Meta just walked away from fact-checking, and AXIOS didn’t like it one bit. In More Speech and Fewer Mistakes, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, Joel Kaplan, explained:
In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable. Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in “Facebook jail,” and we are often too slow to respond when they do.
We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression. Today, we’re making some changes to stay true to that ideal.
The changes? “Ending Third Party Fact Checking Program, Moving to Community Notes.” These “Independent Experts,” Kaplan explained, are “like everyone else.” [They] have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how.
Great!
But in Behind the Curtain: The new gatekeepers, Axios responded:
The truth is, it is an almost impossible task for companies to police speech without bias or unfairness. That leaves two other options — the government or individuals. Both X and Meta are choosing people, with an imperfect ‘community notes’ mechanism to correct misinformation in real time.
That opens most of social media up as a Wild West of expression, where high-quality, trustworthy information will commingle with garbage and misinformation. That's what free speech absolutists have long fought for.
There isn't a tyrant past or present who wouldn't cheer Axios. What does Axios think the government is? It's people. Individuals. The only difference is that the government people are armed. Axios apparently believes that individuals, acting privately, are incapable of distinguishing between high-quality, trustworthy information and garbage and misinformation, but individuals backed by the power of legalized force—the law—are somehow capable of creating that perfect mechanism by successfully making that distinction! This, from a private media company!
Axios acts like "government or [private] individuals" is a balanced choice. Nothing can be further from the truth. Government has a legal monopoly on the use of force and violence. A government edict is imposed on all media, leaving both media owners and consumers no choice—and with the power to levy fines and jail terms for saying the “wrong” thing. A private individual (or company) has no such legal power of coercion of any kind. A Mark Zuckerberg speech regulation, or lack thereof, only affects his own company, which is subject to competition, leaving the field open to other platforms with different content moderation standards—and consumers free to switch and choose.
But, in Axios’s view, we end up with some "Wild West of expression," which implies lawlessness. WRONG! Speech cannot be legally used to violate others' rights. That's why we have laws against inciting violence, making terroristic threats, or endangering public safety. We have libel and slander laws to give victims a chance to recover damages inflicted by others’ lies. Our real danger is a Wild West of arbitrary government speech regulation.
The choice "government or individuals" is a choice of despotism or individual freedom—nothing more and nothing less. The very fact that the choice is even posed as legitimate and balanced shows shocking ignorance of basic political philosophy, of America's very Founding ideals, and of history more broadly—or, worse, an understanding of the stakes involved with Axios deliberately opening the door to despotism, with Axios becoming one of the government’s gatekeepers. As Megan McArdle presciently puts it,
If you see someone advocating for more suppression of dangerous speech — be it heresy, hate speech or “misinformation” — you can be sure they expect their side to have exclusive use of the ban-hammer.
I’ll give Axios the benefit of the doubt and assume ignorance. But what does that say about the state of knowledge in our culture that a widely read social media outlet like Axios can spread such political misinformation with apparent impunity?
Private platforms, of course, have a right to moderate content posted on their platforms by their customers. And they may find that some form of content moderation or suggestive bylines are necessary. Still, kudos to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for championing the powerful idea of intellectual freedom through global information platforms governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.
The very idea of centralized fact-checking, whether by a private media company, which is legitimate but can be problematic, or by the government, which is downright dangerous, ignores a crucial fact. What’s lost in all of the hand wringing over social media misinformation is the fact that it’s never been easier for the average person to do his own fact-checking. Remember that consumers can easily reference professional fact-checkers on their own. All we need to do is get off of our lazy mental asses and do a bit of intellectual labor.
Related Reading:
The Nature of Government, by Ayn Rand, From Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The First Amendment Restricts Government, Not Private Citizens
Here’s the truth: Meta ending fact-checking is a win against censorship by Megan McArdle for WAPO.
The fact that merely letting people talk to each other feels like a dangerous concession to the right tells you just how much power progressives had amassed. Ironically, it reminds me of a quote cited often when conservatives complained about progressives throttling their opinions: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
Meta's Content Moderation Turnabout by Roger Pielke Jur. for The Honest Broker
A Lesson From 1930s Germany: Beware State Control of Social Media By Heidi Tworek for The Atlantic
The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech--by Kimberley Strassel, especially Chapter 2, “Publius & Co.”
HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen
Meta Makes Major Moves to Advance Free Expression on Its Platforms By David Inserra
