Earlier this week, Facebook announced it would shift its policy away from utilizing third-party fact-checkers to a format more closely resembling that utilized by X. One of its executives shared more details with Erick Erickson.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Public Policy, joined The Erick Erickson Show to discuss why the company made its decision.
“We didn’t want to become the arbiters ourselves,” Kaplan said about the new policy. “But the problem over time, the experience we had … is that there was too much political bias. And in terms of choosing what to fact-check, and then in how they’re fact-checked, we’ve just seen, over time, too much political bias get involved. So we decided we’re just going to scrap that program entirely.
“Instead of relying on this group of so-called experts who have their own biases, like everybody else, we’re going to rely on our community of users. It’s an innovation that X has deployed over the last couple of years, community notes. And we just think crowd-sourcing is good. Crowdsourcing this kind of assessment of what’s true and what’s not, what’s accurate and what’s not, is a much more reliable way. That is going to build trust in a way that the fact-checking system simply didn’t.”
The decision by the company has been hotly contested by critics, who argue the plan makes finding verifiable information more difficult on the platform. Others have claimed the company made the decision in an effort to placate incoming President Donald Trump.
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