“Meta has given up censoring speech”: Sen. Rand Paul, aka Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X on Monday

“Meta finally admits to censoring speech…what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X on Monday.

“After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. “We tried to address those concerns in a way that wouldn’t make us arbiters of truth.” “But the fact checkers have not been politically neutral and have destroyed more trust than they have created.”

Some fact-checking organizations rely on the company to survive, since Meta pays them for their work. “We’ll see fewer fact-checking reports published and fewer fact checkers working,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of International Fact Checking Network.

“It was particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers because he knows that the ones that participated in his program were signatories of a code of principles that requires that they be transparent and nonpartisan,” said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network. He left PolitiFact in 2020 after it became part of Facebook’s third party fact checker’s program.

The Financial Impacts of Meta’s Decline to Move to Loss California, Not Texas: Comment on Tweets from the 2016 COVID Experiment

Meta also said it would change how it enforces its policies, relying less on automated systems except for “illegal and high-severity violations” including terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and fraud. The moderation team is moving from California to Texas. The move should “help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” Zuckerberg said.

“So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.

Meta would no longer work with third party fact checkers, but would instead launch a program where people write and rate notes that appear next to specific posts. That’s what Musk has been advocating on X, an effort that used to be known as thePlatform.

Referring to talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video, was a violation of company policies which resulted incensorship.

But the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic accelerated a backlash among conservatives who cast content moderation as a form of censorship. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but eventually allowed him to return ahead of his second run for office. In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges.

News organizations who had cooperated with Meta in order to curb the spread of fake news are scrambling to determine how this change will affect them.

For others the financial implications are even more dire. One editor at a US-based fact-checking organization that works with Meta, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told WIRED that Meta’s decision “is going to eventually drain us out.”

Duke says Lead Stories has a diverse revenue stream and most of its operations are outside of the US, but he claims the decision would still have an impact on them. “The most painful part of this is losing some very good, experienced journalists, who will no longer be paid to research false claims found on Meta platforms,” Duke says.

Jesse Stiller, the managing editor of Meta fact-checking partners Check Your Fact, tells WIRED that they were not aware of it. His organization started working with Meta in 2019, and it has 10 people working in the newsroom. This was out of left field for us. We weren’t aware that the decision was being considered until Mark dropped the video.

Meta has stopped using their services, which was announced on Tuesday in a post by the company’s chief global affairs officer. Instead, the company plans to rely on X-style Community Notes, which allow users to flag content that they think is inaccurate or requires further explanation.