For others the financial implications are even more dire. One editor at a US-based fact-checking organization that works with Meta, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told WIRED that Meta’s decision “is going to eventually drain us out.”
— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) January 7, 2025
While the fact-checkers may be technically correct that they didn’t have the authority to meddle with content on Facebook and Instagram, that is sort of like the guy working in the Zyklon B factory claiming he never gassed anyone. Of course, they knew what the result of their work product was, and of course, they acted with political bias. We frequently felt the impact of their work here at RedState. We have had the site threatened with demonetization over posts on climate change, transgenderism, and COVID. When we first reported rumors of a lab leak at Wuhan, we were forced to choose between staying in business and withdrawing a post. Both Mike Ford and I had posts pulled that dealt with January 6. These people were not only evil, but most of them were profoundly stupid. They literally did not understand the subject matter they were reviewing and made no effort to do so; on the bright side, there was no internal check on their journalistic terrorism by Meta, so YOLO;
In addition to the pain of betrayal, an atmosphere of doom permeated that world occupied by lackwits and midwits who fancied themselves the global arbiters of what was “fact.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, blamed the company’s fact-checking partners for some of Facebook’s moderation issues, saying in a video that “fact-checkers have been too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created.”
Here is the full video from Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of censorship and misinformation policies.I highly recommend you watch all of it as tonally it is one of the biggest indications of “elections have consequences” I have ever seen pic.twitter.com/aYpkxrTqWe
Hopefully, this will change the culture in Big Tech from defaulting toward fascistic government control to favoring individual freedom. Only time will tell.
“We heard the news just like everyone else,” says Alan Duke, cofounder and editor in chief of fact-checking site Lead Stories, which started working with Meta in 2019. “No advance notice.”
Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have taken issue with that characterization, saying they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
This you, dawg? https://t.co/w4xgLbATQS pic.twitter.com/kIaCBI0mxS
There was obviously more at stake here than Zuckerberg deciding to do the right thing. In the video, he refers to the election of Donald Trump as “a cultural tipping point.” On November 27, Zuckerberg trekked to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage (Bending the Knee: Now Mark Zuckerberg Makes the Pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago – RedState). That visit was followed by a $1 million contribution to Trump’s inaugural (Oh, Please: Zuckerberg Kicks in $1 Million Peace Offering to Trump’s Inauguration Fund – RedState). Zuckerberg knows he’s up to his eyebrows in highly questionable censorship activity at the behest of the Biden administration and that no one is around to rescue him now.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement earlier Tuesday that Meta platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, were abandoning the East German style censorship by “fact checking” in favor of other methods caught just about everyone by surprise; see WHOA: Meta Ends Fact-Checking As Zuckerberg Vows to Restore Free Expression on Facebook – RedState. The most surprised were the people currently grifting off, sorry, I mean employed by Meta as fact checkers. According to reports, Meta’s contract fact checkers only learned they were out of work when the rest of us did.
On Wednesday morning, the International Fact-Checking Network (there actually is such a thing) will convene an emergency meeting of its members to decide what to do. The money stream has dried up, and the few remaining clients for KGB-like editorial control don’t have deep pockets. Most of them will, if there is justice, spend a long period of time unemployed and suffer financial devastation. The next hobo you see living in a refrigerator carton under an overpass may be the same guy who labeled your post on Hunter Biden’s laptop as disinformation and had your webpage demonetized.