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Is fact-checking "censorship?" Why Meta's changes are a win for conservatives.
Fri, 17 Jan 2025
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will end their third-party fact checking program, loosen their hate speech restrictions, and move some of the company to Texas. What's all of that signal about what we will see on social platforms in the coming months and years?Brittany Luse is joined by NPR reporter Huo Jingnan and Washington Post tech reporter Naomi Nix to break down Meta's tangled relationship to misinformation and how these changes will impact users.Plus, Brittany, NPR Staff, and NPR listeners share their memories of Los Angeles in a special "Love Letter to LA" amid the ongoing wildfires.Support public media and receive ad-free listening & bonus. Join NPR+ today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What changes is Meta making regarding fact-checking?
We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
I want to draw attention to the word censorship. It's the word some Republican lawmakers have used to describe efforts to combat misinformation online. In the same announcement, Zuckerberg said, Now, all this signals a vast shift in the social media landscape. One major social media platform could go dark in the United States.
Chapter 2: How does Zuckerberg define censorship?
While the CEO of several of the biggest platforms we have left is doubling down on culture war politics. And people are wondering, where do we go from here? Naomi, when it comes to the relationship between disinformation and social media, how would you characterize the moment we're in right now?
Yeah. We're kind of having this collision of an increasing sort of decentralization in the social media market where people get to flock to the apps that they enjoy that might have their kind of partisan leanings. And we're seeing the main platforms walk back many of their programs to fight decentralization. misinformation.
And I think those two things coupled together means that people can kind of, you know, go to their own sort of corners and hot pockets of misinformation or hate speech and not get the kind of fact checks, and people rebutting those claims to a lesser degree.
Gosh, so it sounds like we are moving toward a place where people will be gathering and fewer and fewer sort of like big town square kind of... locations online the way that Twitter used to be or that TikTok kind of is, or I suppose maybe in the future was for a lot of people. People will kind of be in their own silos and also looking at in some cases, maybe their own versions of what facts are.
Is that kind of what you're saying?
Right. People simply just have more options. And various apps have really wildly different approaches to policing speech.
This Zuckerberg announcement that these metaprograms are going to be rolled back is coming after his claims of bullying from the Biden administration. And there are some people, some critics saying that Zuckerberg is pandering to the new Trump administration. Jingnan, can you give us a breakdown of Meta's history with the White House and how this moment might be different?
You know, after news came out in 2016 after the presidential election that Russia was trying to meddle with American voters, Meta set up this third-party fact-checking program where it pays fact-checkers around the world.
Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that we're going to catch all bad content in our system. We don't check what people say before they say it. And frankly, I don't think society should want us to.
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Chapter 3: What is the history of Meta's fact-checking program?
That pressure has always been there, but tech companies have always had the freedom to say no. And I think what we've seen, even in the Biden administration example around COVID-19, is Meta said no a lot. Because at the end of the day, they don't actually have to take orders from any politician about what's going on.
what kind of content should or shouldn't be on their site unless there's some sort of law or regulation passed. And so, you know, I think the case definitely brought up interesting questions around what should the relationship be between how the government interacts with social media companies behind the scenes.
It's kind of an interesting contrast on how he seems to be really actively saying yes to the Republicans' frame of narrative when he announced that Meta is going to have all of these changes to counter-moderation and fact-checking. because he is essentially accusing fact-checkers of being part of some kind of censorship machine that is within his own company.
Right. And in an interview with Fox & Friends, Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan further clarified this reasoning.
They've just become too restrictive over time about what people can say, including about those kind of sensitive topics that you mentioned that people want to discuss and debate. Immigration, trans issues, gender.
We want to make it so that, bottom line, if you can say it on TV, you can say it on the floor of Congress, you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship. So we're changing those rules.
And, like, fact checkers that my colleagues and I have talked to were, like, were very bewildered by this accusation because they're like, if Meta wanted to complain, they could have complained, but they never did. So censorship has been this frame that is very, very dominant in the Republican circles. Like, this is the...
This is the reason that Congressman Jordan is going after all of these researchers and all of these organizations aiming to, you know, add context to curb misinformation. And it seems that Zuckerberg really, really actively embraced it.
I think you're right. His use of the word censorship was a big rhetorical win for Republicans and conservatives. You know, in previous years, the company would have used the industry's word, which is content moderation, right? They would not have framed those programs that they had worked on for years as a form of censorship.
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Chapter 4: How have political pressures shaped Meta's policies?
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I want to talk about another change that we are seeing at Meta. Meta has also revised its hate speech policy. The latest guidelines now allow allegations that LGBTQ plus people are mentally ill because they are gay or transgendered. Here's what the guidelines say now.
Quote, I do want to note here the use of transgenderism and homosexuality, which are words primarily used by people who want to denounce queer people. On top of that, Facebook will also move its trust safety and content moderation team from California to Texas in a move that Zuckerberg said was intended to quell concerns of political bias.
And both Meta and Amazon are scaling back their DEI initiatives. So that's a lot. That's a lot happening at one time. I wonder what do these changes mean for marginalized communities in online spaces?
Yeah, it can be a little bit too early to tell. I talked to this former Facebook employee who used to work on trust and safety, Katie Harbath, and she said, like, tweaking what users eventually will see, it depends on how exactly Meta tweaks the algorithm. And the announcement provides not... a lot of that kind of detail, like it's maybe too early to tell.
But she does also say that a bad scenario will be, well, marginalized groups may have to consider whether or not they stay on that platform. Is it worth it?
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Chapter 5: What implications do new guidelines have for LGBTQ safety?
Chapter 6: Is fact-checking considered censorship by conservatives?
Chapter 7: What does the future of misinformation look like on social media?
They, in a big way, are moving the goalposts on what constitutes acceptable. civil engagement.
Social media has enabled people to have their own bespoke realities. And I think with the like going away of fact checking, it's just like, you know, one step towards like even more bespoke realities, because then you're not going to have a tag telling you to look elsewhere.
Bespoke realities. That's a really that's that's a very helpful and sobering clarification. I really appreciate that. Jingnan, Naomi, I have learned so much here. Thank you both so much. Thank you. Thanks for having us. That was NPR reporter Guo Jingnan and Washington Post tech reporter Naomi Nix. I want us all to pause for a moment and show some love to the city of Los Angeles.
For the past week, wildfires have ripped across the L.A. area. I have been heartbroken seeing images of the wreckage, and I know many of you have been too. We know these places and we know people who've had to evacuate. L.A. is an iconic city. It lives in our collective imaginations, but it's also a very real place that millions of people call home.
So I reached out to the NPR staff and the public to share what makes Los Angeles so special to them. Here is our love letter to L.A.
Hi, my name is Sam. My favorite memory of LA is when I organized a graduation photo shoot with friends at our favorite taco stand at the intersection of Pico and Hobart. Before our ceremony, we took pictures by the stand in our graduation sashes, holding heaping plates of al pastor tacos. I love LA street tacos, and I love the people that make them.
They bring a sense of community to almost every corner of the city, and I think that's beautiful.
My name is Katie Ward. Back in 2017, on October 31st, Halloween night, the Dodgers were playing against the Astros. And as we were trick-or-treating, every single house had the game on. And so we would send the kids up to the door to trick-or-treat and get their treats. But they would also ask, you know, did we make it to third? Did we get them out? So go Dodgers. We love you, Los Angeles.
We're all going to get through this together.
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