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’.”
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 …