Flashback: Meta’s ‘history of censorship’, fact-checking problems under the Trump and Biden administrations

Experts and journalists hope that Meta will continue move towards freedom of 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 took instructions from the government to censor COVID-19 content; they shut down sharing of the New York Post Hunter Biden story; they used fact-checkers who took the word of the administration as fact, not opinion ” New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz told Fox News Digital.

She said that while “caution” about Meta’s past mistakes is important, people should welcome the company’s admission that they “have done bad things and would like to do better.”

“I hope Zuckerberg has seen the light and continues to move Facebook in the direction of free speech,” Markowicz, who co-hosts iHeartRadio’s Normally, said of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s also important to remember that there are companies, like Rumble or Telegram, and then X/Twitter after it was bought by Elon Musk, that did the right thing even when the going got tough with a hostile Biden administration. Those companies should be celebrated.”

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Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was introduced after the 2016 election and has been used to “manage content” and misinformation on its platforms, primarily due to “political pressure,” executives said, but acknowledged the system has “gone too far.”

Study from April from the conservative Media Research Center claimed that Facebook has “interfered” in US elections dozens of times over the past few cycles.

Study says Facebook “censored” 2,024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 2,022 candidates for the Senate and Congress. In 2021, Facebook “deleted the account of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase” and “reinforced its censorship apparatus with a particular focus on Donald Trump” and “shut down political advertising a week before the 2020 election.”

“He also artificially elevated liberal news in his Trending News section while blacklisting popular conservatives like Ted Cruz,” MRC wrote.

In August 2018, Facebook came under fire after the platform deleted scores of videos from conservative nonprofit, PragerU. The company later reversed the decision, admitting that the content had been falsely reported as “hate speech.”

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Republicans later alleged that Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied allegations that Facebook engaged in bias against conservative accounts and content.

Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram faced backlash leading up to the 2020 election after the company throttled access to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story.

Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he had decided to do so censor the New York Post story after the FBI alerted him to a “potential Russian disinformation operation” regarding the Biden family and Burisma.

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

Last year, Meta’s CEO sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he acknowledged that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, particularly with regard to the COVID content, and even items like satire and humor.

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

In 2022, several state attorneys gathered evidence alleging that Zuckerberg coordinated with the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci to “discredit and suppress” the theory that the COVID-19 virus could have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that Meta will end its fact-checking program and end content moderation policies to “restore freedom of expression” on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta platforms.

The fact-checking organizations whose contracts were terminated by Meta said they were disappointed and ridiculed by the news. accusations of bias. They also shifted the blame back to Meta, suggesting that the company’s policies limiting exposure of flagged content were the real catalyst behind the tech corporation’s censorship.

Experts who spoke to Fox News Digital acknowledged Meta’s culpability for withholding information, but criticized fact-checkers for adjusting their ratings to personal beliefs and opinions.

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“These fact-checkers brought this on themselves,” said MRC Vice President of Free Speech Dan Schneider. “They pretended not to be biased. They pretended to be fair brokers. All the evidence says otherwise.”

Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would replace fact-checking groups with a system closer to X’s Community Notes drew mixed reactions. While some have characterized this as a significant step forward in the face of potential bias by fact-checking organizations, others have suggested that Meta has pulled back the guardrails from their content moderation ambitions.

DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former Google consultant, said that while he believed it was the “right move” for Meta and that a Community Notes-style system was an “interesting concept,” it was bound to turn into a “cesspool.” A sort of “vox populi,” Community Notes allow regular X users, through a login system, to monitor content and provide context or corrections.

“Perhaps if Meta uses annotations intelligently, those annotations can be used to train an AI that will then turn it into a more robust content tracking system, but I think that would also be a bad idea if that’s something they’re considering as the next thing. The reality is that an internet full of the loudest people in the room, just lurking online, reading content, watching drama, but never participating thoughts never putting into text or video that can train this artificial intelligence,” he said.

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“What we really need if we want a democratic AI to moderate content is to get content from people who don’t create content online – everyone from people who are centrist and quiet to political figures and high-level executives who don’t have time to use “But if we had that, we’d probably never have these problems, and that’s why this problem is so difficult,” Toscano added.

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Marcowicz was more optimistic, calling Community Notes on X an “excellent” approach and suggesting that the new system is unlikely to be worse than Facebook and Instagram’s current model.

“X was able to leverage its best users to contribute to Community Notes and Facebook should try something similar,” she continued. “Not everyone can put up Community Notes or the system can get overwhelmed, and that’s what makes the whole thing so useful.”