Facebook steps back from censorship; Washington Post's head explodes

The Post lies to the point of hilarity about the comeback of free speech

Ever been to Facebook jail for, among numerous other things, raising questions about the safety of vaccines or the origin of the Covid virus? I haven’t, but several of my friends have. Facebook (I guess more recently known as Meta) now has had second thoughts. As reported by the liberal but smart Nate Silver in his piece, “The rise and fall of ‘fact-checking’":

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of changes to Facebook and Instagram that will considerably dial down the level of content moderation on those platforms. As someone who tries to be non-hypocritically pro-free speech, my inclination is to welcome the changes….

I’m going to focus solely on the first of five new policies that Zuckerberg announced. Here it is in his own words:

First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US. So, over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system.

The news is that Facebook is eliminating a partnership that began in December 2016 with independent fact-checking organizations and replacing them with a Twitter/X style Community Notes program.

A “fact -checker,” for those of our readers who might not have noticed — which I suspect is none — is a hardcore Leftist who views things differently from how you do and, up to now, has had and used his mighty social media platform to erase, or put in some place no one can find, the contrarian, neanderthal view you typed on Facebook.

The fact-checking partnership was implemented during what was something of a moral panic on the left about “fake news” and the role it played in Trump’s first election win. I’ve always thought this was at most a minor factor in Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

Still, the term “fake news” took off after 2016 — and so did the notion of perpetual, round-the-clock fact-checking. “Fake news” waned in popularity once Trump embraced the term, but right on cue, the more scientific-sounding terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” displaced it. Before Trump’s election, meanwhile, broader public interest in fact-checking was pretty much limited to election years. But by 2017, Trump’s first year in office, Google searches for “fact check” almost three times higher than four years earlier in 2013.

Just so. Can’t have that “disinformation” (once known as “a different opinion” and quaintly welcomed in days of yore by free speech fans).

Long having an ambivalent relationship to the news and under political pressure — Facebook was blamed for the influence of Russian disinformation on the 2016 campaign — the company green-lit the partnership. Now, after getting called into Congressional hearing after Congressional hearing, making huge missteps on the Hunter Biden laptop story and suppressing legitimate discussions of COVID origins — and then being threatened by Trump — you can see why Zuckerberg feels burned. If this week’s decision was motivated by political and business incentives rather than high-minded principles — and it almost certainly was — so was adopting the fact-checking program eight years ago.

DING DING DING — although Silver downplays Zuckerberg’s own political leanings.

And here’s the graph of the year (so far), unfortunately buried pretty far down in Silver’s article:

Goodness gracious! They were all a bunch of Lefties from the get-go! Who woulda thunk it?

You should read the whole of Silver’s article. Very much worth your time.

Still, that’s only half the story. The other unintentionally hilarious half is the Washington Post’s nearly terminal indigestion that something resembling free speech is making a comeback. (N.B. — I’ve always believed that one of the strongest reasons to vote for DJT was to repudiate and damage the decades-long liberal-fascist hold on culture and in particular on journalism).

Here’s some of it from the Post’s “5 Minute Fix,” (which is actually more like the 50 year fix):

Owners of social media and traditional media companies are making decisions that appear to benefit President-elect Donald Trump before he even takes office. Guardrails to counter false information and extreme speech are “under attack” in unprecedented ways, as one media analyst put it to me.

This week, Meta announced that it’s getting rid of its fact-checking on its platforms, Facebook, Instagram and Threads, citing Trump’s win as a “cultural tipping point” and echoing Trump’s efforts to muddy legitimate fact-checking…

Here’s what all of this could mean for truthful information, according to social media, journalism and free speech experts who spoke with The 5-Minute Fix.

You gotta love it. “Guardrails to counter false information and extreme speech” is a drawn-out but surprisingly transparent way of saying “censorship.” That the Washington Post is so utterly unable to understand this or hear itself is, in roughly equal parts, ominous and comical.

Some experts warn that the changes to Facebook, Threads and Instagram will allow misinformation, disinformation, extreme speech and even hate speech to thrive on the sites.

Oh the horror! And announced by none less than the WaPo’s ever-handy “experts”!! Are we going to have to live with extreme speech? Does the Post mean stuff like Ms. Harris’s calling Trump a fascist (which the Post gleefully published about a zillion times)?

The Post then makes this glancing and muffled pseudo-concession to sanity: “At the same time, experts say that allowing people to flag problematic posts in real time could work well if done right.” Or, as Thomas Jefferson might have put it, “…allowing people to debate differing views in real time could work well” and might even, someday, be called “free speech.”

Mark Zuckerberg also made other changes, such as reducing guardrails around speech on women, gender identity and migrants, and shifting the algorithm to make it harder to see new information. That could all silo people into their own communities, so users are more likely to echo — rather than challenge — viewpoints, said Laura Edelson, a former Justice Department official…“We will get more extreme rabbit holes,” she warned, “and that is a recipe for more extremist speech that goes unanswered.”

Anyone wondering whose Justice Department this was? Well, whatever. That any official of any Justice Department ever should have heartburn about the expression of “extreme speech” — their term for dissent from the Woke line — is much worse than merely a red flag. And the proposition that speech will now go “unanswered” is a flat-out lie. The new Facebook procedures, unlike the old ones, will facilitate rather than suppress the exchange of opposing views.

Sometimes, maybe often, the “exchange” will look like a middle school foodfight. I get that. But the Framers got it too, and gave us the First Amendment anyway, and the essential values it plants and nourishes in the very soil of what we understand to be a free country.

If Mark Zuckerberg now gets it as well, for whatever reason, all to the good. But if you’re waiting for the Washington Post — a major newspaper, of all things — to get it, you’ll be waiting a long time.