Courage can be contagious. Sometimes it just takes one brave soul to stand up – a lá Spartacus – to cause a domino effect.
That may be what we’re looking at here, as Meta/Facebook announces an end to their notorious “fact-checking” program.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself delivered the good news, saying, “We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the U.S.”
Call it the Elon Effect, or maybe even the cooler ‘X Effect.’
Whatever you call it, also call it good news – because independent outlets like The Political Insider have been severely harmed by the “fact-checkers” and partisan actors who control what you’re allowed to see on social media platforms.
RELATED: MSNBC Finally Admits Biden’s Damning Record On The Border: Trump ‘Is Not Wrong’
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, even went on Fox News of all places to make the announcement. (Which makes sense – Facebook’s demographic skews a little older, and more conservative; precisely the people who have been so long abused by the censorship regimes of the last few years.)
Specifically, Kaplan addressed the elephant in the room: “We went to independent, third-party fact-checkers. It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform.”
Let me tell you folks – you simply wouldn’t believe the things The Political Insider has been “fact-checked” on, or the dire consequences those attacks have on the ability of small, independent publishers to be seen. Several years ago, The Political Insider would regularly draw millions of readers per month from Facebook. Now, that number is a tiny fraction of what it was.
For independent outlets like The Political Insider – outlets that aren’t backed by billionaires like others in conservative media – revenue comes largely from page views. Cut off the page views, cut off the revenue, kill the source.
(Speaking of, if I may be so bold: If you sign up for the newsletter, no social media platform can prevent you from getting the news!)
Kaplan continued: “Instead of going to some so-called expert, it instead relies on the community and the people on the platform to provide their own commentary to something that they’ve read. We think that’s a much better approach rather than relying on so-called experts who bring their own biases into the program.”
Watch Mark Zuckerberg’s entire announcement here:
Remember When the Internet Was Free?
I gotta say folks, they at least seem sincere. Kaplan even acknowledged that the hottest of hot-button issues would be fair game again, saying that the previous rules were “too restrictive and not allowing enough discourse around sensitive topics like immigration, trans issues and gender.”
For some of us, those who grew up as teens in the 90’s when the internet was becoming ubiquitous, we remember a completely different internet. Search engines actually showed you what you were looking for, not what they wanted you to see. There was no such thing as getting throttled for saying things people didn’t like.
There were certainly no organizations filled with former CIA officials and other spooks trying to control the narrative.
It remains to be seen how free Facebook will become. But I gotta say – doesn’t it feel nice to at least know we’re moving in the right direction again?
