Mark Zuckerberg Defends Meta’s Fact-Checking Ban to Joe Rogan: Company Faced ‘Massive Institutional Pressure to Basically Start Censoring Content’
Meta chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to defend his recent decision to end fact-checking on the internet giant’s platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
“I’ve been working on this for a long time, so, I mean, you’ve got to do what you think is right,” Zuckerberg said on Friday’s episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience.”
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Zuckerberg told Rogan two main events in 2016 triggered the move by Meta (then called Facebook) to institute fact-checking: Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president and Brexit in the U.K. “I think that those were basically these two events where for the first time, we just faced this massive, massive institutional pressure to basically start censoring content on ideological grounds,” Zuckerberg said.
“At the time I was really sort of ill-prepared to kind of parse what was going on,” Zuckerberg said. “I think part of my reflection looking back on this is, I kind of think in 2016 in the aftermath [of Trump’s election] I gave too much deference to a lot of folks in the media who were basically saying, ‘OK, there’s no way that this guy could have gotten elected except for misinformation.'” That “started with the the Russia-collusion stuff” but “it kind of morphed into different things over time,” he added.
“I took this and just kind of assumed that everyone was acting in good faith, and I said, ‘OK, well there are concerns about misinformation,'” Zuckerberg said. “If you ask people, no one says that they want misinformation, so maybe there’s something that we should do to to basically try to address this.”
However, Zuckerberg said, “I was really worried from the beginning about basically becoming this sort of decider of what is true in the world… That’s like kind of a crazy position to be in for billions of people using your service.” The company adopted a system that used third-party fact-checkers to identify “very clear hoaxes” — like people claiming that the “Earth is flat” — and “it just sort of veered from there.”
“I think to some degree it’s because some of the people whose job is to do fact-checking, a lot of their industry is focused on political fact-checking,” Zuckerberg said. “So they just kind of veered in that direction.” In the last few years, he said, “I really started coming to the conclusion that we were going to need to change something about that.”
On Monday, Zuckerberg announced that Meta will replace its fact-checking programs with a “community notes” model similar to Elon Musk’s X. Zuckerberg said the fact-checking system led to “too many mistakes and too much censorship” and is “too politically biased.”
Zuckerberg’s decision to end the Meta fact-checking initiative comes just weeks before Trump is set to be sworn in for a second term as U.S. president. Meta appointed UFC CEO Dana White — a close Trump friend — to its board, and the company is donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
On Rogan’s show, Zuckerberg reiterated his position that the decision to end Meta’s fact-checking was to return to its roots. “The whole point of social media is basically, you know, giving people the ability to share what they want and, you know, it goes back to you know our original mission [which] is just give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected,” the Meta chief said.
Zuckerberg said he “wasn’t too deep on our content policies for like the first 10 years of the company.” He said that “practical issues” arose that Meta acted on — such as putting in systems to fight cyberbullying and taking down pirated content — but “it was really in the last 10 years that people started pushing for, like, ideological-based censorship.”
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