Over the past few days, users of “Meta” might have noticed some changes.
Especially if they, like some of us at MRCTV, have suffered the evident government-tied censorship of their posts that were part of a giant, years-long suppression campaign – a campaign that already has seen one Supreme Court challenge, and will see another.
The change was announced last month, and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider heralded it as a “huge victory” over the Biden-tied, Soros-tied censorship complex that ran roughshod over us, and, perhaps, you, and millions more.
And, as Alana Mastrangelo reports for Breitbart, the change comes in Meta’s cessation of “fact-checking” – done by “third-parties” with evident leftist bias, and corrupted by further governmental influence – and the adoption of what X already has started, a “Community Notes” system.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has announced that social media users can now sign up for the Community Notes system on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The company scrapped its third-party ‘fact checking’ system due to its overwhelming leftist bias after the election of Donald Trump.”
Meta is encouraging users to sign up to become writers of “Community Notes,”
but, for some Americans, this might come too late, as the unfair censorship at Meta already turned them away.
As Mastrangelo also observes, in its February 20 announcement:
“Meta explained that Community Notes allows users to ‘add more context to posts that are confusing or potentially misleading.’”
And, Meta added:
“Everyone has seen a post that could use more context, or doesn’t seem quite right. That’s why we’re introducing Community Notes, a new way for people on Facebook, Instagram and Threads to add more context to posts that are confusing or potentially misleading.”
And this has proven to be much more popular on Twitter than the previous, government-subsidized, suppression of speech and reach that we at MRCTV, as well as reporters such as Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger have exposed.
In fact, this not only might help Meta reassure users that their content will be less susceptible to politically motivated censorship, it helps Meta follow X in securing a safe zone free from government threats.
This latter point stems from the fact that Section 230 of the 1996 federal Telecommunications Act creates federal leverage over social media sites and over Internet Service Providers (ISPs), based on a term that the government defines, “curating content in good faith.”
As I noted in 2020 for MRCTV, Section 230 leverages the constitutionally claimed “power” for Congress to create the courts above the state supreme courts and below the United States Supreme Court. This “power” also lets Congress prevent certain kinds of suits from entering the federal courts or from going to the Supreme Court.
Thus, for internet providers and website hosts, Congress wove into Section 230 protection against liability suits (ex: defamation, slander), and it also added protection against federal or state governments charging said providers or hosts for any criminally-produced images that might involve minors, or other posts that might run afoul of FCC “regulations,” or state or federal statutes.
And the pertinent clause focusing on these forms of "protection" offered by Congress reads:
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected…”
The problem being that the term “Good faith” is, of course, defined by the overlords in DC, which gives them incredible, and completely arbitrary, power over social media and ISPs.
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But this move by Meta, as well as the prior, path-breaking, move, by X, seems to work around that government claim of power over the companies that run the sites or ISPs. If the company brass shift the “checks” for “validity” from their own staff or from hired “fact-checkers” and shift it to the users, themselves, how can any agent of the state – which purportedly “represents the people,” not defer to the “Community Notes” being generated by the users of that platform?
Both Meta and X might have skirted government accusations of “not curating in good faith” by handing the curation of “news” to the users, themselves.
This is a positive development, but should not blind freedom-backers from recognizing the deeper, longer-term problem of federal politicians attempting to influence speech, suppress speech, or use the Constitution-insulting Federal Communications Commission to play favorites with media companies or with providers of communication technology.
The good thing is that our communications on Meta platforms might be freer of direct government suppression. The bad thing is that the U.S. government already has created institutional controls over speech and telecommunications.
The fight is not over, and it will continue, as long as federal bureaucracies exist contrary to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
