Meta Still Suppressing Viewpoints Based on Fake Fact Checks Despite Zuckerberg’s Latest Promise

Fact checkers are a Madhatter problem, not the solution to online nonsense.

5 minute read

Barely a week after Mark Zuckerberg apologized for Meta censoring people at the behest of Biden administration pressure, Meta continues suppressing information based on fact checks that don’t check facts. I know, because it happened to me.

Last week, I posted a video on Meta of Kamala Harris calling free speech a “privilege.” Here’s that Kamala Harris video.

Kamala Harris’s claim that free speech is a “privilege” irritated me for obvious reasons. Even though current Democratic Party leaders have problems with free speech, it’s protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Someone who went to law school, served as a city prosecutor, and is now Vice President should know as much.

So I posted the Kamala Harris video on Meta, writing, “The Democrat who wants to run the country argues free speech is a ‘privilege.’”

I was on vacation last week and was trying to stay off social media, but I later noticed that my post got a “missing context” from one of Meta’s “independent” fact checkers.

I had no clue what any of this meant since I was just restating Harris’s claim. What “context” is missing?

So I clicked on the “fact check.” And soon realized I had stepped through the looking glass.

The fact check took me to an Italian fact checking site with the fact check, “In questo video Kamala Harris non dice di voler chiudere X.” First off, why is an Italian fact checker involving itself in a discussion of American free speech? And what relevance does this have to do with an American writing in English?

It’s beyond wacky.

Translated into English, the fact check reads, “In this video Kamala Harris doesn't say she wants to shut down X.”

Okay. But what does this have to do with what I posted?

Nothing, actually. This fact check has nothing to do with what I wrote. It’s a “missing context” claim that is itself missing context.

When I fed the rest of the fact check into a translator, I learned after 500 long words: the video of Kamala Harris calling free speech a “privilege” dated from 2019. However, some people on X were claiming it was recent and that Harris was calling for X to be shut down.

Okay. But again, what the hell does this have to do with me?

I don’t care when Kamala Harris claimed free speech is a “privilege.” And I don’t know what other people shared on X about the video. And how am I responsible for what other people do with a video?

It’s like you’re taking your kid to baseball practice in suburban Philadelphia and get pulled over by the police who confiscate your kid’s Louisville slugger because a teenage thug with a baseball bat stole a purse last night from some babushka riding the subway in Moscow.

I’m sorry officer, what???

This is exactly what I discussed a couple years back with Matt Taibbi after a Meta “fact checker” claimed an investigation I wrote for The BMJ “lacked context.” Fact checkers deploy the “missing context” label when they can’t find any facts that are wrong but want to villify something they don’t like.

They first pick some proposition out of thin air that you’re not even discussing. They then “debunk” their own proposition and label you “missing context.” It’s an Orwellian nightmare of nonsense.

Here’s how Taibbi reported it at the time:

“Missing context” has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient. As Thacker notes in the Q&A below, “They’re checking narrative, not fact.”

The significance of the British Medical Journal story is that it showed how easily reporting that is true can be made to look untrue or conspiratorial. The growing bureaucracy of “fact-checking” sites that help platforms like Facebook decide what to flag is now taking into account issues like: the political beliefs of your sources, the presence of people of ill repute among your readers, and the tendency of audiences to draw unwanted inferences from the reported facts. All of this can now become part of how authorities do or do not define reporting as factual.

“But that’s not a fact check,” says Thacker. “You just don’t like the story.”

I didn’t dispute the Meta “fact check” of the Kamala Harris video because that would be arguing with the Madhatter over tea time. The Italian fact checker is not checking facts. They’re suppressing a video they don’t like.

If you’re still confused about why an Italian fact checker is butting into current American concerns over free speech, here’s another Kamala Harris video where she makes similar denigrating comments on protected free speech. So it’s not like the video clip I posted is a one off example.

In 2019, Harris gave a talk at the NAACP in which she promised to activate the Department of Justice to hold social media companies accountable for “hate” a term that has no legal definition, but which many perceive as code for facts and narratives she just doesn’t like.

And, yes: In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's Snyder v. Phelps is one such example.

Here’s the video.

UPDATE: A reader named “Texas Morning Coffee” posted on X that the same thing happened to her. After she posted the Kamala Harris video on Meta complaining about 1st Amendment protections for free speech, she got hit with the “missing context” Italian fact check. The reader is apparently in Texas, raising obvious concerns about fact checkers in Italy getting involved in American controversies over proteced speech.

Also, she never said anything about when Kamala Harris made this statemnet nor did she claim “Harris was calling for X to be shut down.” These are the facts which the “fact check” claims to be checking.

Seems they’re checking a narrative, not a fact.