President Joe Biden on Friday lambasted Meta’s decision to replace its third-party fact-checking program with user-generated “community notes” on Facebook and Instagram as “shameful.”
The change marks Meta’s renewed commitment to free speech and represents the social media conglomerate’s rightward shift as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office. Biden called out CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the decision.
“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 . . . I think it’s really shameful,” Biden told reporters at the White House.
The outgoing president added he believes the American people “want to tell the truth,” suggesting that Zuckerberg’s decision undermines that.
Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced Meta would make several changes to its content moderation policies to allow users to freely discuss controversial topics such as immigration or gender without the fear of being censored as a result.
In the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory, Facebook launched its independent fact-checking program to address the mainstream media’s concerns “about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” Zuckerberg said this week. The platform has since wrestled with how to handle “misinformation” on numerous issues, such as the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines.
Zuckerberg admitted the fact-checkers were “too politically biased,” which is why Meta ended the program altogether.
In place of its fact-checking program, Meta will adopt a community notes system that Elon Musk pioneered with X after he bought Twitter in 2022.
Over the past four years, the Biden administration pressured Facebook into censoring posts made by conservative voices that went against the White House’s prevailing political narrative on certain issues, especially the Covid-19 pandemic. Zuckerberg revealed as much in a letter to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) last August.
While taking responsibility for complying to Democrats’ demands, the tech executive continues to throw the Biden administration under the bus.
Invited by Joe Rogan to discuss Meta’s stunning reversal on his podcast, Zuckerberg recounted how Biden officials would berate Facebook staff in making their case for removing heterodox content from the platform.
“Basically, these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and, like, scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg told Rogan in an episode that aired Friday. “It just got to this point where we were like, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna take down things that are true. That’s ridiculous.'”
Biden officials apparently asked Facebook to take down a meme that showed Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood pointing at a television screen advertising a class action lawsuit for those who took the Covid-19 vaccine.
The meme reads: “10 years from now you will be watching TV and hear . . . ‘Did you or a loved one take the covid vaccine? You may be entitled . . .'”
“They’re like, ‘No, you have to take that down,'” Zuckerberg said on Rogan’s show. “We said, ‘No, we’re not gonna, we’re not to take down humor and satire. We’re not gonna take down things that are, that are true.'”
Notably, he said his own company’s fact-checking process was “something out of 1984,” referring to George Orwell’s dystopian novel.
Following Trump’s reelection victory in November, Meta has taken significant steps in changing its policies and leadership to match the company’s renewed vision.
Meta terminated its internal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, announcing the move in an employee memo that Axios first reported on Friday. The social media company also removed the transgender and nonbinary “themes” on its Messenger chat app this week and ordered the removal of tampons from the men’s bathrooms at its offices in Silicon Valley, Texas, and New York.
Last week, Joel Kaplan was named the new head of Meta’s global policy team. Kaplan is one of the social media company’s most prominent Republicans, who has advocated against restrictions on political speech on its platforms and helped change Facebook’s algorithm in a way that would champion conservative publications on the app.
One day before Zuckerberg’s announcement, Meta appointed UFC CEO Dana White as one of its three new board directors. White is the most notable member tapped, considering he is a strong supporter of Trump and has organized the president-elect’s appearances at UFC matches.