Since Donald Trump won reelection, the fiercest Trump-bashers in the press have raged against any sign of media titans softening their approaches before the second term begins. Visits to Mar-a-Lago? Outrageous! Donating to Trump's inauguration? Unconscionable!
Then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced his Meta sites would be abandoning the censorship of "fact-checkers," in place since 2015. NBC reporter Hallie Jackson stuck to fiction when she reported they would be abandoning the "independent nonpartisan fact checking they've had in place."
Anyone claiming websites like PolitiFact are "independent" or "nonpartisan" should get the rating "Pants On Fire." In the first nine months of 2024, PolitiFact was twice as likely to tag Republican officials as "Mostly False" or worse (82.2%) as they were for Democrat officials (41.3%). Put aside the percentages for the raw numbers, and there were 88 "false" tags for Republicans, 31 for Democrats -- almost 3 to 1.
PolitiFact veterans like Angie Drobnic Holan tried to claim they were not engaged in censorship (but merely flagged articles for suppression!) and that they observed a Meta code of principles "requiring nonpartisanship and transparency." This boilerplate is not credible.
Nevertheless, it is a little shocking to witness Zuckerberg proclaiming "the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S." That's correct, but it's not hard to imagine the lefties seeing Zuckerberg waving a white flag of surrender in the Trump Wars. Some unintentionally hilarious pundits said he went "full MAGA."
Hallie Jackson raised questions about the political timing, with the tech CEOs trying to "make inroads" with Trump. That's fair, but she and the other liberals didn't find anything suspicious about social media giants censoring content to "make inroads" with Joe Biden (like ignoring Hunter Biden's laptop, followed by Jackson and others parroting the Biden line that it was "Russian disinformation").
They all ridiculously presume that they are so "fact-based" in their liberalism that cooperating with Democrats is eminently sensible and wholly noncontroversial.
Zuckerberg shifted left to "moderate" content under Democratic pressure after Trump was first elected in 2016, with Democrats accusing his sites of allowing Russian meddlers to install Trump. In 2020, Zuckerberg flooded heavily Democratic areas with millions of dollars to turn out minority voters -- "Zuckerbucks" -- and that was a yawner to Democrat media outlets. Only now is "making inroads" to an incoming president suddenly scandalous.
It was also shocking to hear Zuckerberg announce he would "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."
Censors often use the Orwellian buzzword "inclusion" to exclude conservative views that are critical of transgender advocates or illegal-immigration boosters. So now, Team Zuckerberg will allow "allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation." You're allowed to state that wanting to cut off your own genitals might be mentally ill.
The left incessantly insisted that Trump would impose autocracy if elected again. But to conservatives, this feels like the end of Big Tech autocracy. The Republican half of America will have more leeway to say things that the Democrat half cannot abide -- like COVID probably came from a lab in Wuhan, and Tony Fauci loves himself too much. Opposing mass importation wasn't racist, and illegal immigrants are lawbreakers.
Mark Zuckerberg tore down the wall of censorship. You can tell who favors censorship by noticing who is upset.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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