Biden calls Zuckerberg ditching Facebook fact-checkers 'shameful'

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been making a clear pivot to the political right in recent months and this week announced plans to change the fact-checking component on both Instagram and Facebook. Outgoing President Joe Biden was asked about it on Friday and he complained about the move, calling it "shameful." 

Biden claimed that Zuckerberg was "walking away from fact-checking" by removing the third party fact-checkers that had been implemented at Facebook in 2020 and shifting to an X-style Community Notes system. "As well as not reporting anything having to do with uh, um discrimination regarding the uh TPS, I find to be just contrary to American, justice, American the way we talk about one another," Biden said. TPS stands for "temporary protected status," the status that is bestowed upon immigrants from countries deemed too unsafe for them to return to.

"Telling the truth matters, I mean it's a, I know I'm on national television but you all are local reporters and national reporters. I'm not at this is not a real question but what do you think? You think it doesn't matter? That they let be printed? Where millions of people read it, things that are simply not true? I mean I wanna know what that's all about. It's just completely contrary to everything America's about. We want to tell the truth. We haven't always done it in our nation but we want to tell the truth," he went on, in a somewhat confused manner.

"And the idea," he laughed, "that a billionaire can buy something and say 'by the way, from this point on, we're not gonna fact-check anything.' And you know when you have millions of people going online and reading this stuff, I think it's really shameful."

In a video posted to Insta, Zuckerberg said "We're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

Zuckerberg made an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience on Friday where he told the popular podcast host that Facebook had been pressured to censor information from users on the platform talking about Donald Trump or the Covid pandemic. 

He said the Facebook platform faced "massive institutional pressure" to "start censoring content on ideological grounds" both after Donald Trump was elected to a first term and as the pandemic got underway. He said that "this really hit the most extreme I'd say, it was during the Biden administration, when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. He said "I think on balance, the vaccines are more positive than negative, but I think that while they're trying to push that program, they also tried to censor anyone who is basically arguing against it." 

"And they pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly, were true," he added. "They basically pushed us in and said, you know, anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you basically need to take down."

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and transformed it into free speech platform X, made a similar change, one that was a precursor to Zuckerberg's changes, when he instituted the Community Notes program on the platform.

Biden is in office for the next 10 days and then will move back to Delaware. President-elect Donald Trump will take his place in the White House and begin his second term in office.