Mark Zuckerberg says ending fact-checks will curb censorship. Fact-checkers say he’s wrong. [Video]

Meta’s fact-checking partners are rebutting Mark Zuckerberg’s suggestion on Tuesday that their work is tantamount to censorship. 

In announcing the social media giant’s decision to end fact-checking in the U.S. on Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms, Zuckerberg said the move would “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.” In a Facebook post explaining the company’s shift to a community-driven moderation approach, Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan also said that “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail’.”

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But those running the nonpartisan entities behind Meta’s third-party fact-checking efforts said they had nothing to do with whether a post was removed from a platform, noting that the company was the final arbiter of what content it published.

“Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything,” Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit …