Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of leftist echo chamber Reddit, has expressed his support for Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision to terminate Meta’s biased third-party “fact-checking” program, calling it a “very pragmatic change.”
CNBC reports that in a recent interview, Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, shared his views on Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s biased third-party fact-checking program for platforms including Facebook and Instagram. The move was announced by Zuckerberg in January, just days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration as U.S. president.
Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, launched in 2016, claimed to combat misinformation on its platforms by partnering with fact-checking organizations in over 100 countries. However, in practice the fact checker’s extreme leftist bias was used to silence conservative voices on Zuckerberg’s platforms.
Ohanian characterized Meta’s decision as a “pragmatic” one, stating that “it is impossible to do fact-checking at scale, let alone in real-time, as Facebook was trying to do.” He added that Meta was “just winding back something that was a bad idea from the start because it was untenable.”
The rollback of the fact-checking program will begin in the U.S., with Meta planning to replace it with a community-based system. This new approach aligns with the model used by X (formerly Twitter), which empowers its community to add context to potentially misleading posts.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, praised X’s success with the community notes model, saying, “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.”
Ohanian also shared his thoughts on the future of social media, suggesting that users should have the ability to choose their own algorithms. He believes that platforms are incentivized to provide the best possible algorithm to keep users engaged, without any sinister motives.
As one of the pioneers of social networking platforms, Reddit has faced its own challenges with moderation. The platform, which went public in March 2024 and boasts over 70 million daily active users, has implemented community-specific rules across individual subreddits, demonstrating its own extreme leftist bias by banning the top subreddit for Trump supporters, “The_Donald.”
Meta’s decision to end its third-party fact-checking program comes amidst a series of policy changes at the company, including the termination of DEI programs following Trump’s inauguration. Zuckerberg recently expressed regret over some of Meta’s decisions in a letter to Congress, claiming that the Biden Administration had pressured the company to censor certain content related to coronavirus.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
