Meta announced this week that it will switch to a community notes style of fact-checking, abandoning its existing third-party fact checking program, which the social media giant now acknowledges was plagued by political bias.

The original fact-checking system, deployed in 2016 as Trump took office, essentially outsourced the job of verifying the veracity of popular narratives to partner organizations, most of which were legacy media outlets. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in announcing the end of the program this week, Meta (then Facebook) decided to launch the fact-checking initiative in response to pressure from the mainstream media about the spread of “misinformation” online and the resulting harms to democracy. The outlets that applied the pressure ultimately reaped financial rewards as Facebook paid them to do the fact checking.

While Facebook did partner with some conservative outlets — including, for a brief time when the program first launched, National Review — the bulk of the fact-checking was done by ideologically homogenous outlets that instinctively targeted high-profile right-wing users and publications, leading to the suppression of claims that ultimately proved true around topics like Covid, Biden family misdeeds, and climate change.

Around the time the fact-checking program was launched, a former Facebook employee accused the platform of omitting conservative topics from its trending bar, though the platform denied the allegations. The worker said Facebook bumped stories about CPAC, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from the trending section.

In 2018, Facebook came under fire for deleting videos PragerU had posted to the platform. Facebook ultimately reversed its decision and explained that the videos “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” and “Make Men Masculine Again” had been falsely reported to have hate speech.

Two years later, then-congressman Matt Gaetz filed a criminal referral against Zuckerberg, claiming the Facebook CEO had made false statements to Congress while under oath when he asserted the website did not engage in bias against conservative speech. Zuckerberg testified before Congress in 2018 and “repeatedly and categorically denied” Facebook engaged in bias against conservatives, but a Project Veritas investigation reportedly found the “overwhelming majority” of content that the platform’s artificial intelligence filtered was in support of then-President Trump and other conservative figures and topics.

But perhaps the greatest test of Facebook’s free speech policies came in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic, as Facebook and other sites faced pressure from the Biden administration to censor critical information regarding so-called Covid-19 misinformation.

Zuckerberg acknowledged in an August letter to the House Judiciary Committee that "senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured" Meta to "censor" content related to the pandemic in 2021.

But even before President Biden took office, Facebook was among several social media sites that banned discussion of the lab-leak theory in spring 2020. It wasn't until May 2021 that Facebook announced it would no longer remove posts that suggested Covid escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Fast-forwarding to the next year: When vaccines against the virus became widely available, Facebook began to censor claims that Covid vaccines didn't prevent infection.

Even The BMJ, a leading medical journal, was not safe from Facebook's censorship; in November 2021, the journal sent a letter to Zuckerburg that said readers reported a variety of problems when trying to share a BMJ article by journalist Paul D. Thacker that alleged there had been "poor practice" at one of the companies involved in the phase III evaluation trials of the Pfizer vaccine.

While some users were unable to share the article, others said their posts were flagged with a warning that read, “Missing context . . . Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people." Users who tried to post the article received a warning from Facebook that users who repeatedly share "false information" can have their posts moved lower in the newsfeed.

When the article was shared in Facebook groups, administrators received messages from the platform warning that the posts were "partly false," while readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by Facebook partner Lead Stories.

But that the BMJ received fact checking should perhaps come as little surprise given the treatment Jay Bhattacharya and other medical experts received from the platform when they released the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for "focused protection" rather than a detrimental broad-strokes approach to shutting down communities to stop the spread of Covid.

"We were just acting as scientists, but almost immediately we were censored," said Bhattacharya, director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. "Google de-boosted us. Our Facebook page was removed. It was just a crazy time."

"The kinds of things that the federal government was telling social media companies to censor included us — along with millions of other posts from countless other people who were criticizing government COVID policy," he added.

Meanwhile, Facebook also dropped the ball in its handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before the 2020 election. The platform suppressed the story after the FBI trained Facebook and Twitter to treat the story as a "hack-and-leak" Russian operation that involved President Joe Biden's son, according to a House Judiciary report published in October.

Independent journalist and free speech advocate Michael Shellenberger also faced censorship from Facebook in 2020 on a different topic – climate change. He accused Facebook of "inappropriately" censoring a "scientifically accurate" article he wrote that was republished by Environmental Progress, Zero Hedge, and Quillette.

The article, "On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare," was affixed with a warning that led readers to believe it contained false information.

Facebook's fact-checking partner Climate Feedback decided claims in the article were false. One of the claims it took issue with was that humans are not causing a sixth mass extinction. While Shellenberger quoted the co-chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services as saying humans are not in fact causing a sixth mass extinction, Climate Feedback falsely repeated the myth that that is the case, Shellenberger argued.

Shellenberger told National Review he's "thrilled" about Meta's shift toward community notes–based fact-checking.

Climate Feedback was one of ten fact-checking partners Meta relied upon in the U.S., including Politifact, which has been criticized time and time again for its obvious bias against conservatives.

Politifact, which worked in the third party fact-checking program for the project’s entire duration, has brushed away Democrats' stolen election claims as "mostly symbolic" and once gave Florida governor Ron DeSantis a rating of "mostly false" for saying that Lee County was not inside Hurricane Ian's forecast cone – because one largely uninhabited barrier island was in the storm's path.

Meanwhile, Politifact would often show up in defense of Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris.

The "fact-checker" defended comments Harris made that hurricane relief should be based on "equity." “It is our lowest income communities, and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions,” Harris said after hurricanes Ian and Fiona in 2022.

Politifact claimed Harris had been taken "out-of-context" and fact-checked Florida senator Rick Scott for claiming Harris had effectively said, "If you have a different skin color, you’re going to get relief faster.”

“Harris said no such thing in a response to a question that touched on several topics, including Hurricane Ian, climate change policy and disparities in who is most harmed by climate change and extreme weather,” Politifact wrote.

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