FASHION: Zuckerberg and Facebook have had conflicting positions over the years on censorship

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s past comments about censorship resurfaced after his decision stop fact-checking on its American platformsrevealing a legendary range of seemingly contradictory positions that seemed to put him at odds with his company.

When controversy erupted over his refusal to fact-check political ads in 2019, Zuckerberg said 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 this in an interview with CBS at that time.

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“In general, I think that basically people should decide what’s trustworthy, what they want to believe and who they want to vote for, and I don’t think that should be what we want from tech companies or any kind of other company (to) make, ” – he said in an interview with Fox News in the same year.

He also gave a speech at Georgetown University in 2019 criticizing China for curbing free speech online.

In 2020, Zuckerberg doubled down on his stance, saying in a subsequent interview with Fox News: “I just strongly believe that Facebook should not be the arbiter of truth in everything that people say on the Internet. Private companies probably shouldn’t be like that, especially these platforms, shouldn’t be able to do that.”

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But just a month after that appearance, Zuckerberg’s Meta, then Facebook, announced it was expanding its fact-checking program in the U.S. 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 the social media site. The company did not renew Trump’s account until January 2023.

In April 2024 Zuckerberg admitted in the letter that Facebook was under pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to force Americans to censor COVID-19 content. Zuckerberg said he did not support the decision, despite accepting it, and expressed remorse for bowing to pressure from Biden officials.

The tech mogul’s previous comments came back into the spotlight this week after he announced that Meta was lifting word restrictions to “restore freedom of speech” on Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms by ending its third-party fact-checking program, admitting that their content moderation practices have gone “too far”.

The third-party fact-checking program Meta 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.

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.

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Reuters, USA Today, The Dispatch, PolitiFact, Agence France-Presse US, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, Science Feedback and Univision’s ElDetector make up the team of third-party fact-checking partners, Facebook confirmed to Fox News Digital.

They were told to prioritize “provably false claims, especially those that are timely, popular and consequential. They do not prioritize claims that are irrelevant 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, calling his attempt to avoid online bias misguided and sudden.

Lead Stories editor Maarten Schenk expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the move, saying he was only informed of the partnership’s termination through media reports of Zuckerberg’s decision to cut the program.

“Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed to learn from media reports and a press release about the termination of the Meta Third-Pity Fact-Checking Partnership, of which Lead Stories has been a part since 2019,” he said. wrote on Tuesday.

Facebook’s fact-checker, which is staffed by 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 derided the move, which ended an eight-year partnership with Meta, saying that Meta initially hired them “to identify false information and hoaxes on their platforms.”

Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, the journalism nonprofit that owns PolitiFact, called Zuckerberg’s announcement “disappointing.”

“It perpetuates a misunderstanding of one’s own agenda,” Brown said of Zuckerberg’s statement. “Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything. And Meta always held the cards in his hands. It’s time to stop using inflammatory and false language to describe the role of journalists and fact-checkers.”

AFP, a global news agency based in Paris, said it also learned that Zuckerberg was canceling the program at the same time as the public.

“This is a severe blow to the fact-checking community and to journalism. We are assessing the situation.” they told Reuters.

Zuckerberg’s decision was widely celebrated by conservativeswho have become disenchanted with fact-checking after a series of questionable actions sparked outrage from media critics and right-wing internet users. In recent years, some have accused fact-checking websites of acting as shields for the Democratic Party with partisan intent.

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Conservative KTTH radio host Jason Rantz once called PolitiFact “Democratic activists who decided to use what should be a really objective analysis” after the organization published some highly controversial fact-checks against Republicans.

Rantz, at the time – the organization said was one of the most “transparently partisan” websites, often used by left-wing media to boost political propaganda.

When asked about the 2022 allegation, PolitFact Editor-in-Chief Kathy Sanders said the fact-checking site supported his reporting.

President-elect Donald Trump has often complained about fact-checking hurting people for moderation practices throughout the 2024 campaign. On Tuesday, he noted Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking, telling Fox News Digital that the company has “come a long way.”

Until Tuesday’s Meta announcement repeatedly advertised 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 obliged Code of principles developed by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which includes qualities such as “impartiality, fairness, transparency of sources, transparency of funding and organization, and open and honest correctional policies.”

The Meta webpage promoting the program remains active as of Wednesday, despite Zuckerberg accusing the organizations involved of taking the moderation practice “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 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” Tuesday.

“We turned to independent third-party fact-checkers,” he later said said Fox News Digital. “It’s become clear that there’s too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, because basically they can fact-check anything they see on the platform.”

“We want to make sure that discourse can happen freely on the platform without fear of censorship,” Kaplan added. “We have the power to change the rules and make them more favorable to free speech. And we’re not just changing the rules, we’re actually changing the way we enforce them.”

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Kaplan said Meta is “discontinuing that completely” and will replace it with a “Community Notes” model similar to that used by X, formerly Twitter.

It looks like Meta’s global fact-checking program will run smoothly. The company did not respond to a question about the future of Fox News Digital’s global programming.

Fox News’ Brooke Syngman and Nicholas Lanum contributed to this report.