In this article, John Roskam contextualises and disseminates the findings of the IPA’s research on fact checking.
Whether Mark Zuckerberg made his decision to placate Trump or from a commitment to free speech, it’s a victory for freedom of expression.
What’s been happening to the culture in much of the West over the past 12 months has been given many different names: “the vibe shift”, “the cultural tipping point”, and “a weather change”. It’s been described in basic terms as the backlash against “woke”. A more sophisticated analysis calls it the “the turning against managerial authoritarianism” and “the reassertion of democratic populism”.
In November, the election of Donald Trump as US president and his victory in the popular vote were manifestations of the trend. Another was the news on the homepage of The Washington Post from Wednesday this week. Just below the story “Meta ends fact-checking, drawing praise from Trump” was one with the title “McDonald’s ending some DEI practices, joining a growing list of companies”. say it isn’t.
The announcement by Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook would stop “fact-checking” its social media posts is a victory for freedom of speech. By adjudicating the “truth” of what appeared on social media, third-party fact-checkers exercised massive and unchecked power over what people could say to each other.
Whether Zuckerberg made his decision because he wants to placate the incoming Trump administration or from a genuine commitment to free expression, we’ll never know. And it doesn’t matter anyway. A win for freedom of speech is a win – however it comes about.
Facebook will now follow Elon Musk’s X, and instead of having posts fact-checked, other users will be able to comment on them. Which is what should happen. “Wrong” speech should be countered by more speech, not censorship.
Predictably, that’s not the approach of Michelle Rowland, the Labor government’s communications minister. In response to Facebook’s decision, she said the alternative to misinformation was “quality, fact-checked information” from “public broadcasters”.
Under the Albanese government’s now-abandoned ‘misinformation’ laws, fact-checkers played a key role in advising on what was to be censored.
“Fact-checking” was never about checking facts. It was about governments, implicitly or explicitly, and academics and journalists controlling public discussion for political purposes.
In 2020, the BBC fact-checked and declared false the claim that the source of the COVID-19 virus was a laboratory in Wuhan.
The Institute of Public Affairs analysed fact-checking during the Voice referendum. RMIT FactLab employed Facebook during the campaign and checked 41 articles on the Voice. Despite all the claims for the Voice made by almost every institution of social and economic power in Australia, the only arguments RMIT FactLab assessed were those supporting the No case. Facebook eventually suspended RMIT FactLab as one of its fact-checking partners.
Under the Albanese government’s now-abandoned “misinformation” laws, fact-checkers played a key role in advising on what was to be censored.
According to Rowland’s spokesperson, “Misinformation can be harmful to people’s health, wellbeing, and to social cohesion.” Maintaining “social cohesion” is just the latest in a long line of excuses for censorship that governments through the ages have used to justify censorship. Politicians have the temerity to tell the public that to stop the fraying of social cohesion, people should stop talking about the fraying of social cohesion.
Social media makes it hard for politicians to hide reality. European lawmakers are angry at Elon Musk’s posts on X about the continent’s immigration policies as much because he dares raise the issue in the first place as because of their content. Europeans have never had any qualms about commenting on American politics, but when the position is reversed (Musk is a US citizen), they rush to claim their elections are being interfered with. When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated to The Guardian there were no complaints then about British democracy being compromised.
Once upon a time, the West’s political leaders liked social media.
In 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring, Barack Obama welcomed that “cell phones and social networks allow young people to connect and organise like never before” against authoritarian regimes. The president quoted an engineer in Benghazi who said, “Our words are free now. It’s a feeling you can’t explain”, and a young man in Damascus, “After the first yelling, the first shout, you feel dignity”.
As we’ve been discovering recently, many leaders in the “liberal” West are enthusiastic about freedom of speech everywhere other than in their own country.
Those leaders are not so keen on social media when the free words and yelling of uncensored speech are directed at them.
