The Media Research Center’s celebratory dance over the death of fact-checking at Meta (Facebook and Instagram) continued in a Jan. 8 post by Alex Christy:
The Daily Show’s host-of-the-week Desi Lydic and The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon used their respective shows on Comedy Central and NBC on Wednesday to attack Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his decision to ditch the company’s relationship with fact-checking companies. As Lydic and Fallon tell it, if someone calls themselves a fact-checker, they must be an unbiased observer of the truth who simply tells it like it is, and Zuckerberg’s move will be devastating for those who believe in truth.
Lydic began by declaring, “But knowing how much Trump lies, it’s more important than ever for everyone to rededicate themselves to the pursuit of truth.”
After a clip of CNN’s John Berman reporting on the news, Lydic resumed, “Or that! Guess you could just live your truth. That’s right. Facebook is ending fact-checking, as Mark Zuckerberg announced, apparently while entering his Gen Z era.”
It is amazing that Lydic did not see the irony of lamenting the demise of Meta’s relationship with the fact-checking outlets while referencing the progressive idea of living “your truth.” As it was, Zuckerberg was then shown in a clip stating that “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech [jump cut] Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
After some more jokes about Zuckerberg’s fashion sense, Lydic asserted that Zuckerberg was unwittingly insulting conservatives, “I got to say, though, saying, ‘We realized relying on facts was discriminating against our Republican users’ is kind of a big diss to conservatives. It’s like saying, ‘Sorry, our no skid mark policy was singling out Greg. All underwear stains are welcome.’”
In the real world, it is an admission that fact-checkers sometimes need to be fact-checked, and once you acknowledge that, it becomes untenable to have a group of gatekeepers who claim they get to determine what objective truth is and punish others for dissenting from that judgment.
We remember the numerous meltdowns the MRC has had when its own work got fact-checked.
MRC chief Brent Bozell did some more crowing about this in a Jan. 8 TV hit:
After Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg agreed to end fact-checking and turn back censorship on his platforms, MRC Founder and President Brent Bozell exposed how Zuckerberg’s announcement was a vindication of the serious grievances and hard work of free speech advocates.
Bozell made clear the significance of Zuckerberg’s promises and admissions during an interview on the Jan. 8 edition of Christian Broadcasting Network’s The 700 Club. Zuckerberg “was unequivocal in recognizing that they have been in the business of censorship as we’ve been saying for years, and they’ve been denying for years,” Bozell said. He went on to blast the fact checkers who have also fallen from grace.
Bozell exposed the lie that allowed fact checkers to wield so much power on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. “The supposition was that by third-party, you meant independent,” Brent said before shredding the obvious lie. “Well it wasn’t. It all came out of Silicon Valley. They were all left-wingers, and they were all devoted to shutting down conservatives.”
Maybe if right-wingers didn’t lie so much, that wouldn’t be an issue. Still, Tim Graham did even more crowing in his Jan. 8 podcast:
Mark Zuckerberg fired the so-called “independent fact-checkers” from the Meta websites. He said they’re so biased they “destroyed more trust than they created.” That’s correct, but we didn’t expect Daddy Zuckerbucks to say it out loud. It sounds like what we’ve been saying about the “fact-checkers.” Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider says this is a big victory.
The New York Times posted an article with this headline:
Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.
The Times reporter dutifully repeated that “Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
Graham offered no evidence that the facts themselves were inherently “leftist.” Instead, he whined that :
Schneider points out that the radical tilt is underlined when funders of groups like PolitiFact are leftists like George Soros, and teachers union bosses like Randi Weingarten want their “media literacy lessons” taught in schools.
Graham offered no evidence that the facts themselves were inherently “leftist.” Instead, he whined:
Meanwhile, CNN’s Brian Stelter was tweeting “The very notion of fact-checking is under assault by a wide array of fact-challenged politicians and interest groups…he 2016 phrase “war on truth” comes to mind…” It just sounds like the more anti-Trump you are, the more “pro-truth” you are. That’s a long-standing CNN pose.
Has Graham or anyone else at the MRC ever fact-checked Trump? Not that we’re aware of.
Christy complained when it was pointed out that Meta’s new planned fact-checking model — Community Notes on X — doesn’t work very well, then tried to make excuses for it:
After Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company will be dumping its partnership with fact-checking companies in favor of a X-like community notes-style method of combating misinformation, PolitiFact tried to fearmonger about such a move. Unfortunately for writer Angela Fu, any criticism she had could also apply to PolitiFact and its partners.
On Wednesday, Fu relied on “experts” who naturally told her what she wanted to hear. Championing one side’s experts is one reason why fact-checkers have burned their credibility. For example, in 2022, PolitiFact rated Sen. Mitch McConnell “false” because liberal experts disagreed with his take on a Democratic “voting rights” bill; the fact that PolitiFact also interviewed CATO’s Ilya Shapiro, who agreed with McConnell, had no impact on their rating.
Fu also warned, “Fact-checkers say that they’ve noticed misinformation go unchecked on X. Science Feedback, a fact-checking organization in the U.S. that was part of Meta’s program, analyzed X posts from the 2024 European Parliament elections. It found that out of the 894 tweets that professional fact-checkers identified as containing misinformation, only 11.7% had a Community Note attached.”
Because the European Fact-Checking Standards Network only provides its data upon request, readers are left to simply guess what those 894 tweets said, although climate-related issues are likely disproportionately represented. Furthermore, it is not like the fact-checkers fact-check everything themselves.
Christy then mocked the reasonable fear that lack of guardrails could leave people open to threats of violence in the way that Facebook fueled ethnic violence in Myanmar:
NBC senior reporter on all things internet, Brandy Zadrozny, joined MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Thursday’s edition of The 11th Hour to discuss Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to revise the company’s rules of what constitutes acceptable speech. Zadrozny was not there for subtlety or nuance as she suggested the door is now open for a Myanmar-style genocide.
[…]Fortunately for everyone, there is nothing in Meta’s new guidelines that suggests calling for genocide or race massacres is acceptable conduct. As for dumping machine learning, Zuckerberg has said the system simply made too many mistakes.
Christy also got mad that that Zadrozny pointed out that “Sometimes conservatives say they are censored, which is not true, according to the data and research. That is not actually happening. But they feel that it is, and their feelings are more important than your truth, so we are going to roll back the things that we have instituted to try to keep those users safe. We don’t care about those people.”
Clay Waters started a post about a New York Times article about the Meta switch by lashing out at the reporters:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement about the supposed return of unfettered free speech on his platforms was cynically reported in the lead story slot on Wednesday.by New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac and Theodore Schleifer, who covers “billionaires” (though perhaps not leftist billionaire George Soros, given that criticism of him is posed as anti-Semitic)
That’s because no small amount of it really is anti-Semitic — including that pushed by Waters’ employer.
Waters followed that with another post complaining that PBS pointed out the likely result of Meta’s move:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s startling announcement that his company’s Facebook and Instagram sites would drop its censorious fact-checking process scared the press and leftist academics, who would no longer be able to use pseudo-scientific concepts like “misinformation” to silence conservative debate on issues like COVID, radical Islam, Black Lives Matter, and “climate change.”
Tuesday’s edition of the PBS News Hour was a prime example, with co-anchor Geoff Bennett warning in the show’s introduction: “Facebook and Instagram end their fact-checking program, a move critics say will pave the way for a spike in misinformation.”
Waters then falsely framed fact-checkers as perpetuating a “censorship regime” versus “so-called conservative disinformation.” He didn’t explain why facts are now “so-called.”