Joe Schaeffer: Fact-Checkers Heading Down Same Black Hole as CNN, MSNBC

Mark Zuckerberg disbands his army of ‘truth tellers’ who are shocked, shocked at their dismissal.

A self-anointed coterie of journalists that has forfeited the public’s trust with repeated, egregious displays of personal bias is astounded that it can’t skate by on credentialism any longer. Where have we seen that before? The gravy train for fact-checkers appears to be grinding to a halt, and all the muttering in the world about “codes of principles” and “identifying truth” won’t be able to save another crumbling annex of the big-box media edifice from fading into irrelevance on a CNN or MSNBC scale.

Rebekah Barnett: The beginning of the end for the 'fact-checker' con?

Depending on which echo chamber you get your news from, this week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took steps to either save democracy, or to end it.

In a statement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg (now in his manosphere era) said that the social media giant had over-censored user content with its dragnet algorithms, and it was time to “[restore] free expression on our platforms.”

Brendan O'Neill: Mark Zuckerberg’s bonfire of the orthodoxies

Meta’s scrapping of the fact-checkers proves positive change is in the air.

Move over Elon Musk, another billionaire has hit the headlines. And he didn’t even have to demand the jailing of a prime minister to do so. It’s Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Meta. Yesterday he released the most extraordinary video. Sporting unruly curls, a black tee and dog-tag chain – the uniform of the millennial oligarch – he announced that Meta’s platforms would give their ‘fact-checkers’ the heave-ho and ‘dramatically reduce the amount of censorship’ they carry out. I doubt a more impactful mea culpa will be issued this year.

Dr Will Jones: Facebook Dumps “Politically Biased” Fact-Checkers That Have “Destroyed More Trust Than They’ve Created”

Facebook is to scrap its fact-checkers after founder Mark Zuckerberg said they have “been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created” as he pledged to “restore free expression” on the social network. The Telegraph has more.

Josh Stylman, Jeffrey A Tucker: The Cost of Facebook’s Now-Repudiated Censorship

History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers, and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from “misinformation.”

Lushington D. Brady: Calling the Zuck to Account

A common argument from the anti-free speech left is that “it’s only censorship if the government is doing it!” This, they claim, means that when social media companies censor speech on their platforms, it’s not really censorship. This is wrong, of course, on several points. Firstly, while private companies are certainly allowed to set their terms of service, those terms should be applied consistently. That’s not what happens, as we all know. Besides, when Big Tech censors factual information, that’s not covered by any terms of service.

Matt Ridley: Doing good by doing well

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan marked the birth of their daughter Max by promising to donate 99 per cent of their Facebook shares during their lifetimes to support good causes. For this they were pilloried by some. The economist Thomas Piketty called it a “big joke”. For author Linsey McGoey it was “business as usual, rebranding as philanthropy, and announced with a deceptive air of selflessness”.

We have reached new depths of cynicism when a couple say in a letter to their newborn child that “our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality” and some people can only sneer.