Political strategist Tim Miller, during a podcast Tuesday, called out Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for not taking “responsibility” after criticizing his own platform’s fact-checkers as being “too politically biased.”
Zuckerberg released a video on Facebook Tuesday and announced the company’s change to content moderation. On “The Bulwark,” Miller said the CEO’s statement had “two elements,” calling out the company’s fact-checking as “mostly pointless.”
“Yeah, I think that there are two elements to this. One is the forward-looking Trump suck-up part, and one is the regrets looking back part. We’re going to get to the Trump suck-up part, but let’s continue down the looking back part first,” Miller said.
“Bill Kristol in our internal Slack wrote this. I told him I was going to steal it from him, but I’ll credit it. He was like — here’s the thing, the fact-checking ended up being mostly pointless,” Miller added. “There’s not a lot of evidence [the] fact-checking part works. I think de-ranking things from [the] feed matters. The fact-checking ended up not being that useful. I’m open to the fact that there’s counter research on this. Maybe you’ve seen [it].”
In 2016, Meta launched its fact-checking system on Facebook, running information on the platform through third-party “fact-checkers” who had been certified by the International Fact-Checking Network as well as the European Fact-Checking Standards Network, according to NBC News. However, despite the program being implemented on both Facebook and Instagram for the past nine years, Zuckerberg said that both programs will be getting back to their “roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
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Miller went on to say how “Never-Trump” conservative Bill Kristol also criticized Zuckerberg before adding that the CEO could have removed the fact-checking on the platforms at any point in time.
“Bill [Kristol] writes, ‘Zuck now denouncing Facebook’s fact-checking when he implemented it, was in charge of it, arranged it, supervised it, paid for it for years, is like a Stalinist show trial type of self-denunciation for the new leader,’” Miller said. “I think it is part that, putting on the hair shirt for Trump, but I do think he also has some of his own regrets about it, but he hasn’t done the mature thing of accepting responsibility for the decisions he made as one of the richest people in the world.”
“In this announcement, it’s like, ‘The legacy media and these annoying hall monitors forced me to do this.’ Now, it’s like, ‘Now this is my big middle finger back at them.’ As you point out, he could have done whatever he wanted, really,” Miller added. “It’s not like the Biden regulators were coming for him. He believed a lot of the stuff based on that interview with Ben Smith, but he hasn’t accepted responsibility for that. It doesn’t feel like it.”
Zuckerberg’s change to the platform comes after major shifts in social media, as billionaire Elon Musk took over X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022 to help protect the “free speech” platform. The CEO said in his video that the changes were influenced by the 2024 election, calling out “governments and legacy media” for their push to “censor more and more.”
Republicans have long called out what they said was social media censorship and influence on the public, as platforms had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.
Featured Image Credit: Eirik Solheim
