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 (transcript here), 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”.
Zuckerberg announced several changes to Meta’s moderation approach, including replacing third-party fact-checkers with a user-driven Community Notes model (like on Elon Musk’s X) and directing resources towards removing illegal content, while “getting rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse”.
Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram and Threads, will also bring back its recommender algorithms for political content, will move its trust and safety operations from California to Texas, and will “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more”.
There’s a lot to say about this announcement. Sincere or not, Zuckerberg is obviously doing the politically savvy thing given Trump’s decisive election win. Presiding over the data of more than three billion users, Zuckerberg has access to the best barometer in the world for public sentiment, and it looks like free speech has gone mainstream. (But only to a point. More on this further down.)
Lifting the curtain on the fact-checker con
Regardless of Zuckerberg’s motivations, I welcome the changes, especially ditching the third-party fact-checkers, which are one of the biggest cons of the digital information age.
Far from the neutral image they try to cultivate, ‘fact-checkers’ often operate more as opinion police, employing a range of logical fallacies and argumentation tactics to reassert narrative hegemony in an increasingly decentralised media environment, which is why the term ‘fact-checker’ often appears in sarcastic quote marks on this Substack.
In an unwitting self-own, the New York Times (NYT) lifted the curtain on the artifice with the least self-aware headline of 2025 thus far: ‘Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.’
Zuckerberg said, “the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
We saw a similar phenomenon in Australia during the Voice referendum, when Facebook fact-checking partner RMIT FactLab was suspended by Meta after accusations of political bias (accusations which appear to have been well-founded).
They’re also too often misleading or flat-out wrong. See the Telegraph‘s list of five major fact-checker misses for a sample. I’ve documented numerous other faux pas here, here, here, and here.
That’s why, for the problem of dealing with misinformation on social media specifically, I favour democratised, user-generated systems like Community Notes on X instead of top-down information control meted out by “young kids” who “misunderstand the experts”, enforced by algorithms.
As a user of both Meta’s Instagram and Elon Musk’s X, I have personally found Community Notes to be far more effective in adding missing context and busting hoaxes than the laughable efforts of fact-checkers to police jokes, expert opinions and factually accurate information.
Both the top-down and the user-generated approaches have downsides, but the pitfalls of top-down control exceed those of allowing social media users to thrash it out themselves (furnished with the input of journalists doing their jobs).
The pearl-clutchers are wailing this week about the anticipated explosion of harmful mis- and disinformation on Meta platforms, and performatively leaving Facebook in protest.
But they appear to have quite forgotten that much of the mis- and disinformation proliferating online over the past several years stemmed from official sources, which were bolstered by deferent fact checks and pushed to users as ‘authoritative sources’.
And there is the cost of censoring accurate information to account for. “Even if [our algorithms] accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” said Zuckerberg.
Even the most authoritarian-leaning information control zealots would have to admit that banning people from sharing the fact that Covid is airborne a full year into the pandemic on the World Health Organisation’s say-so likely cost lives.
At the most extreme, top-down censorship regimes have claimed millions of lives, as occurred in the Soviet Union and Communist China, where criticisms of politically favoured but disastrous policies (Lysenkoism, Mao’s Great Leap Forward) were banned, resulting in widespread famine and death.
The beginning of the end?
After nearly a decade of heading down this path, Meta’s abandonment of third party-fact-checkers signals a fork in the road, not just for the company, but for the industry.
Meta’s Facebook has more users worldwide than any other platform, meaning fact-checkers just lost their biggest social media partner.
But the change won’t happen overnight, at least not for users outside of the U.S., which is where Meta will begin rolling out its shift to a Community Notes model.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) confirmed in an email that “advice from Meta [is] that there is no immediate plan to make changes to the third-party fact-checking programme in Australia”.
The Australian division of AAP FactCheck’s contract with Meta reportedly runs into 2026, and covers fact-checks in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (the company also has relationships with other tech companies like Google and TikTok).
But the writing is on the wall, at least as far as future contracts with Meta are concerned.
Fact-checkers push back
However, the fact-checkers aren’t about to go quietly into the night. It’s big business after all.
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” Neil Brown, the President of the Poynter Institute, told the NYT. Poynter is a global non-profit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners.
Chris Morris, Chief Executive of U.K. fact-checker Full Fact, said: “We absolutely refute Meta’s charge of bias – we are strictly impartial, fact-check claims from all political stripes with equal rigour and hold those in power to account through our commitment to truth.”
“Like Meta, fact-checkers are committed to promoting free speech based on good information without resorting to censorship. But locking fact-checkers out of the conversation won’t help society to turn the tide on rapidly rising misinformation.”
And AAP FactCheck CEO Lisa Davies told Crikey that: “AAP FactCheck plays a critical role in responding to disinformation with factual, objective journalism and through media literacy education.”
“Independent fact-checkers are a vital safeguard against the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation that threatens to undermine free democratic debate in Australia and aims to manipulate public opinion.”
U.S. First Amendment vs. The World
In his statement on Tuesday, Zuckerberg foreshadowed a showdown between U.S. First Amendment principles (backed, in his version of the story, by the incoming Trump Administration), and foreign governments pushing for tighter information controls.
“Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there,” he said.
“Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
“The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. Government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years, when even the U.S. Government has pushed for censorship by going after us and other American companies.”
Australia can be added to that list. In fact, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fancies Australia to be a world leader in cracking down on social media platforms.
“I know that our strong action is being watched right around the world because other leaders that I’ve spoken to have indicated that they applaud [it],” he said this week.
Though the Albanese Government’s misinformation bill was unceremoniously dumped at the end of last year after failing to secure critical support, the Government achieved a world first in passing legislation to raise the minimum age for social media access to 16.
And, this year the Government will force Big Tech companies to pay for Australian news content, legislate a Digital Duty of Care and expand the Online Safety Act.
Australia’s Communications Minister Michelle Rowland signalled her support for the fact-checker game after Meta’s announcement, stating: “Misinformation can be harmful to people’s health, wellbeing and to social cohesion.”
“Misinformation… is complex to navigate and hard to recognise. Access to trusted information has never been more important.
“That’s why the Albanese Government is supporting high quality, fact-checked information for the public through ongoing support to ABC, SBS and AAP.”
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has been at loggerheads with X since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform (formerly Twitter) said that Meta will be “required to comply with Australian law, including the Online Safety Act”.
“We will continue holding all technology companies to account for online harms and safety inadequacies.”
The European Commission has also doubled down, arguing that its data laws only require social media platforms to remove illegal content which may be harmful, such as to children or to the EU’s democracies.
“We absolutely refute any claims of censorship,” a Commission spokesperson said.
And Reuters reports that “Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes, who last year had led the Supreme Court decision that temporarily suspended social media platform X in the country, said on Wednesday tech firms would need to comply with laws in order to keep operating in Brazil”.
Looks like it’s game on.
Free expression on Meta, really?
While some are decrying Meta’s moderation changes as going too far, others say they don’t go far enough, at least not if free expression is truly the goal.
As pointed out by Ken Klippenstein on Substack, content that remains banned on Meta includes: “glorification” of so-called “Dangerous Organisations and Individuals” or “violent events”; “support” for such dangerous individuals, including “directly quoting” them “without caption that condemns, neutrally discusses, or is a part of news reporting”; and “private information obtained from illegal sources” (presumably hacked emails, for example).
The threats to free speech posed by these and other Meta policies are real and cut against Zuckerberg’s purported desire to stand up to Government censorship. Guess how Meta decides what constitutes “dangerous organisations”? By relying on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist groups, per a Human Rights Watch report detailing the platform’s systemic censorship of discourse on the Gaza war. For the high crime of merely interviewing Hamas officials to get them on the record, my former Intercept colleagues Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill over at Drop Site News have had their reporting removed by Meta.
Digital rights group liber-net has called for Meta to show that it is genuine in its apparent recommitment to free expression by enacting further reforms.
Suggested reforms include: “Disclosing all non-public portals used for communication between Meta and government officials, making public agreements where government, non-profit or academic researchers have been granted special or exclusive access to Meta product data or APIs, and committing to a yearly public disclosure of ‘revolving door’ employees who cycle between U.S. Government positions and roles in the tech industry.”
Grab the popcorn. The anticipation of the impending demise of the fact-checking con. The high stakes if Meta and X lose the information control war with governments in control of enormous markets. The drama of world leaders posturing, tech bros tweeting, academics pontificating, while unbridled users lambast them all in Community Notes… it should be quite the show.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnett’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Isn’t it still too early to say that? Cancers not caught early enough may well not have caused death yet, among other factors.
Yes this will play out slowly not quickly, and the biggest impact will be on the third world not the UK.
Isn’t it clear from the graph that they’ve just created a new category – COVID – and deaths that were previously in other categories are not in the COVID category?
Or said in another way, they have created the perfect method for laundering the deaths they cause through their jabs and other measures.
Noah still banging on with duff analysis, using Narrative constructs like ‘Covid deaths’ and ‘excess deaths’, coupled with ignorance of the flaws of age-adjusted figures.
Do you honestly simply accept that deaths from Covid rank third in this hierarchy of common fatal disease, given its low incidence and therefore minute incidence of fatality? Pull the other one.
OK – there is a bit of a message to be gleaned from one month’s dodgy figures – but it’s very limited and to be treated with caution.
What can be said is that the continuing panic scenario is blown out of the water.
A slow learner!
Perhaps you could explain what you mean. What is duff by using widely accepted metrics? What do you mean by “narrative constructs”? I looked that up and am still none the wiser. The only thing I can think of is that you mean “Covid deaths” cover a much wider range of causes of which Covid is often just part of the story. I have asked for clarification of that from the author.
Which month’s dodgy figures? They are all questionable, but in this case to you mean last month’s high or this month’s lower ones?
Why do you feel the need to make judgements abot Noah’s character?
“What is duff by using widely accepted metrics?”
Oh – nothing at all. Listen to the BBC and Stephen Powis any day for the accepted metrics. 🙂
The flawed use of recent short term averages as a baseline has been extensively discussed, as they inflate the exceptionality of 2020-21. ‘Narrative construct’ – a meme produced by the official narrative.
Look – if you haven’t sussed the total unreliability of (a) the use of the term ‘Covid’ and (b) the highly questionable nature of the term ‘Covid deaths’, then you really need to go back to basics. Anyone who does not have difficulty in keeping up would immediately know that the proper meaning of ‘Covid death’ is a death caused specifically by ‘Covid’ – a secondary pulmonary disease. They would further know that the data on this is an unknown.
I’m not judging Noah’s ‘character’ – I don’t know the person. I’m commenting on a run of flawed analysis.
Hard Data Shows the Covid Vaccines Don’t Work
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/hard_data_shows_the_covid_vaccines_dont_work.html
From the front line this weekend I can report it is all quiet . After three months of unusually high levels of respiratory patients it is as though summer has returned. I can also report that many trusts are today cancelling routine surgery booked for December ” just in case ” . This performance will go on as long as the Mousetrap .
Thanks. Always informative to read your updates from the front line.
Thank you for your very apt analogy. This is no more than a theatrical performance; one of incompetent acting and atrocious direction
Not sure I’m following the logic in this piece – 7.1% increase does not equal equal in my book. But I agree, it is heartening that there has been an improvement vs the month before.
However, I can’t help noticing in the bar chart of age-standardised mortality broken down by cause that October 21 mortality is reduced relative to 5yr average by ~5-20% for all causes except “Covid-19” and “Symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions”. Dry tinder effect? Missattribution? <Insert preferred conspiracy theory here>?
It’s either misattribution, or Covid is managing to magically reduce the usual causes of death at old age. I wonder which is most likely?
The latter, obviously, and also the Chinese Virus cures influenza.
Actually, nothing magical there, if you are old and die from Covid, you cannot die from another disease as well. If we started culling old people, the other old-age diseases would also “magically” go away. People tend to only die once, you see.
Or, viewed another way, neglect and unavailability of health care has culled all that it’s going to cull, for now. We’ve levelled down to a steady state.
Seems to confirm my suspicions about why GP Practices* are only “commissioned” to boost vax the over 75s. Are they being given some special booster jab denied to the rest of the boost seeking community?
Segregation by location meaning that jabbers don’t have to make decisions on the spot about who to give the ‘special vax’ to and who not.
I would previously have laughed out loud at the suggestion of a ‘boost to kill/cull’ policy but these days, who knows?
* Which is the case at my large GP Practice which lists about 10 Drs. as Partners and a further 20 or more Salaried.
Just to be clear, do we assume that the Covid deaths are the usual “within 28 days” tripe?
No reason why not plus the usual attributed to Covid behind closed doors if it is still usual practice that Covid deaths only require a single signature on the death certificate and other reductions in time consuming paperwork which was the case during Lockdown One.
I can feel myself turning into an A+ conspiracy theorist as time goes by which was never previously the case.
Only A+? come on! You must try harder! There is the A+++ with tin foil hat level to aim for 😉
That’s what happens when governments and formerly-trustworthy(ish!) professions demonstrably lie and mislead over and over again, and keep on lying even when basic logic shows what they are doing.
Age standardised mortality can be a good measure, but it does hide what is happening here unless you use it carefully.
There are a number of reasons that deaths are still running high at the moment but ASM would appear to be back in a relatively normal range
The abnormal numbers of people dying in the 15-44 and 45-64 age groups (and that’s per million in the group so adjusted for both age and population roughly speaking) doesn’t get reflected in ASM in a way that can be seen. For example 15-44 is about a 3% component of ASM and so a say 10% increased in mortality in that age group would have only a 0.3% affect on ASM which wouldn’t be noticed. And the age 45-64 group is only about a 11% component of ASM so again higher mortality in that age group doesn’t really show up in a noticeable way.
So really ASM just tells you about the 65+ age groups. What is happening there is that there are less vulnerable people in those age groups currently than there have been in say a 5 year Autumn period on which a compare is made. It may be that increased mortality in those older groups is balanced by this less ‘dry tinder’ affect. This is not to be confused with the dry tinder effect say immediately after Spring 2020 when the pandemic occurred and pretty much ended (bar the disastrous response), and where the pandemic brought forward by months the dates of deaths of those at end of life.
Let’s also remember that ASM is dependant on the population numbers you assume in each age group. We know ONS are still basing things on the 2011 census so there is potential for errors in the age standardising calculation to have significant affects also.
And here is a chart for the 45-64 age group looking at mortality (per million in group) since 2010.
Mortality is still running high in the 45-64 age group. But that won’t be visible in the ASM figure as mentioned.
Clearly from this there should be ongoing concerns about the impacts of lack of access to healthcare and vaccine related deaths.
Now look at the oldest upper banded age group for which ONS publish good data, ages 75-84.
Can you see deaths per million for 2021 for that age group from the merge of all the different years? Much less so than the 45-64 age group in the radial chart and not at all for the cumulative chart.
But it’s that sort of age group (75-84) that is driving the thinking when we talk of ASM and come to conclusions about overall mortality.
How dare you present data which does not fit the “sceptics'” message? That’s not very sceptical at all!
“Age standardised mortality can be a good measure”
Yes – in the appropriate context of differently structured populations etc. But it is often introducing speculative modelling into a situation that doesn’t require it. Often, population size standardisation is all that is needed, and is clearer. The KISS principle is important in statistical analysis before getting into more complex manipulation.
P.S. This is not about looking at differing mortality between age groups.
Just as predicted here and elswhere 12-18 months ago.
The final tally of non Covid excess deaths caused by lockdown and consequential failings within the NHS will take decades be fully realised.
The last being the final cause of death of babies damaged by understaffing of maternity units and curtailment of home visits by midwives during Lockdown 1.
By which time those responsible will be enjoying a comfortably funded retirement with gongs and medals on the sideboard to admire.
October deaths in England and Wales have been 46,000 for the last three years. I’ve been banging on about this to normies. The October 2020 deaths figure differed from October 2019 by 44. That’s not a misprint. 46,238 versus 46.282. This in a month where we supposedly had thousands of “covid deaths”. It’s all a pack of lies.
We have had a very mild October.
The big freeze of the last 2 weeks of November will hit the vulnerable hard as is always the case.
I’m sure we can blame omnicon or covid-19 or something though so not to worry when the deaths from November jump again.
Totally agree that the excess deaths in the younger age groups are entirely hidden in the stats with age adjusted mortality. Overall deaths in the young make up a tiny proportion of all deaths so even if you doubled these deaths, they’d have little impact on overall death figures.
This suggests that my concerns about the delayed impact of lockdown on mortality may have been misplaced.
Kudos to Noah for intellectual honesty. (The data also show that vaccines have had no discernible effect on mortality)
So no discernible mortality effect in the 15-19 age group? (see attached chart). The male version of the graph looks worse than this.
Is the onus on the vaccine manufacturers to prove they are safe or is the onus on others to prove they are dangerous. I’d suggest the former.
I don’t claim that the chart in any way proves that the vaccines caused those deaths in the 15-19 age groups. However there is a very worrying signal in that data that needs looking into. What were the causes of death for example? Or do we just ignore it and declare no discernible effect?
“The data also show that vaccines have had no discernible effect on mortality”
Conclusion still : the jabs don’t work.
So you’re discounting those that were culled in the roll out last winter?
Here is an idea that a few might find hard to accept.
It would be hard to argue that at a basic level our health care helps and saves people’s lives. For example, when accidents happen, particularly to younger healthy people, then the healthcare system is a real life saver.
However, beyond that, I reckon the NHS does more harm than good. At best it extends life a bit for some people. It probably also shortens a fair few lives through botched operations, frail people catching infections in hospitals and trying to treat people that are so hopelessly compromised.
Maybe, just maybe, people staying away from hospitals and doctors for almost 2 years is having a net positive effect on health.
I think that’s a very fair point, and it’s something I’ve been giving some thought to as well.
Far too simplistic. Of course, there are botches and mistakes and wrong prescription, but I’m not atypical in having my life considerably extended by the interventions of health care system.
The return on a maternity department, and of healthcare for infants, is probably very high in terms of life years saved, just because infants typically have a long life ahead of them if they survive the first few years. Also a lot of what needs doing in a maternity department is relatively cheap and low-tech.
On the other hand there are lots of people on take-these-pills-daily-for-the-rest-of-your-life regimens who probably shouldn’t be, for example many diabetics who might do better to change their diet.
“October’s Age-Standardised Mortality Rate Was Equal to the Five-Year Average”
So… this is all about depopulation… right?
Hospitals in USA and in first world countries are refusing life-saving Ivermectin treatment even with court orders. Big Pharma doing everything they can to jab us no matter what, while alternative COVID cures EXIST! There happens to be heavy censorship who are looking for these treatments. The Research Is Clear: Ivermectin Is a Safe, Effective Treatment for COVID. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
Isn’t your chart labelled wrongly based upon comments below -ie you say dementia deaths above 5yr av yet 5yr av line is longer. Isn’t it the reverse? Just trying to help.