Experts and journalists hope that Meta will continue to towards freedom of speech and eschew the content moderation policies that plagued Facebook under the Biden administration.
“Meta has a history of bad behavior during the Biden era. They took direction from the government to monitor the news of COVID-19; they shut down the New York Post's Hunter Biden story division; they used analysts who accepted the word administration as fact and not opinion,” New York Post reporter Karol Markowicz told Fox News Digital.
He said that while “recognition” of Meta's past mistakes is important, people should welcome the company's acknowledgment that they “did bad things and would like to be better.”
“I hope that Zuckerberg has seen the light and will continue to run Facebook in the direction of free speech,” Markowicz, who works on iHeartRadio, said of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It is also important to remember that there are companies, such as Rumble or Telegram and X / Twitter once Elon Musk bought it, that were doing the right thing even when it was difficult with a hostile system of Biden. Those companies should be celebrated.”
Meta's announcement of the return of “free speech” comes after years of testing against the company's real-world analysis and content measurement methods. (Nicolas TUCAT/AFP/Jason Henry/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The third-party fact-checking program Meta was created after the 2016 election and had been used to “control content” and misinformation on its platform, mainly due to “political pressure,” executives said. , but they believe the system “also went. away.”
April lesson from the Center for Media Research said that Facebook has “intruded” on US elections several times over the past few cycles.
The study said that Facebook “screened” the 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the 2022 Senate and congressional candidates. In 2021, Facebook “deleted the account of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase,” and “raised its blocking tools to focus more on Donald Trump” and “blocked ads of politics a week before the elections” in 2020.
“It has also promoted liberal content in its Trending News section while listing conservative celebrities like Ted Cruz,” MRC wrote.
In August 2018, Facebook came under fire after the platform deleted a number of videos on Conservative nonprofit, PragerU. The company later reversed that decision, admitting that the content was falsely reported as “hate speech.”
JONATHAN TULEY: META'S ZUCKERBERG MAKES A FREE SPEECH THAT CAN REALLY CHANGE.
Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday that his company will use a new data tracking system similar to Social Data on Elon Musk's X. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Republicans later claimed that Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied allegations that Facebook was biased against conservative accounts and news.
Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram faced fallout leading up to the 2020 election after the company throttled access to Hunter Biden's infamous laptop story.
Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he had decided to check the New York Post story after the FBI warned him about “possible Russian activity” regarding the Biden family and Burisma.
“It has since been clarified that the report was not Russian news, and in retrospect, we should not have taken the story down,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We've changed our policies and procedures to ensure this doesn't happen again – for example, we no longer take things down temporarily in the US while we wait for inspectors,” he said.
Last year, Meta's CEO sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee where he admitted that he felt under pressure from the Biden administration, in particular. on the issues of COVID, even things like satire and comedy.
CONSERVATIVES REJOICE AT 'JAW DROPPING' META CENSORSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT: 'TOO MUCH FOR FREE SPEECH'
The New York Times sparked controversy when it highlighted real critics who disagreed with comments from Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. (New York Times building photo courtesy of CAMERA | Zuckerberg photo from Kent Nishimura)
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS anchor Gayle King that his platform had removed 18 million posts containing “misinformation” about the virus.
In 2022, several federal prosecutors gathered evidence that Zuckerberg was connected with the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Dr. Anthony Fauci to “disdain and suppress” the idea that the virus of COVID-19 may have. It originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced that Meta will end its fact-checking program and promote content moderation policies to “bring back free speech” to the Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms.
Fact-checking organizations that were dismissed by Meta said they were disappointed by the news and ridiculed. allegations of bias. They also shift the blame back to Meta, suggesting that the company's policies limiting the exposure of branded content were the real cause of the tech corporation's performance.
Experts who spoke to Fox News Digital acknowledged Meta's fault for suppressing information but criticized real critics for changing their facts to fit their beliefs and opinions.
TRUMP SAYS META 'TOOK A LONG TIME' AFTER ZUCKERBERG'S SON FINALLY EXPLORED SOME PLANETS.
Meta platforms are displayed on a smartphone screen, with the Meta logo appearing in the background in Chania, Greece, on August 9, 2024. (Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“These critics brought this up,” said MRC Vice President of Free Speech Dan Schneider. “They pretended to be impartial. They pretended to be fair brokers. All the evidence is against them.”
Zuckerberg's announcement that Meta would replace the note-taking groups with a system similar to X's Community Notes drew mixed reactions. While some have marked it as a significant step away from the potential trends of rating agencies, others suggest that Meta has taken away from their ambitions to measure content.
DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former Google consultant, said that while he believes it's the “right move” for Meta and that a Community Notes-style system is an “interesting idea,” it must becoming a “cesspool.” A type of “vox populi,” Public Information allows ordinary X users, through registration, to present police information and provide context or corrections.
“Maybe if Meta uses data wisely, that data can be used to train AI to become a powerful content monitoring system, but I think that would be a bad idea too if that's what they're taking as the following. The truth is that the internet is full of the loudest people in the room. There are many people who lurk on the internet, read the news, watch the drama, but never contribute. therefore never their thoughts put into it. text or video that can train this AI,” he said.
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“What we really need if we want a balanced democratic AI is to get input from the people who don't make the news online – everyone from the middle and quiet people to the people who politics and higher authorities do not. Having time to use the internet, but if we had it, maybe we wouldn't have had these problems in the first place, because the reason why this problem is so difficult, “ho add Toscano.
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Marcowicz was more optimistic, calling Social Data on X a “good” approach and suggesting that the new system might be worse than the current version of Facebook and Instagram.
“X has been able to use its best users to contribute to the Social Data system and Facebook should try the same,” he continued. “Not everyone can enter Public Data, or the system can be hacked, and that's what makes the whole thing worthwhile.”