Meta chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is defending his decision.
The 40-year-old Facebook exec went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to defend his recent decision to end fact-checking on Meta, including Facebook and Instagram.
“I’ve been working on this for a long time, so, I mean, you’ve got to do what you think is right,” he began.
He then pointed out the two events that caused it to be first instituted: Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president coinciding with Brexit in the U.K, followed by the pandemic in 2020.
“I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time, we just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds,” he explained.
“At the time I was really sort of ill-prepared to kind of parse what was going on. I think part of my reflection looking back on this is, I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath [of Trump’s election] I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, ‘OK, there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation.’”
He went on to say that “started with the Russia-collusion stuff” but “it kind of morphed into different things over time.”
“I took this and just kind of assumed that everyone was acting in good faith, and I said, ‘OK, well there are concerns about misinformation.’ If you ask people, no one says that they want misinformation, so maybe there’s something that we should do to basically try to address this,” Mark said.
“I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world… That’s like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service.”
Meta established a system that used third-party fact-checkers to identify “very clear hoaxes,” like flat Earthers, and “it just sort of veered from there.”
“I think to some degree it’s because some of the people whose job is to do fact-checking, a lot of their industry is focused on political fact-checking. So they just kind of veered in that direction,” he explained.
Meta’s fact-checking program became “something out of like, you know, ‘1984,’ one of these books where it really is a slippery slope. And it just got to a point where it’s just, ‘OK, this is destroying so much trust especially in the United States to have this program’…I really started coming to the conclusion that we were going to need to change something about that.”
Instead, Meta will adopt a “community notes” model similar to Elon Musk’s X after the system led to “too many mistakes and too much censorship.”
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