerberg was ending the program at the same time as the public.
“It is a severe blow to the fact-checking community and journalism. We are assessing the situation,” they told Reuters.
Zuckerberg’s decision was widely celebrated by conservativeswho became frustrated with fact-checkers after a number of questionable practices drew the ire of media critics and right-wing online users. In recent years, some fact-checking websites have been accused of acting as shields for the Democratic Party, with partisan motives.
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PolitiFact’s CEO burned Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for announcing the end of fact-checking on his social media platforms. (Kent Nishimura for Getty.)
Conservative KTTH radio host Jason Rantz once called PolitiFact “Democrat activists who have decided to weaponize what should be truly objective analysis” after the organization released several highly contested fact-checks against Republicans.
Rantz at the time said the organization was one of the most “transparent partisan” websites available, often used by left-wing media to amplify political propaganda.
When asked about the 2022 allegations, PolitFact Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders said the fact-checking website stood by his report.
President-elect Donald Trump has often complained about fact-checkers fussy about people behind the moderation practice during the 2024 campaign He celebrated Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking on Tuesday, telling Fox News Digital that the company has “come a long way.”
Before Tuesday’s announcement, Meta advertised several times its third-party fact-checking initiative as an effective system to “reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users.”
All organizations, they said, were tied to Code of principles by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which includes qualities such as “impartiality, fairness, transparency of sources, transparency of funding and organization, and an open and fair policy of due process.”
Meta’s website promoting the program remains active as of Wednesday, despite Zuckerberg blaming the organizations involved for taking their moderation practices “too far.”
In a video announcing the end of the program, Zuckerberg promised to “return to our roots and focus on reducing errors, simplifying our policies and restoring freedom of expression on our platforms.”
Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, hailed the move as “a great opportunity for us to strike a balance in favor of freedom of expression” on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday.
“We went to independent, third-party fact-checkers,” he said later he told Fox News Digital. “It became clear that there is too much political bias in what they decide to fact-check because, basically, they have to fact-check everything they see on the platform.”
“We want to ensure that discourse can take place freely on the platform without fear of censorship,” Kaplan added. “We have the power to change the rules and make them more supportive of free expression. And we’re not just changing the rules, we’re actually changing the way we enforce the rules.”
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Kaplan said Meta is “ending it completely” and will replace it with a “Community Notes” model similar to that used on X, formerly Twitter.
Meta’s global fact-checking program will likely continue to operate without interruption. The company did not respond to a question about the future of Fox News Digital’s global programming.
Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Nikolus Lanum contributed to this report.
