I’ve to commend Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his new coverage chief Joel Kaplan on their timing. It’s not vastly stunning that, because the pair introduced early in the present day, Meta is giving up on skilled third-party fact-checking. The operator of Fb, Instagram, and Threads has been backing off moderation just lately, and fact-checking has all the time been contentious. But it surely’s in all probability sensible to do it two weeks earlier than President-elect Donald Trump takes workplace — and nominates a Federal Communications Fee head who’s threatened the corporate over it.
Trump’s FCC chairman decide (and present FCC commissioner), Brendan Carr, is a self-identified free speech defender with a inventive interpretation of the First Modification. In mid-November, as a part of a flurry of calmly menacing missives to varied entities, Carr despatched a letter to Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft attacking the businesses’ fact-checking packages.
The letter was primarily targeted on NewsGuard, a conservative bête noire that Meta doesn’t really work with. But it surely additionally demanded details about “the use of any media monitor or fact checking service,” and it left little doubt about Carr’s place on them. “You participated in a…
