News Ticker

The International Fact-Checking Union (Yes That’s Real) Convenes An Emergency Meeting

January 8, 2025 UKR Editor CENSORSHIP, WORLD 0

Following Zuckerberg’s announcement that he’s dumping them

Following Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook and Instagram will no longer defer to ‘fact checkers’ because they are too politically partisan, the International Fact-Checking Network has convened an emergency meeting, presumably to discuss their impending obsoletion.

Zuckerberg put out a video noting that Meta will be switching to a ‘Community notes’ type system much like X has. He also announced that Meta intend to “restore free expression” on its platforms.

While that remains to be seen, it’s all a part of Zuckerberg’s apparent ‘awakening’ and realisation that he was being used as a tool of oppressive censorship and control by powerful elites.

In response to Zuck’s announcements, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) has convened an emergency meeting of its members to brainstorm how it will go forward now it has lost influence over two more huge social media platforms.

FACT CHECK: Yes. there is such a thing as the International Fact-Checking Network. It’s made up of bodies like PolitiFact and Snopes, which have proven themselves to be completely partisan leftist ‘ministries of truth’, as well as legacy media outlets including the AP and Reuters who seem to spend much of their time ‘fact checking’ satirical articles.

✅

Business Insider writer Pranav Dixit reports “The meeting is expected to draw between 80 to 100 attendees from IFCN’s network of fact-checkers, which spans 170 organizations worldwide. Not all of the attendees are Meta fact-checking partners, although many of them have a stake in the program’s future and its global implications.”

He continues, “The IFCN has long played a crucial role in Meta’s fact-checking ecosystem by accrediting organizations for Meta’s third-party program, which began in 2016 after the U.S. presidential election.”

Yeah, not any more. Because as Zuckerberg noted, they have done incredible damage to what little trust was left in Facebook, which is now basically synonymous with outright censorship and leftist political bias.

The report notes that the fact checkers received no prior warning that Zuckerberg was going down this road.

IFCN’s director, Angie Holan, admitted that the meeting has been called in response to Zuckerberg’s announcement and that her “People are upset because they saw themselves as partners in good standing with Meta, doing important work to make the platform more accurate and reliable.”

“It was never about censorship but about adding context to prevent false claims from going viral,” Holan claimed.

No one believes you anymore Angie, not even Zuckerbollocks.

Go on… fact check it.

This article (The International Fact-Checking Union (Yes That’s Real) Convenes An Emergency Meeting) was created and published by Modernity and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Steve Watson

*****

RELATED

Zuckerberg Abandons Facebook Censorship For X-Like Community Notes

Zuckerberg Abandons Facebook Censorship For X-Like Community Notes

‘Fact-Checkers Too Politically-Biased’

(ZeroHedge) – Just over a month after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort – and a day after Trump’s longtime friend, UFC CEO Dana White, joined Facebook’s board – Zuckerberg announced a sweeping overhaul of the social media platform’s moderation policies. The changes include nuking the controversial fact-checking censorship program and adopting a system similar to Elon Musk’s Community Notes on X, signaling a pivot toward free speech as Trump 2.0 will usher in an era of revitalization of Western values.

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted on Facebook early Tuesday morning.

He said, “More specifically, we’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes similar to X, starting in the US.”

Zuck went on to point the finger at the real problem:

“After 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically-biased…”

Meta released a subsequent press release detailing the changes in content moderation policies regarding political topics. He pointed to the presidential election as a significant influencer to the company’s decision and railed against “governments and legacy media” for allegedly pushing “to censor more and more.”

Meta explained its decision to end third-party fact-checking, citing concerns over political bias and emphasizing that X’s Community Notes model represents the best approach to future content moderation:

When we launched our independent fact checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth. We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations. The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.

That’s not the way things played out, especially in the United States. Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.

We are now changing this approach. We will end the current third party fact checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.

  • Once the program is up and running, Meta won’t write Community Notes or decide which ones show up. They are written and rated by contributing users. 
  • Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.
  • We intend to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in our apps, and are working on the right way to share this information.

We plan to phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months, and will continue to improve it over the course of the year. As we make the transition, we will get rid of our fact-checking control, stop demoting fact checked content and, instead of overlaying full screen interstitial warnings you have to click through before you can even see the post, we will use a much less obtrusive label indicating that there is additional information for those who want to see it.

Another significant change is that Meta will relocate its trust and safety teams, responsible for drafting content policies and reviewing content, from the far-left state of California to Texas and other locations.

Also, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, joined Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” to discuss the social media platform’s monumental changes.

“This is a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression. As Mark says in that video, what we’re doing is we’re getting back to our roots and free expression,” Kaplan said.

He said, “It has become clear there is too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check because, basically, they get to fact-check whatever they see on the platform.”

Musk’s X Community Notes system is emerging as the “gold standard” in social media content moderation. This marks a shift away from radical leftist billionaires, legacy MSM, and federal agencies that fund or support nonprofit fact checkers, which often function as censorship weapons against political enemies of the left.

About one year ago: WSJ EIC Emma Tucker complained how MSM was no longer the “gatekeeper” in the news cycle.

Former presidential climate envoy John Kerry…

And Hillary Clinton called for anyone spreading “misinformation” to be criminally charged

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei was livid about X becoming ‘the new media’ ..

Also, Tyler O’Neil, managing editor of The Daily Signal, recently showed one of the best flow charts of how the “Democratic Party Big Gov’t Machine” works with its network of shady billionaire-funded foundations capturing federal agencies to heavily influence the administrative state on issues like censorship of their political enemies. 

Zuckerberg also stated that Meta will work with the incoming Trump administration to promote Western values, such as free speech, on a global scale. However, he did not elaborate on the specifics of this plan. This all seems like an olive branch move with Trump and Musk to avoid “life in prison” and endless investigations over the 2020 election interference.

_________

(SOURCE)

Header featured image (edited) credit:  Photograph: Anadolu/Getty. Emphasis added by (TLB)

Published to UK Reloaded  from The Liberty Beacon

*****

RELATED

Billionaires dangle free speech like a bauble. We gawp like open-mouthed babes

Zuckerberg, Trump, Musk. None care about free speech, least of all yours or mine. They care about power and remaining billionaires – or, better still, becoming trillionaires

A few observations on Mark Zuckerberg’s astonishing volte face today, declaring that he will end the crushing climate of censorship on his Meta platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, in time for Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House.

It should not have taken a video admission from Zuckerberg for us to appreciate the degree to which we have been living for many years under a regime of political censorship on social media, with Meta leading the pack.

Just to take my own case as an illustration. My likes and shares on Facebook have been declining relentlessly over the past seven or eight years. But they took an especially sharp downturn after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The algorithm-gods at Meta decided it was critically important that the vast majority of my 44K followers should not be exposed to an anti-genocide perspective.

It is difficult to prove you are being throttled by a social media corporation. If you raise the issue of falling likes and shares, you are typically greeted with snark or rationalisations. It’s because you’re less interesting / relevant / insightful than you were a while back. Or it’s because people are losing interest in social media in general, or in your kind of political content in particular.

None of that was ever convincing. Almost the minute Trump won the election, my fortunes on Facebook were transformed. Since early November my views, likes and shares are back where they were eight years ago, before Meta began slowly throttling my account. I am seeing posts there get more than 1K likes – something I had assumed would never be possible again.

The algorithms are still rigged against me, but much less so than they have been for many years.

In his grovelling video message to Trump – I mean, to Meta users – Zuckerberg effectively settles the question of whether his globe-spanning corporation has been aggressively corralling its 3 billion users away from political content. He admits it has.

What he has not admitted, and won’t, is that Meta has not even been trying to enforce that censorship evenhandedly or neutrally. We know, for example, that Meta’s algorithms were carefully engineered for many long months during Israel’s genocide in Gaza to keep Palestinian news sources out of public view, while the same algorithms left Israeli news sources unharmed.

For years, Zuckerberg’s goal – his business plan – has been to keep the main power-block of the western establishment happy: that is, the Biden administration, the three-letter agencies, the war industries, the “legacy media”, and the billionaire class to which he belongs.

None of them wanted voters thinking too deeply about politics – all the more so populist kinds of politics, whether of the left or right, that risked disturbing their smooth ride on the neoliberal gravy train and the forever wars from which they profit so handsomely.

Zuckerberg must now recalibrate his algorithms to keep the Trump team happy, and not stray too far from the “free speech” mantra of fellow billionaire and social media mogul Elon Musk. Zuckerberg must ensure his own platforms don’t end up getting treated like a US equivalent of TikTok, under risk of a ban for supposedly posing a “national security” threat.

No one seems to notice that, were Trump really some kind of free-speech warrior, Zuckerberg would not be so desperate to placate him, nor would the incoming president have been threatening for years to crack down on platforms just because they are not wholly owned by US billionaires.

Trump’s recent change of heart on TikTok, he has all but admitted, is because the newly domesticated platform is swinging younger voters his way.

Is Zuckerbeg serious about allowing more free speech? Probably, as my own post-election experience indicates. He must keep on the right side of the Trump administration at all costs, by easing up on the censorship of political content, just as earlier he kept on the right side of the Biden administration by tightening up on the censorship of political content.

Does that mean he is now a free speech champion? Don’t bet on it. He is in favour of free speech only in so far it is good for his business interests, just as Trump and Musk are. He will allow it only in so far as, and for as long as, Trump wants it. If free speech – or certain kinds of it – start to become a problem for Trump, as they surely will, the Trump administration will lean on him just as repressively as the outgoing Biden administration did.

The reality is no one in the establishment cares about free speech, least of all yours or mine. They care about power. They care about staying billionaires and, ideally, becoming trillionaires. What Zuckerberg has made clear is that free speech is not a principle. It is a toy, a plaything to be dangled in front of us, the people, who respond like grateful, credulous, open-mouthed babes.

We will be allowed free speech only in so far as it assists the powerful to stay powerful.

This article (Billionaires dangle free speech like a bauble. We gawp like open-mouthed babes) was created and published by Jonathan Cook and is republished here under “Fair Use” 

••••

The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)

••••

Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.

••••

Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

••••

Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*


Copyright © 2012 - 2025 | TLB Project™ LLC