There are a lot of reasons to hope that Facebook will just go ahead and die right along with Twitter, and this here is definitely one of them.
Under our rules Donald Trump is a politician because he announced that he is running for president again, and as such our fact checkers are no longer allowed to fact check his shit.
This is legitimately the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard all day. If not to fact check politicians of all stripes especially the ones with a propensity for lying about every damn thing, why do you have fact checkers at all? I realize that Facebook likes to think of itself as a neutral party that does nothing more than allow people to communicate, but it’s too big and too relevant to too many people’s lives for it to reasonably take that stance and for it to not have some sensible moderation and truth standards. We’re talking about a company that literally gets people killed. Doing anything at all to help negate some of the problems it helped create is the bare ass minimum it can do. And here it is, again, doing not that. Jesus Christ.
Facebook’s fact-checkers will need to stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following the announcement that he is running for president, according to a company memo obtained by CNN.
While Trump is currently banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says and false statements made by Trump can be posted to the platform by others. Despite Trump’s ban, “Team Trump,” a page run by Trump’s political group, is still active and has 2.3 million followers.“Some of you have reached out seeking guidance regarding fact-checking political speech in anticipation of a potential candidacy announcement from former President Trump,” the Meta staffer wrote in the memo.
The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians.
“It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak,” Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former politician, said in 2019, defending the exemption.The memo noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.”
