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This week, Mark Zuckerberg announced he was cancelling Meta’s fact-checking program in the United States (with plans to remove it globally in the future). Meta will now adopt the ‘community notes’ approach supported on X by owner Elon Musk.
In a video statement, Zuckerberg said Meta’s fact-checkers and content moderators made “too many mistakes,” noting that even if a small fraction of users are mistakenly curtailed, that’s still millions of people impacted.
I spoke to a few people who work in tech, one who said it would be like Ford announcing that, since the brake pads on its trucks lock up too often, the 2026 models will roll off the production line with no brakes at all.
They’re exaggerating, a little, but I get why it's hard for some industry folks to take Zuckerberg’s concern for user experience seriously after he’s spent years jamming his platforms, especially Facebook, full of an increasingly frustrating amount of spam, AI slop, and other engagement hacks that prevent people from seeing content they want while keeping them on the app.
Likewise, few news outlets have been credulous; most coverage of this has been framed as part of a broader movement by media companies to ingratiate themselves with the returning Trump administration. The shift has struck many commentators as “obeying in advance,” as historian Tim Snyder has called it, or less academically, “media’s suck-up moment,” as Axios reported.
It’s hard to dismiss the correlation when major media companies (including Meta) are giving significantly more to Trump’s inauguration fund than they gave to Biden’s (if they gave at all). Zuckerberg made the link explicit in this week’s announcement, saying Trump’s re-election marked a “cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” (And if reporting from The Verge is to be believed, Trump’s pick to lead the FCC, Brendan Carr, has been pushing Zuckerberg and others toward his idea of a free-speech utopia.)
Now, I’ll admit, I’ve had posts and comments censored for reasons that seemed silly, strained, or inscrutable. I had an Instagram post labeled as AI-generated (it wasn’t), an article from Reuters flagged as misinformation (it contained a correction but was definitely credible, accurate reporting), and a cooking post reported, I suspect, because it contained a link to a different page with a recipe that shares its name with a homophobic slur (the page itself contained no hate speech, nor did the linked recipe, though it did include an explanation of the unfortunate name).
Once, I was thrown in Facebook jail (that is, had my account temporarily restricted), after I referred to the British Museum’s refusal to return the Elgin Marbles on a legal technicality as “so very fucking British of them” – pardon my language, but I get heated about antiquities.
Facebook was likely indifferent to my profanity but objected to me targeting a particular nationality. I was given the option to appeal and my account was restored. I had been prepared to make my case – that insulting the British empire was ‘punching up’ by the logic of comedy – but it never came to that. I simply clicked a single button asking Facebook to reconsider, and then my digital life went on.
It's hard to say I was deeply aggrieved in any of these cases. I understood the basic principle Meta was trying to apply, and found the glitchy execution somewhere between mildly amusing and frustrating. Of all the technological dystopias, these were the mildest imaginable, and I didn’t take it personally. But I understand that many did.
There's a lot more we could, and should, say about what Facebook – and the internet more generally – really is, who it is for, what duty owners and regulators have to shape online speech, and what personal responsibility we have as users. But for now, let's stick to this week's Meta update.
It's worth noting that Meta has not embraced free speech absolutism (in fact, none of the major platforms have). Complete anarchy would probably be untenable for a whole host of reasons, not least among them liability for intellectual property misuse, child abuse content, and other criminal and civil issues. Meta is still regulating the speech on its platform, an approach many people agree with. But its specific choices are worth looking at.
What’s interesting to me is that many of the loudest voices decrying Facebook’s ‘censorship’ were upset that Meta blocked content alleging it was mis- and dis-information about Covid. In some cases, like Facebook yielding to White House pressure to kill posts contemplating Covid’s potentially man-made origins, this seems to me like a legitimate grievance. In other cases, like removing the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, it seemed like Facebook was acting responsibly, hoping to avoid culpability in something like the Samoan measles outbreak disaster.
There are some who argue you should be able to say anything you want online, but that's not the case under our current laws, and it's certainly not how Meta (and Facebook) have handled things. While Zuckerberg has said his platforms won't be "arbiters of truth," they are at the very least distinguishing between what is a consensus truth and what is open for reasonable debate, at least when it comes to public health.
On that front, it’s clear Meta’s handling of Covid content was contentious. So it’s striking that Meta’s update doesn’t remove its ban on vaccine misinformation. The companies’ community standards on misinformation, including this week’s changes, still prohibit posts that, for example, claim vaccines cause autism or are more generally toxic or dangerous.
What it does allow, is referring to women as “household objects,” and referring to queer or transgender people as mentally ill.
“We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the new guidelines on “hateful conduct” read.
The internet has never been 'safe,' and platform moderation was never going to offer complete protection. But there’s a lot to unpack about Meta's particular concessions here.
Take the word “transgenderism,” which is understood by organizations like GLADD and the Anti-Defamation League as a co-opted academic term, “weaponized” by conservative commentators to attack and marginalize trans people “under the guise” of opposing an ideology (often referred to as queer marxism). Not everyone would agree with that, but the word is certainly a choice – especially since the guidelines refer to the topic of “transgender rights,” elsewhere. It could be sloppy writing – but it’s been read by many in the trans community as a dog whistle loud enough to be heard from Mar-a-Lago to the White House to next month’s CPAC meeting.
And more broadly, explicitly authorizing “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation” seems like a pretty big bag of hateful worms to open. Are there thoughtful conversations to be had about the role of mental health in sexuality and gender identity? Of course. Does calling someone ‘mentally ill’ because they’re gay seem like “dehumanizing speech” (which Meta does remove)? Yes.
We could go on, but I think you get the point. We could debate whether users should be able to share the next Great Barrington Declaration or Hunter Biden laptop story. But that doesn’t seem to really be where Zuckerberg has taken the brakes off, so to speak.
Editorial endnotes
A few things here on the way out:
Apology not accepted: A few weeks ago, I wrote about CFPUA board member Leslie Hudson’s inappropriate message, left on the legislative voicemail of Rep. Ted Davis, excoriating him for his support of the GOP's 'last man blows the bridge' legislation, and telling him "I hope you rot in hell and you suck."
While we’d expected to see the issue resurface during this week’s city council meeting, the other shoe actually dropped for Hudson during Wednesday’s CFPUA meeting. She was censured following a motion introduced by City Councilman Luke Waddell, who clearly had not considered her apologies to Davis, council, and CFPUA sufficient.
As WECT reports, board member Jessica Cannon made a pointed note that councilman and CFPUA board member Charlie Rivenbark was not censured aftergetting a DUI driving drunk back from Myrtle Beach.
Perhaps the board felt Rivenbark had embarrassed only himself, and not CFPUA. Or, maybe it was that the object of Hudson’s childish invective is a state-funding breadwinner for New Hanover County – as board member Deans Hackney said, “If you cannot see that and you bite the hands that feed you, you’re not doing the job of this board.” Hudson’s censure doesn’t remove her from the board, but it will probably make things awkward around the office for a bit.
MLK mystery: There's been much confusion and consternation over the cancellation of this year’s MLK Jr. parade in Wilmington. Hollis Briggs, the longtime parade showrunner, said a conflict with the presidential inauguration – to which the Wilmington Police Department is sending six officers – created an issue.
It’s hard to believe those six officers are the problem; the department’s systemic staffing issues have more likely played a role. But the decision was ultimately up to Briggs, and quietly cancelling seems poorly thought out: he released a list of events that omitted the parade, and only responded, vaguely, to the parade’s absence after the fact. Hitting the issue head-on would have probably been better.
I'm frustrated at the poor communication, but I do appreciate the perspective offered by Derrick Anderson, who noted on his Facebook Live show this week that Briggs founded the parade at a time when Wilmington was conspicuously lacking an event – and that he helped fund the parade out of his own pocket when necessary. He has, Anderson said, earned some grace. I’d love to talk to Briggs about this, and I hope he responds to my offer to sit down to talk about the past, present, and future of the parade.
Hail to the Chief: This week, Donny Williams announced he would resign as Wilmington Police Chief by the end of June. While this follows a lot of negative press and public criticism of his leadership, Williams steadfastly defended his record and said his retirement fulfilled a promise he’d made in 2020 after being appointed by city council not to stay beyond 2025.
I’ve never once heard about this five-year timeline, and I reached out to council after Williams’ announcement on Friday for some clarity (no response, yet, but it was Friday in Wilmington, so I’ll give it some time).
All that said, I think the most important questions now revolve around what comes next. If there are, as Williams alleges, still pockets of racism in the department, how will the next chief deal with that? If there was systemic mismanagement, as some retired officers have alleged, will the next chief address that? And, will the city look outside the department for a new leader, or try to tap someone from the current administration? I hate saying ‘time will tell,’ but it will, so stay tuned…
