Mark Zuckerberg wants you to believe he's based. He's replacing partisan "fact" "checking" with a more fair and balanced Community Notes system. Meta's DEI program is DOA. Our dude even took tampons out of the boys room. Way too many people on the Right are impressed by Zuck's appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, claiming the Biden Admin would yell at him. He has A LOT more to answer for as far as I'm concerned. Like the portal his company created that only the government had access to.

As someone who publishes web content for a living, Facebook has been the bane of my existence for years. I should probably watch Zuckerberg's appearance on Rogan in its entirety, not just clips. But I know it's going to make me angry, and I gave up drinking for Dry January.

Zuck made news, or "news," last week when he told Rogan that the Biden administration would call Meta cursing and screaming for them to take down "misinformation" about the pandemic response, even if it were satire or NOT misinformation. The META CEO claims the company refused, which is bullplop because they DID take down memes and DID take down things that were true.

We once got dinged over a Wall Street Journal story about a John Hopkins study that the third-party "fact" checkers determined wasn't sciencey enough. Here's the thing: We didn't write about the study. We only hyperlinked the WSJ article while pointing out that there had to be other sciencey people besides Anthony Fauci the media could talk to. THAT was enough to get our post taken down.

We all know that the Biden administration yelled at Meta because we've all seen Jim Jordan's Facebook Files. The question is, how far did government censorship go? For example, with a portal, the government could log in to identify posts it deemed "misinformation" and/or "disinformation."

From The Intercept (not exactly known for being a MAGA fanzine):

There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

"Disagreeing with pandemic policy." Except, I'm sure coincidentally, around the same time, we saw our traffic to any post that was critical of Joe Biden on anything plummet. Also, I'm sure coincidentally, only to articles we shared on the Steven Crowder Facebook page. The articles still pulled respectable numbers if they were shared on smaller pages, emails, or random aggregation sites. If you manage right-leaning web content, you had (and have) the same experience.

There is still a lot of "if true" or "we'll see" with Zuckerberg's claim the company is changing. Admitting that Facebook's "independent" "fact" checkers were partisan hacks operating in bad faith is a start.

But it is just a start. Zuckerberg needs to testify underoath on exactly how far the Biden Administration and progressive NGOs went in censoring content they didn't like. How much content was censored? Who in the company made the decision to censor it? Are they still employed?

It's nice that Zuck likes to smoke meat and roll BJJ. However, he needs to answer a lot more before he can sit with us.

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Brodigan is Grand Poobah of this here website and when he isn't writing words about things enjoys day drinking, pro-wrestling, and country music. You can find him on the Twitter too.

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