Biden Calls Meta’s Decision To End Fact-Checking Program “Really Shameful”

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times,

President Joe Biden has shared his disapproval at Meta’s decision to do away with its current social media fact-checking program.

This week Meta, which owns the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms, announced it would stop using its third-party fact-checking program for U.S.-based content review purposes.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he made the decision because the existing fact-checking program has become “too politically biased,” resulting in censorship and a loss of trust.

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said in a Jan. 7 video statement.

Asked for his opinion on the move at a Jan. 10 press conference, Biden said, “It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about.”

Up until this week, Meta had partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to run its third-party fact-checking service. The IFCN is administered by the Poynter Institute, which also operates the PolitiFact fact-checking publication.

“The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say ‘by the way from this point on, we’re not going to fact-check anything’ and you know when you have millions of people reading, going online reading this stuff it’s—anyway, I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said.

Meta is not doing away with fact-checking outright. Rather, Zuckerberg said Meta’s platforms will move toward a “more comprehensive community notes” style system, similar to the one employed by social media platform X. He will start the new model in the United States.

Rather than relying on a fact-checking organization such as the IFCN to review content, X’s community notes feature allows users to weigh in directly. X users may suggest a fact-checking note on controversial posts on the platform, and then provide feedback on whether a suggested fact-checking note is itself accurate, and necessary for the particular post. Posts that have been flagged with sufficient community input display an attached fact-checking note explaining why the particular post is inaccurate or may be missing important context.

Zuckerberg also announced that Meta’s content moderation team will be moved out of California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

Zuckerberg and other Meta officers have defended the move as needed to restore free speech and expression to their platforms.

In a Jan. 7 blog post, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said as well-intentioned as their prior fact-checking efforts had been, “they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users, and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.”

“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” Kaplan said.

Meta’s fact-checking and content moderation decisions had been a point of contention during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

In October 2020, the Meta platforms reduced the reach of posts linking to articles by The New York Post concerning a laptop that then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had reportedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. The New York Post’s articles detailed the contents of the laptop, including documents indicating the elder Biden had some level of interaction with his son’s foreign business partners.

In a Jan. 10 interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg alleged that officials in the Biden administration routinely contacted Meta, with demands that they remove or suppress certain content, including memes and satirical posts.

“Basically these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive a response by press time.