The beginning of the end for the 'fact-checker' con?
On Meta's free speech pivot
Depending on which echo chamber you get your news from, this week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took steps to either save democracy, or to end it.
In a statement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg (now in his manosphere era) said that the social media giant had over-censored user content with its dragnet algorithms, and it was time to “[restore] free expression on our platforms.”
Zuckerberg announced several changes to Meta’s moderation approach, including replacing third-party fact-checkers with a user-driven Community Notes model (like on Elon Musk’s X) and directing resources towards removing illegal content, while “getting rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will also bring back its recommender algorithms for political content, will move its trust and safety operations from California to Texas, and, will “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”
There’s a lot to say about this announcement. Sincere or not, Zuckerberg is obviously doing the politically savvy thing given Trump’s decisive election win. Presiding over the data of more than three billion users, Zuckerberg has access to the best barometer in the world for public sentiment, and it looks like free speech has gone mainstream (But only to a point. More on this further down).
Lifting the curtain on the fact-checker con
Regardless of Zuckerberg’s motivations, I welcome the changes, especially ditching the third-party fact-checkers, which are one of the biggest cons of the digital information age.
Far from the neutral image they try to cultivate, ‘fact-checkers’ often operate moreso as opinion police, employing a range of logical fallacies and argumentation tactics to reassert narrative hegemony in an increasingly decentralised media environment, which is why the term ‘fact-checker’ often appears in sarcastic quote marks on this Substack.
In an unwitting self-own, the New York Times (NYT) lifted the curtain on the artifice with the least self-aware headline of 2025 thus far: ‘Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.’
Zuckerberg said, “the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
We saw a similar phenomenon in Australia during the Voice referendum, when Facebook fact-checking partner RMIT FactLab was suspended by Meta after accusations of political bias (accusations which appear to have been well-founded).
They’re also too often misleading or flat-out wrong. See the Telegraph’s list of five major fact-checker misses for a sample. I’ve documented numerous other faux pas here, here, here, and here.
That’s why, for the problem of dealing with misinformation on social media specifically, I favour democratised, user-generated systems like Community Notes on X instead of top-down information control meted out by "young kids” who “misunderstand the experts,” enforced by algorithms.
As a user of both Meta’s Instagram and Elon Musk’s X, I have personally found Community Notes to be far more effective in adding missing context and busting hoaxes than the laughable efforts of fact-checkers to police jokes, expert opinions, and factually accurate information.
Both the top-down and the user-generated approaches have downsides, but the pitfalls of top-down control exceed those of allowing social media users to thrash it out themselves (furnished with the input of journalists doing their jobs).
The pearl-clutchers are wailing this week about the anticipated explosion of harmful mis- and disinformation on Meta platforms, and performatively leaving Facebook in protest.
But they appear to have quite forgotten that much of the mis- and disinformation proliferating online over the past several years stemmed from official sources, which were bolstered by deferent fact-checks, and pushed to users as ‘authoritative sources.’
And there is the cost of censoring accurate information to account for. “Even if [our algorithms] accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” said Zuckerberg.
Even the most authoritarian-leaning information control zealots would have to admit that banning people from sharing the fact that Covid is airborne a full year into the pandemic on the World Health Organisation’s say-so likely cost lives.
At the most extreme, top-down censorship regimes have claimed millions of lives, as occurred in the Soviet Union and Communist China, where criticisms of politically favoured but disastrous policies (Lysenkoism, Mao’s Great Leap Forward) were banned, resulting in widespread famine and death.
The beginning of the end?
After nearly a decade of heading down this path, Meta’s abandonment of third party-fact-checkers signals a fork in the road, not just for the company, but for the industry.
Meta’s Facebook has more users worldwide than any other platform, meaning fact-checkers just lost their biggest social media partner.
But the change won’t happen overnight, at least not for users outside of the U.S., which is where Meta will begin rolling out its shift to a Community Notes model.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) confirmed in an email that, “advice from Meta [is] that there is no immediate plan to make changes to the third-party fact checking program in Australia.”
The Australian division of AAP FactCheck’s contract with Meta reportedly runs into 2026, and covers fact-checks in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (the company also has relationships with other tech companies like Google and TikTok).
But the writing is on the wall, at least as far as future contracts with Meta are concerned.
Fact-checkers push back
However, the fact-checkers aren’t about to go quietly into the night. It’s big business after all.
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, told the NYT. Poynter is a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners.
Chris Morris, chief executive of UK fact-checker Full Fact, said, “We absolutely refute Meta’s charge of bias – we are strictly impartial, fact-check claims from all political stripes with equal rigour and hold those in power to account through our commitment to truth.”
“Like Meta, fact-checkers are committed to promoting free speech based on good information without resorting to censorship. But locking fact-checkers out of the conversation won’t help society to turn the tide on rapidly rising misinformation.”
And AAP FactCheck CEO Lisa Davies told Crikey that, “AAP FactCheck plays a critical role in responding to disinformation with factual, objective journalism and through media literacy education.”
“Independent fact-checkers are a vital safeguard against the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation that threatens to undermine free democratic debate in Australia and aims to manipulate public opinion.”
U.S. First Amendment vs. The World
In his statement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg foreshadowed a showdown between U.S. First Amendment principles (backed, in his version of the story, by the incoming Trump Administration), and foreign governments pushing for tighter information controls.
"Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there," he said.
“Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
“The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the US government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies.”
Australia can be added to that list. In fact, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fancies Australia to be a world leader in cracking down on social media platforms.
"I know that our strong action is being watched right around the world because other leaders that I've spoken to have indicated that they applaud [it]," he said this week.
Though the Albanese Government’s misinformation bill was unceremoniously dumped at the end of last year after failing to secure critical support, the government achieved a world first in passing legislation to raise the minimum age for social media access to 16.
And, this year the government will force big tech companies to pay for Australian news content, legislate a Digital Duty of Care, and expand the Online Safety Act.
Australia’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland signalled her support for the fact-checker game after Meta’s announcement, stating, “Misinformation can be harmful to people’s health, wellbeing, and to social cohesion.”
“Misinformation … is complex to navigate and hard to recognise. Access to trusted information has never been more important.
“That’s why the Albanese Government is supporting high quality, fact-checked information for the public through ongoing support to ABC, SBS and AAP.”
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has been at loggerheads with X since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform (formerly Twitter) said that Meta will be “required to comply with Australian law, including the Online Safety Act.”
“We will continue holding all technology companies to account for online harms and safety inadequacies.”
The European Commission has also doubled down, stating that its data laws only require social media platforms to remove illegal content which may be harmful, such as to children or to the EU's democracies.
"We absolutely refute any claims of censorship," a Commission spokesperson said.
And Reuters reports that, “Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes, who last year had led the Supreme Court decision that temporarily suspended social media platform X in the country, said on Wednesday tech firms would need to comply with laws in order to keep operating in Brazil.”
Looks like it’s game on.
Free expression on Meta, really?
While some are decrying Meta’s moderation changes as going too far, others say they don’t go far enough, at least not if free expression is truly the goal.
As pointed out by
on Substack, content that remains banned on Meta includes: “Glorification” of so-called “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals” or “violent events;” “Support” for such dangerous individuals, including “directly quoting” them “without caption that condemns, neutrally discusses, or is a part of news reporting,” and; “private information obtained from illegal sources” (e.g: hacked emails?).“The threats to free speech posed by these and other Meta policies are real and cut against Zuckerberg’s purported desire to stand up to government censorship. Guess how Meta decides what constitutes “dangerous organizations”? By relying on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups, per a Human Rights Watch report detailing the platform’s systemic censorship of discourse on the Gaza war. For the high crime of merely interviewing Hamas officials to get them on the record, my former Intercept colleagues Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill over at Drop Site News have had their reporting removed by Meta.”
Digital rights group liber-net has called for Meta to show that it is genuine in its apparent recommitment to free expression by enacting further reforms.
Suggested reforms include, “disclosing all nonpublic portals used for communication between Meta and government officials, making public agreements where government, non-profit or academic researchers have been granted special or exclusive access to Meta product data or APIs, and committing to a yearly public disclosure of "revolving door" employees who cycle between U.S. government positions and roles in the tech industry.”
Grab the popcorn. The anticipation of the impending demise of the fact-checking con. The high stakes if Meta and X lose the information control war with governments in control of enormous markets. The drama of world leaders posturing, tech bros tweeting, academics pontificating, while unbridled users lambast them all in Community Notes… it should be quite the show.
Read the transcript of Zuckerberg’s statement, posted 7 January 2025, here.
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1) "Fact checkers" have no credentials, they're anonymous, they are not transparent or accountable, they have unilateral censorship power. That is not how science operates.
2) Meta is not interested in science or democracy, they're interested in population control via information control, narrative control and communication control. E.g. they're concerned with losing "trust"; they're not concerned about material damage they have caused e.g. causing people to take a dangerous injection. They too are not transparent or accountable. All of this is not how democracy works.
3) Meta will just pivot to achieving (2) by using fake AI accounts to manipulate discussion and "community notes". Facebook is already rife with fake accounts.
These people have already broken cover in terms of what they want to achieve. Nothing has changed.
It's really funny. One day after one of Trump's biggest buddies, Dana White, goes on the board of Meta, Zuck changes his tune on censorship. As you say, grab the popcorn !