By: Dr. Matevž Tomšič
Last week, the neo-leftist guardians of “ideological orthodoxy” on social media suffered a massive blow. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of the tech corporation Meta, which includes the social networks Facebook and Instagram, announced the abolition of so-called fact-checking and the subsequent removal of “inappropriate” posts on his platforms (this will be replaced by a system of so-called community notes). Something similar happened on the X network, formerly known as Twitter, after it was taken over by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. In this way, yet another bastion of woke censorship of online content has fallen.
Many would probably say there’s nothing wrong with fact-checking. Do we not all want credible information? Is the fight against misinformation and fake news not in the public interest? In principle, this is true, but in practice, such efforts have become deeply corrupted.
Even fact-checking can be manipulated. It can begin with the selection of whose statements are put “under the microscope.” It is entirely possible that only “their” statements are scrutinised, while “ours” are left alone. The latter are treated leniently, while every letter of the former is weighed meticulously. Statements involving value judgments (subjective assessments that cannot be factually right or wrong) or metaphorical language can easily be labelled as false (e.g., marking a statement like “something is a hundred times more/less” as false, even if it is just figurative exaggeration). In such cases, it is not about uncovering facts but distorting them.
In justifying his decision, Zuckerberg noted something that careful observers of social media had known for years: the people tasked with fact-checking were highly biased, politically and ideologically. And almost always in the same direction. They disproportionately targeted right-wing politicians and other opinion leaders, typically labelling their statements as false, while often failing to address clear manipulations by leftists.
This amounts to deliberate support for spreading a left-wing agenda. For instance, one of the main organisers of fact-checking websites in the U.S., PolitiFact, was founded by the Poynter Institute, a major funder of which is George Soros’s foundation. And “coincidentally,” articles critical of Soros’s activities are regularly labelled as “fake news.” Of course, their primary targets are Republicans. Even more blatant is the activist bias of the Slovenian organisation Oštro (tasked with fact-checking for Meta in Slovenia), which “investigates” practically only individuals from the right-wing political spectrum (mainly from the Slovenian Democratic Party). Its evaluations are textbook examples of manipulation.
Predictably, leftists around the world are now raising a major outcry. They accuse Zuckerberg of capitulating to the newly elected U.S. President Donald Trump (who has often been critical of Meta’s platforms). Certainly, some degree of political opportunism cannot be denied. But this was also true in the past (Zuckerberg surely did not just now realise how biased his fact-checkers were). The political reality has simply changed. The results of the U.S. elections reflect a rejection of the woke agenda, which most so-called fact-checkers support.
The uproar from “progressive forces” over the abolition of “fact-checking” on Meta’s platforms is not only ideologically driven. It is not just about the left losing a vital tool for maintaining ideological hegemony. It is also about money – or rather, the loss of it. Many leftist activists disguised as so-called fact-checkers will now lose their jobs. And gradually, they will become irrelevant.