Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Left-wing Echo Chamber Reddit, has expressed his support for Mark Zuckerberg's recent decision to call Meta's biased third-party “fact check” program “a very practical change.”
CNBC Report In a recent interview, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian shared his views on Mark Zuckerberg's decision to terminate meta's biased third-party fact-checking program for platforms including Facebook and Instagram. The move was announced by Zuckerberg in January, days before Donald Trump's second inauguration as US president.
Meta's third-party fact-checking program, launched in 2016, claimed to combat platform misinformation by partnering with fact-checking organizations in more than 100 countries. But in reality, they used Checker's extreme left-wing prejudice to silence conservative voices on Zuckerberg's platform.
The Ohanian saw the meta decision as “practical” and said “it's impossible to check facts on a massive scale, let alone in real time, as Facebook is trying to do.” He added that Meta “is unacceptable, so we just rewind something that was a bad idea from the start.”
Rollback of the fact-checking program will begin in the US, with Meta planning to replace it with a community-based system. This new approach is consistent with the model used in X (previously Twitter), allowing you to add context to potentially misleading posts.
Joel Caplan, Meta's Chief Officer of Global Affairs, praised X's success in the Community Notes model, saying, “We've seen this approach work with X, where the community can decide when a post is misleading and requires more context.”
Ohanian also shares his thoughts on the future of social media, suggesting that users should have the ability to choose their own algorithms. He believes the platform is incentivized to provide the best possible algorithm to attract users without any ominous motivation.
As one of the pioneers of social networking platforms, Reddit faces its own challenges in moderation. The platform was launched in March 2024 and boasts over 70 million active users every day, but it demonstrates its own extreme leftist bias by implementing community-specific rules for individual subreddits and banning top subreddits from Trump supporter The_Donald.
Meta's decision to terminate the third-party fact-checking program comes in a series of policy changes for the company, including the termination of the DEI program after Trump took office. Zuckerberg recently expressed regret in a letter to Congress about some of Meta's decisions, claiming that the Biden administration has pressured the company to censor specific content related to the coronavirus.
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Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News, which covers the issues of freedom of speech and online censorship.
