Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, will be ending the “fact-checking” program it began in 2016, and replacing it with “community notes” like those found on Elon Musk’s X.
In a video posted to Facebook, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to bring Meta back to its roots. “We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech,” he said, adding:
After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop 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 U.S.
So over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community notes system. Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.
Political intervention and biased motives
Meta has a history censoring pro-life speech at the behest of pro-abortion politicians. In 2021, New York Governor Kathy Hochul urged Facebook to curb pro-life messaging on the platform.
“Each day, posts are liked and shared on your site that make false claims about abortion procedures and reproductive health legislation, and this misinformation has hit close to home,” Hochul wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg. “An analysis of Facebook engagement between January 1 and March 20, 2019, found that four of the top 10 stories receiving the most engagement on the platform were articles about the New York State Reproductive Health Act from anti-choice news sources that misrepresented the bill.”
Additionally, the individuals frequently utilized by Meta to “fact check” pro-life groups were far from unbiased, with many working either as abortionists or as representatives of pro-abortion organizations. Live Action was fact-checked by some of these individuals back in 2019, including Daniel Grossman, an abortionist who previously served on the board of NARAL Pro-Choice America (now known as “Reproductive Freedom for All”) and the National Abortion Federation, and currently serves on California’s Future of Abortion Council. He also worked for Ibis Reproductive Health, which has ties to abortion pill manufacturer Danco Laboratories. Grossman is currently the director of University of California San Francisco’s (UCSF) Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), which aims to improve access to “safe abortion” in the United States.
Abortionist Robyn Schickler, also used in the past by Facebook as a “fact-checker,” was at that time a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. Later, she went on to work as the medical director for Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida.
Abortionist Jen Gunter was also used as a Facebook fact-checker. Gunter has compared preborn children to zombies, has lied about prenatal heartbeats, and is so pro-abortion that she reportedly refused to take an ethics class in medical school simply because the professor was pro-life.
Could any of these individuals be realistically trusted to be truthful about the pro-life viewpoint?
Social media censorship
Numerous Big Tech companies, including Meta, have censored Live Action and the pro-life movement in the past. In 2020, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, sent a letter to Zuckerberg demanding an investigation after Facebook refused to run ads from both the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List (now Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America) and a pro-life marketing agency, based on a biased and erroneous fact check.
In one of the aforementioned fact checks against Live Action, abortionists Grossman and Schickler claimed that numerous pregnancy complications — such as placenta previa, ruptured membranes, pre-eclampsia, and even hyperemesis gravidarum — would necessitate an induced abortion, contrary to what thousands of doctors have claimed. That fact check led to a meeting between Zuckerberg and Hawley, in which Zuckerberg said he believed the fact check to be “clearly biased.” At that time, Zuckerberg — despite admitting to the fact-checkers’s bias — refused to take action to ensure such a situation would not happen again.
In 2020, Live Action News chronicled how Facebook had hidden and removed Live Action’s content, or held ads indefinitely for “review.” The platform labeled images of premature babies as “graphic,” and even categorized pro-life memes shared by Live Action as “hate speech.”
Also in 2020, fact-checkers labeled information about abortions committed upon children with Down syndrome abortions as false, and then hid the content (which was accurate) from Instagram. This censorship occurred less than 15 minutes after the post was published on Instagram.
CNN notes that “As part of the changes, Meta will move its trust and safety teams responsible for content policies from California to Texas and other US locations. ‘I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,’ Zuckerberg said.”
While some Big Tech leaders, like X owner Elon Musk, have promoted users’ freedom to express viewpoints that don’t always fit the prevailing narrative without censorship or penalty, it may take time for certain penalized groups to trust that Mark Zuckerberg will keep his promise to do the same with Metz.
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
