Mark Zuckerberg Says Ending Fact-Checks Will Curb Censorship. Fact-Checkers Say He's Wrong.

CBS Bay Area

January 9, 2025

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 "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.

Click here for the full story via CBS San Francisco

CBS Local Digital Media personalizes the global reach of CBS-owned and operated television and radio stations with a local perspective.