A prominent fact-checking organization used by Facebook to moderate political content reacted to news that it will revamp its fact-checking to better avoid bias with an article outlining its disappointment and disagreement with the move. 

‘Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed to first learn through media reports and a press release about the end of the Meta Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership of which Lead Stories has been a part since 2019,’ Lead Stories editor Maarten Schenk wrote on Tuesday in response to an announcement from Meta that it would be significantly altering its fact-checking process to ‘restore free expression.’

Lead Stories, a Facebook fact checker employing several former CNN alumni including Alan Duke and Ed Payne, has become one of the more prominent fact checkers used by Facebook in recent years. 

Fox News Digital first reported on Tuesday that Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to ‘restore free expression’ across Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting its current content moderation practices have ‘gone too far.’ 

‘After Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,’ Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video message on Tuesday. ‘We tried in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S..’

‘What political bias?’ the article from Lead Stories asks before explaining that it is ‘disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse the organizations in Meta’s U.S. third-party fact checking program of being ‘too politically biased.’’

‘Especially since one of the requirements Meta imposed for being part of a partnership included being a verified signatory of the IFCN’s Code of Principles, which explicitly requires a ‘commitment to non-partisanship and fairness,’’ the article states. ‘In all the years we have been part of the partnership, we or the IFCN never received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement.’

Meta said in its announcement that it will move toward a system of moderation that is more in line with Community Notes at X, which Lead Stories seemed to take issue with. 

‘However, In our experience and that of others, Community Notes on X are often slow to appear, sometimes downright inaccurate and unlikely to appear on controversial posts because of an inability to reach agrement [sic] or consensus among users,’ Lead Stories wrote. ‘Ultimately, the truth doesn’t care about consensus or agreement: the shape of the Earth stays the same even if social media users can’t agree on it.’

Lead Stories added that Community Notes is ‘entirely non-transparent about its contributors: readers are left guessing about their bias, funding, allegiance, sources or expertise and there is no way for appeals or corrections’ while ‘fact-checkers, on the other hand, are required by the IFCN to be fully transparent about who they are, who funds them and what methodology and sources they use to come to their conclusions.’

Schenk added, ‘Fact-checking is about adding verified and sourced information so people can make up their mind about what to believe. It is an essential part of free speech.’

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Duke said that Lead Stories plans to press on.

‘Lead Stories will continue, although we have to reduce our output with no support from Meta,’ Duke said. ‘We are global, with most of our business now outside the USA. We publish in eight languages other than English, which is what will be affected.’

Some conservatives took to social media to blast Lead Stories over their article lamenting the change at Meta after years of conservative pushback to Facebook’s fact checkers as a whole on key news stories, including the suppression of the bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.  

‘Of all the fact-checking companies, Lead Stories is the worst,’ British American conservative writer Ian Haworth posted on X. ‘Couldn’t be happier that they’ll soon be circling the drain.’

The executive director of Politifact, a fact checker also used by Facebook, issued a strong rebuke of Zuckerberg following Tuesday’s announcement. 

‘If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror,’ Aaron Sharockman said in a statement he posted on X following Zuckerberg’s announcement.

Sharockman fumed, ‘The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision could not be less subtle.’

He threw back Zuckerberg’s accusation of political bias, stating that Meta’s platforms, not the fact-checkers, were the entities that actually censored posts. 

‘Let me be clear: the decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not fact-checkers. They created the rules,’ Sharockman said.

At the conclusion of his Lead Stories post, Schenk wrote, ‘Even though we are obviously disappointed by this news, Lead Stories wishes to thank the many people at Meta we have worked with over the past years and we will continue our fact checking mission. To paraphrase the slogan on our main page: ‘Just because it’s now trending without a fact-checking label still won’t make it true.’’

Fox News Digital’s Gabriel Hays and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.

Hawaii’s Democratic Governor and practicing physician, Josh Green, is visiting Capitol Hill this week to lobby lawmakers against the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary. In a Tuesday op-ed for The New York Times, he argued that ‘our children’s lives depend’ on preventing Kennedy from leading the agency.

Green, who worked as a physician before entering politics, has continued practicing emergency room medicine throughout his legislative career. In 2019, as Hawaii’s lieutenant governor, Green helped spearhead efforts to increase vaccination rates in Samoa amid a measles outbreak in the region. Green arrived in the nation’s capital on Sunday evening to begin his meetings that will go until he returns to Hawaii on Thursday. 

‘As the only physician governor, I need to explain what are good picks and what maybe aren’t so good picks for the cabinet,’ Green said in a video ahead of his planned trip to Washington, noting that his lobbying against Kennedy is not anything personal or politically motivated. ‘[RFK Jr’s] appointment to be the head of Health and Human Services is not consistent with safety for our children,’ he said. 

During his trip to Washington, Green said that he would be discussing with lawmakers and other leaders to explore ‘a better place for [RFK Jr.] to be’ rather than HHS, calling his potential confirmation ‘a bad idea.’

Questions over the likelihood of Kennedy’s confirmation took a turn this week after Sen. Bill Cassidy, R–La., the incoming chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, called out the potential future HHS Secretary for being ‘wrong’ on the issue of vaccines. The criticism follows concerns that Kennedy may seek to get rid of the polio vaccine, after news broke that one of his previous colleagues at Childrens Health Defense, a health-focused nonprofit Kennedy previously chaired, petitioned the government in 2019 to revoke its approval.

Green’s criticism of Kennedy has largely revolved around his anti-vaccine views as well, in particular Kennedy’s response to a measles outbreak in Samoa, during which the potential future HHS Secretary promoted doubts around vaccine efficacy, according to Green and others, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Those efforts included a letter Kennedy sent to the country’s prime minister, as chairman of Children’s Health Defense, suggesting that the measles vaccine could have potentially exacerbated the outbreak.

The Democratic governor penned an op-ed published in The New York Times on Tuesday, continuing to drill at Kennedy’s anti-vaccine efforts in 2019 amid Samoa’s measles outbreak. According to Greene, Kennedy ‘used misinformation to scare all the people of Samoa away from being vaccinated’ and served to ‘torpedo’ the country’s vaccination efforts.

‘Too much depends on our commitment to truth and the lifesaving power of vaccines to entrust Mr. Kennedy with the direction of these programs. Our children’s lives depend on it,’ Green wrote.

Kennedy’s team has not responded to repeated efforts by Fox News Digital to get in touch, but in 2023, Kennedy said during an appearance in a short film that he ‘never told anybody not to vaccinate’ and that he ‘didn’t go [to Samoa] with any reason to do with that.’ Furthermore, amid concerns about how Kennedy might approach the polio vaccine, he told reporters on Capitol Hill last month that he is ‘all for the polio vaccine.’

Proponents of Kennedy’s nomination have suggested his proposed plans, if confirmed, will be rooted in logic and science.

‘I think that Kennedy has aimed to stand for evidence-based changes to policy,’ said Nina Teicholz, a nutrition expert and founder of The Nutrition Coalition, a New York-based nonprofit organization. 

‘Right now, the media is covering RFK Jr. poorly and unfairly, giving him no credit for ideas that are well within the bounds of discussion,’ added Dr. Vinay Prasad, in an article published by The Free Press. ‘Many of RFK Jr.’s ideas have a logic.’

Fox News Digital reached out to Green’s office for comment but did not hear back by publication time.  

Mark Zuckerberg, who often bends with the political winds, is getting out of the fact-checking business.

And this is part of a broader effort by the Meta CEO to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump after a long and testy relationship.

After a previous outcry, Zuck made a great show of declaring that Facebook would hire fact-checkers to combat misinformation on the globally popular site. That was a clear sign that Facebook was becoming more of a journalistic organization rather than a passive poster of users’ opinions (and dog pictures).

But it didn’t work. In fact, it led to more info-suppression and censorship. Why should anyone believe a bunch of unknown fact-checkers working for one of the increasingly unpopular tech titans?

Now Zuckerberg is pulling the plug, announcing his decision in a video to underscore its big-deal nature:

‘The problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts. That’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.’

Let me jump in here. Zuckerberg bluntly admits, with that line about ‘cultural tipping point,’ that he’s following the conventional wisdom–and, of course, the biggest tipping point is Trump’s election to a second term. And skeptics are portraying this as a bow to the president-elect and his team.

‘So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms…

‘We’re going to get rid of fact checkers’ and replace them with community notes, already used on X. ‘After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. 

‘We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.’ 

It was Zuckerberg, along with the previous management at Twitter, that banned Trump after the Capitol riot. This led to plenty of Trumpian attacks on Facebook, and the president-elect told me he had flipped his position on banning TikTok because it would help Facebook, which he viewed as the greater danger.

Trump said last summer that Zuckerberg plotted against him in 2020 and would ‘spend the rest of his life in prison’ if he did it again.

The president-elect boiled it down in a posting: ‘ZUCKERBUCKS, DON’T DO IT!’

Here’s a bit more from Z: ‘We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it’s gone too far.’ 

Indeed it has. And I agree with that. In 2020, social media, led by Twitter, suppressed the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, dismissing it as Russian disinformation, though a year and a half later the establishment press suddenly declared hey, the laptop report was accurate.

Let’s face it: People like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (now embroiled in a war of words with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over an alleged coverup of gang rapes of young girls when Starmer was chief prosecutor) have immense clout. They are the new gatekeepers. With so-called legacy media less relevant–as we see with the mass exodus of top talent from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and the recent rise of podcasts–they control much of the public dialogue. And yes, they are private companies that can do what they want. 

At yesterday’s marathon news conference, a reporter asked Trump about Zuckerberg: ‘Do you think he’s directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past with promises?’

‘Probably. Yeah, probably,’ Trump said, twisting the knife a bit.

Meanwhile, having made the obligatory trek to Mar-a-Lago for dinner, the CEO has taken a number of steps to join forces with the new administration. And it doesn’t hurt that Meta is kicking in a million bucks to the Trump inaugural.

Zuck named prominent Republican lawyer Joel Kaplan as chief of global affairs, replacing a former British deputy prime minister. On ‘Fox & Friends’ yesterday, Kaplan said: 

‘We’ve got a real opportunity now. We’ve got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression, and that makes a difference. One of the things we’ve experienced is that when you have a U.S. president, an administration that’s pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don’t even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on US companies. We’re going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.’

We’re going to work with President Trump. Got it?

What’s more, Zuckerberg is adding Dana White, chief executive officer of United Fighting Championship, to the Meta board. White is a longtime Trump ally, so MAGA now has a voice inside the company.

In other words, get with the program.

At his news conference, where Trump seemed angry about the latest court battles and plans to sentence him, the incoming president said–or ‘didn’t rule out,’ in journalistic parlance– ‘military coercion’ against two of his latest targets.

‘Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes,’ he said. And Americans lost many lives building the Panama Canal. ‘It might be that you’ll have to do something.’ 

He’s not going to use military force against either one. But his answer stirs the pot, as he knew it would.