Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement earlier Tuesday that Meta platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, were abandoning the East German style censorship by “fact checking” in favor of other methods caught just about everyone by surprise; see . The most surprised were the people currently grifting off, sorry, I mean employed by Meta as fact checkers. According to reports, Meta’s contract fact checkers only learned they were out of work when the rest of us did.

“We heard the news just like everyone else,” says Alan Duke, cofounder and editor in chief of fact-checking site Lead Stories, which started working with Meta in 2019. “No advance notice.”

The news that Meta was no longer planning on using their services was announced in a blog post by chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan on Tuesday morning and an accompanying video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, the company plans to rely on X-style Community Notes, which allow users to flag content that they think is inaccurate or requires further explanation.

In addition to the pain of betrayal, an atmosphere of doom permeated that world occupied by lackwits and midwits who fancied themselves the global arbiters of what was “fact.”

For others the financial implications are even more dire. One editor at a US-based fact-checking organization that works with Meta, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told WIRED that Meta’s decision “is going to eventually drain us out.”

In his video, Zuckerberg clearly states that fact-checking resulted in content being restricted, reach limited, or simply deleted.

Here is the full video from Mark Zuckerberg announcing the end of censorship and misinformation policies.

I highly recommend you watch all of it as tonally it is one of the biggest indications of “elections have consequences” I have ever seen pic.twitter.com/aYpkxrTqWe

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) January 7, 2025

We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.

This was disputed by the former fact-checkers in a New York Times article headlined, and I swear I’m not making this up, .

Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have taken issue with that characterization, saying they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.

“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners. “There’s a mountain of what could be checked, and we were grabbing what we could.”

This you, dawg? pic.twitter.com/kIaCBI0mxS

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) January 7, 2025

While the fact-checkers may be technically correct that they didn’t have the authority to meddle with content on Facebook and Instagram, that is sort of like the guy working in the Zyklon B factory claiming he never gassed anyone. Of course, they knew what the result of their work product was, and of course, they acted with political bias. We frequently felt the impact of their work here at RedState. We have had the site threatened with demonetization over posts on climate change, transgenderism, and COVID. When we first reported rumors of a lab leak at Wuhan, we were forced to choose between staying in business and withdrawing a post. Both Mike Ford and I had posts pulled that dealt with January 6. These people were not only evil, but most of them were profoundly stupid. They literally did not understand the subject matter they were reviewing and made no effort to do so; on the bright side, there was no internal check on their journalistic terrorism by Meta, so YOLO;

Facebook in March 2021 flagged a Journal op-ed by Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary about the pace at which Americans would develop herd immunity. The platform also targeted the Journal’s review of climate contrarian Steven Koonin’s excellent book “Unsettled.”

On Wednesday morning, the International Fact-Checking Network (there actually is such a thing) will convene an emergency meeting of its members to decide what to do. The money stream has dried up, and the few remaining clients for KGB-like editorial control don’t have deep pockets. Most of them will, if there is justice, spend a long period of time unemployed and suffer financial devastation. The next hobo you see living in a refrigerator carton under an overpass may be the same guy who labeled your post on Hunter Biden’s laptop as disinformation and had your webpage demonetized.

There was obviously more at stake here than Zuckerberg deciding to do the right thing. In the video, he refers to the election of Donald Trump as “a cultural tipping point.” On November 27, Zuckerberg trekked to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage (). That visit was followed by a $1 million contribution to Trump’s inaugural (). Zuckerberg knows he’s up to his eyebrows in highly questionable censorship activity at the behest of the Biden administration and that no one is around to rescue him now.

Hopefully, this will change the culture in Big Tech from defaulting toward fascistic government control to favoring individual freedom. Only time will tell.