Time To Fact-Check the Brussels Thought Police

Zuck's getting rid of "fact-checking" is a sham. I recently got a "fact-check" because my post "might be seen in countries that Meta still fact-checked" in.

From The European Conservative

By Gábor Szűcs

While Mark Zuckerberg dismantles fact-checking on his platforms, the European Commission continues to enforce norms that penalize dissenting opinions.

“The effort to be more inclusive has gone too far: it has increasingly been used to silence and exclude those who hold different opinions,” the founder and CEO of Meta said in January of this year regarding the censorship prevailing on social media platforms. The Facebook owner also admitted, “Governments and traditional media have been pushing for more and more censorship. A lot of this is clearly done for political reasons.” 

Mark Zuckerberg’s volte-face is clearly linked to the election of pro-freedom Donald Trump as president.  Previously, Facebook censorship was defended with the argument that Meta is a private company and, according to its own rules, restricts whatever it wants on its platforms. Meta also used to claim that there were no political interests influencing this process. These arguments, of course, were completely nullified by Zuckerberg’s admissions. Incidentally, judicial practice previously considered it a “public statement” if someone expressed their opinion on Facebook—not in a private message—or made a defamatory statement about someone, or damaged someone’s reputation.

What was truly novel about the billionaire tech guru’s statements, however, was the bluntness with which he spoke about the interventions of the globalist elite. 

In the last ten years, they started to enforce ideologically-based censorship. I think there were two main events that triggered that. The election of Trump in 2016, which basically coincided with Brexit and the fragmentation of the EU. Then, in 2020, there was COVID … These people from the Biden administration called our team. They were yelling and swearing at them, 

Zuckerberg testified.

In light of all this, it’s no surprise that Meta banned Russian state media from its platforms worldwide last September, after then-U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Russia Today’s “destabilizing activities.”

Meta’s censorship, however, does not only affect politicians and media outlets that are undesirable to the international Left: the sword of Damocles hangs over the heads of every user when they express their opinion on topics that are important to the left-liberal establishment. It is saddening that this modus operandi is reminiscent of the (opinion) dictatorship that the peoples of post-Communist countries thought would be gone forever after the regime changes in East-Central Europe.

Although Zuckerberg promised to eliminate fact-checking on Facebook, this is easier said than done in Europe. As he himself said, “More and more laws in Europe are institutionalizing censorship.” The most important of these are the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in November 2023 in case C-376/22.

The declared aim of the DSA is to replace the normally applied self-regulation of public political communication on social media with competition law obligations. The largest platforms would thus be forced to analyze the impact of their services on electoral processes. The most absurd part of the regulation is found in Article 34 of the DSA, which requires service providers to carry out a risk assessment of the extent to which their service restricts freedom of expression or the right to free information, and the risks it poses to civil discourse and electoral processes. In other words, to assess the danger of people freely expressing their thoughts on Facebook. If a platform fails to comply with the provisions of the DSA, the EU can impose fines of up to 6% of the company’s global turnover.

Judgment C‑376/22 of the CJEU considers national legislation to be a “legal obstacle to the proper functioning of the internal market,” which must be removed by harmonizing certain national laws, as it creates legal uncertainty if such services are subject to different rules. Interestingly, concerns about legal certainty do not arise about ordinary social media users never knowing whether expressing their opinion will result in the deletion of the post, the blocking of the user, or no consequences at all. With its judgment, the CJE has essentially excluded national legislators from regulating social media platforms, while creating a hegemonic position for Brussels.

In 2020, as the first phase of the EU’s anti-disinformation strategy, the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) began operating, funded by the European Commission (EC), with the aim of coordinating the work of fact-checking centers and editorial offices set up in member states, as well as research on fake news and the spread of disinformation. The project aimed to build an EU market for fact-checking services and support authorities responsible for monitoring digital media and developing new policies. In the second phase, the EC has launched a €9 million call for proposals to set up national and regional ‘disinformation centers,’ and tasked committed left-wing journalists with “fact-checking.” 

The work of fact-checkers often fails the rule-of-law filter. Even their name is misleading, as they often ‘check’ opinions rather than facts. The latter is conceptually incomprehensible, since what distinguishes an opinion from a statement of fact is that it does not necessarily have to be based on data or factuality, and therefore cannot be checked—at most, it can be censored. While stating untrue facts in certain cases may even constitute a crime, freedom of expression is a first-generation fundamental right. As the Hungarian constitutional court has also stated, personal opinions represent an independent value to be protected regardless of their truth content.

Finally, it is obvious that fact-checking systems not only trample on the freedom of speech but they also totally lack legitimacy. Think about it: just who—and on what basis—authorized a group of people to silence the opinions of others, restricting a first-generation fundamental right? This is the million-dollar question that should be asked in every democratic society. 

Instead, globalist politicians operating in Europe voiced their outrage almost as one when Zuckerberg announced there would be no more fact-checking on his platform, and threatened the Facebook founder, once considered their ally.

This is not surprising, given that the goal of the globalist elite, by spending billions of euros on a censorship system, is to ensure electoral victories and maintain their power. They are pursuing anti-national and anti-European destructive policies that the majority of voters oppose—but the public’s chances of sharing their dissatisfaction with others and organizing in response is increasingly limited, since they face the risk of being silenced. 

Just how effective the censorship in the political space is can be illustrated by the fact that, according to some calculations, if American voters had been able to learn the full history of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020, one in six Biden voters would not have voted for him, which would have led to a victory for Donald Trump. 

But the times are changing, since “you cannot fool all the people all the time,” as we know from Abraham Lincoln. Despite the strong media headwind, the Republicans managed to win in the United States, and the Patriots for Europe group now has 86 MEPs, making it the third largest group in the EP. It is only these sovereignist forces that can restore free speech in Western societies.