Original article (in Croatian) was published on 30/8/2024; Author: Petar Vidov
Croatian disinformation spreaders falsely claim that Zuckerberg’s letter proves Faktograf and other fact-checkers engage in censorship.
Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta, recently sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives of the US Congress in which he wrote that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of President Joe Biden put pressure on his companies to remove or censor certain content.
Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the world; his company, among other things, owns the social networks Facebook, Instagram and Threads and the communication application WhatsApp. Considering that Faktograf cooperates with Meta through their Third Party Fact-Checking program, many domestic spreaders of disinformation decided to interpret Zuckerberg’s letter as proof, or a confession, that Faktograf and other fact-checkers carried out censorship on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we have repeatedly explained (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), this is not true.
After the publication of Zuckerberg’s letter, unfounded claims related to the work of Faktograf were made on Facebook by notorious spreaders of disinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines against this disease, as well as other topics: the controversial entrepreneur Nenad Bakic (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and his business partner, discredited scientist Gordan Lauc (1), marginal web portals Narod.hr (1, 2) Kamenjar (1, 2) and Crodex (1), as well as the political party Most (1) and their MP Marin Miletic (1, 2)
Faktograf has repeatedly written about the disinformation spread by the mentioned sources, which you can read in more detail in our archive (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
Hunt for the fight against disinformation
Before we deal with the content of Zuckerberg’s letter to Congress, it should be clarified how it happened that the owner of Meta is addressing American lawmakers in this way.
The head of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives is Republican Jim Jordan, one of the most prominent allies of former US President Donald Trump in the Republican Party. Jordan used his position as the head of this committee to launch an investigation in which he tries to prove that large technology companies (with a particular focus on Facebook) moderate content on their networks in a way that systematically censors and silences the voices of Republicans and their sympathizers (Vox).
So far, no evidence has been found in support of Jordan’s thesis, although as part of the same investigation, documents have previously surfaced showing that representatives of the Biden government communicated with the people of Meta and requested the removal of content that they estimated could endanger public health (The Wall Street Journal). The legality of that procedure has already been questioned by the US Supreme Court, which concluded that the lawsuit brought before the judges, which was brought by several Republican state prosecutors, has no legal basis (The New York Times).
However, Jordan’s hunt against the tech companies, fact-checking media organizations, and scientists investigating the spread and impact of digital disinformation in the US has borne some fruit. Thus, for example, Stanford University gave up its digital disinformation research program, and the National Institutes of Health suspended its program to improve the communication of health-related information. Many scientists are withdrawing from the field of digital disinformation research because they do not want to be the target of persecution and harassment for their work (The Washington Post, IFCN).
In the same way, domestic political extremists and spreaders of disinformation are on the hunt against Faktograf, trying to intimidate us so that we stop doing our job. Because of this, Faktograf’s journalists are exposed to regular threats and harassment, and other fact-checking organizations in Europe face the same problem.
In other words, the statements from Zuckerberg’s letter do not represent any “confession” or “proof” that politically motivated censorship is being carried out on social networks, and especially that fact-checkers are doing such a thing. Such interpretations are just a continuation of the ongoing hunt for people who study disinformation and combat its spread.
Zuckerberg’s letter
Mark Zuckerberg’s letter was posted in its entirety on Twitter by the House Judiciary Committee. In that letter, the owner of Meta really claims that the Biden administration put pressure on his companies. Here is the quote:
“In 2021, senior officials of the Biden government, including people from the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire, and expressed frustration with the work of our teams when we disagreed. Ultimately, the decision whether or not to remove content is ours and we stand by our decisions, including the COVID-19 changes we made following that pressure. I believe that the pressure from the authorities was wrong and I regret that I did not speak about it more openly. I also think we made some decisions that, with the benefit of retroactive analysis and new information, we would not have made today. As I told my teams at the time, I firmly believe that we should not compromise our content standards because of pressure from any authority in any direction – and we stand ready to fight back if something like this happens again.
In another case, the FBI alerted us to a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma ahead of the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a story in the New York Post about corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his family, we sent the story to fact-checkers to check its accuracy and temporarily limited its spread while we waited for a response. It later became clear that it was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have reduced the visibility of that story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to ensure this doesn’t happen again – for example, we’re no longer temporarily reducing the reach of content in the US while we await verification of factual accuracy”.
As we have already pointed out, the statements from Zuckerberg’s letter do not constitute any revelation. It was previously known to the American and international public that the Biden administration had asked Meta to remove potentially harmful content from their platforms. Joe Biden himself stated during the COVID-19 pandemic, in July 2021, that “Facebook is killing people” (but later softened his statement).
Furthermore, it is quite clear from Zuckerberg’s letter that the removal of content from Meta’s social networks is in no way connected to the fact-checkers.
A combination of human and machine moderation is responsible for removing content on social networks; content that violates the law or violates community standards is sometimes removed automatically, without the intervention of human moderators, and sometimes the final decision is still left to a human. Machine moderation primarily serves the automatic recognition and removal of content such as juvenile pornography (and pornography in general), promotion of terrorism or explicit violence.
However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Meta, by its own admission, also began to remove disinformation content that could seriously endanger public health. They continued to behave in a similar way in other crisis situations, removing from Facebook and Instagram, for example, violent videos and photos from the battlefields in Ukraine and Palestine.
In this process, as documented in several decisions by the Supervisory Board, which was established by Meta specifically to decide on the justification of removing certain content, mistakes often occur, i.e. content that does not even violate laws is removed from Meta’s social networks. It is not known to what extent these errors are the result of human and to what extent machine moderation.
Meta’s cooperation with fact-checkers works differently from the content moderation process and does not result in content removal. When fact-checkers for some content on Facebook determine that it is factually incorrect, a label is displayed next to that content warning users that it is disinformation. Also, Facebook’s algorithms stop recommending such content to other users and thereby reduce the reach of disinformation. However, the original disinformation remains posted on Facebook unless it is removed by the author of the post.
It is completely clear that this is not censorship. Censoring certain content implies its complete or partial removal from the public space. Fact-checkers not only do not remove any content from the public space but do the exact opposite: they add additional information to content that could misinform social network users and place this information in full context to provide people with the opportunity to be adequately informed about important topics such as public health threats or electoral processes.
Claims according to which Mark Zuckerberg’s letter is an argument in support of the thesis that fact-checkers carry out censorship are therefore not factually based.
