Flashback: Meta’s ‘history of censorship,’ fact-checking woes under the Trump, Biden administrations

Experts and journalists hope Meta will continue to move toward free speech and avoid the content moderation policies that plagued Facebook under the Biden administration.

“Meta has a terrible history of censorship in the Biden era. They took direction from the government to censor COVID-19 content; they shut down the sharing of the New York Post Hunter Biden story; they used fact-checkers who accepted the word of the administration as fact and not opinion,” New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz told Fox News Digital.

She said that while being “wary” of Meta’s past mistakes is important, people should cheer the company’s admission that they have “done bad things and would like to be better.”

“I hope Zuckerberg has seen the light and will continue to move Facebook in the direction of free speech,” Markowicz, who co-hosts Normally on iHeartRadio, said of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “It’s also important to remember that there are companies, like Rumble or Telegram and then X/Twitter once Elon Musk bought it, that were doing the right thing even when it was difficult with a hostile Biden administration in place. Those companies should be celebrated.”

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Meta’s third-party fact-checking program was put in place after the 2016 election and had been used to “manage content” and misinformation on its platforms, primarily due to “political pressure,” executives said, but admitted the system has “gone too far.”

An April study from the conservative Media Research Center claimed that Facebook had “interfered” in U.S. elections dozens of times over the last several cycles.

The study said Facebook has “censored” 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 2022 Senate and congressional candidates. In 2021, Facebook “deleted Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s account,” and it “cranked up its censorship apparatus with special focus on Donald Trump” and “shuttered political advertising one week before the election” in 2020.

“It also artificially elevated liberal news in its Trending News section while blacklisting popular conservatives like Ted Cruz,” the MRC wrote.

In August 2018, Facebook came under fire after the platform deleted a plethora of videos from the conservative nonprofit, PragerU. The company later reversed the decision, admitting that the content was falsely reported as “hate speech.”

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Republicans later claimed that Zuckerberg made false statements to Congress in April 2018, when the tech billionaire denied accusations that Facebook had engaged in bias against conservative accounts and content.

Like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram faced backlash leading up to the 2020 election after the company throttled access to the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story.  

Zuckerberg later told podcast host Joe Rogan that he had decided to censor the New York Post story after the FBI warned him about “a potential Russian disinformation operation” regarding the Biden family and Burisma.

“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again – for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers,” he said.

Last year, the Meta CEO sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in which he admitted that he felt pressure from the Biden administration, particularly with regard to COVID content, and even items like satire and humor.

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At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Zuckerberg told CBS anchor Gayle King that his platform had removed 18 million posts containing “misinformation” about the virus.

In 2022, several state attorneys general compiled evidence alleging that Zuckerberg coordinated with former National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to “discredit and suppress” the theory that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.

Zuckerberg on Tuesday announced that Meta would end its fact-checking program and lift content moderation policies to “restore free expression” across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms.

Fact-checking organizations that had their contracts terminated by Meta said they were disappointed by the news and scoffed at accusations of bias. They also redirected the blame back at Meta, suggesting that the company’s policies that limit the exposure of flagged content were the real catalyst behind the tech corporation’s censorship.

Experts who spoke with Fox News Digital acknowledged Meta’s culpability in suppressing information but criticized fact-checkers for tailoring their ratings to personal beliefs and opinions.

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“These fact-checkers have brought this on themselves,” MRC Free Speech Vice President Dan Schneider said. “They’ve pretended that they’re not biased. They’ve pretended that they’re being fair brokers. All the evidence is to the contrary.”

Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would replace fact-checking groups with a system closer to X’s Community Notes has sparked mixed reactions. While some have characterized it as a significant step-up from the potential biases of fact-checking organizations, others suggest Meta has pulled the guardrails off their content moderation ambitions.

DataGrade CEO Joe Toscano, a former Google consultant, said that while he believes it is the “right move” for Meta and that a Community Notes-style system is an “interesting concept,” it is bound to devolve into a “cesspool.” A sort of “vox populi,” Community Notes allows regular X users, through a sign-up system, to police content and provide context or corrections.

“Perhaps if Meta uses the notes intelligently, those notes can be used to train AI that they will then turn into a more robust content monitoring system, but I think that would also be a bad idea if that’s something they’re considering as a next step. The reality is that the internet is full of the loudest people in the room. There are a lot of people who simply lurk on the internet, read content, watch the drama, but never participate, and therefore their thoughts are never put into text or video that can train this AI,” he said.

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“What we really need if we want a democratic content moderating AI is to get content from the people who don’t make content on the internet – everyone from people who are centrist and quiet to political figures and high-level executives who don’t have time to use the internet. But if we had that, we probably would never have had these problems in the first place, and that’s why this problem is so hard,” Toscano added. 

Marcowicz was more optimistic, calling Community Notes on X an “excellent” approach and suggesting the new system is unlikely to be worse than Facebook and Instagram’s current model.

“X has managed to utilize its best users to contribute to the Community Notes system and Facebook should attempt something similar,” she continued. “Not everyone gets to put up Community Notes, or the system can be overrun by a mob, and that’s what makes the whole thing so useful.”