Home » Perspective » Meta blocks fact-checking and rejects its First Amendment right to say ‘no’

By Dennis Hetzel, published on January 20, 2025

Select Dynamic field

Even if you accept the notion that too much fact-checking and post-removing has reflected some type of woke, left-wing bias, “anything goes” is not a socially responsible solution. It’s time to get creative for the good of our democracy, ourselves, our national security, and our children. 

Meta has decided to eliminate third-party fact-checking, leaving it up to its users to counter the misinformation that will cascade beyond what we already see. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admits there will be more chaff among the wheat, but he says the change, along with a major loosening of rules to allow more hate speech, is necessary to support free expression. 

It’s a bad idea, one that a media organization that cared about the harm it causes would have the courage to resist. 

Whatever the reasons for Zuckerberg’s self-proclaimed epiphany, Meta’s platforms certainly will become more like X. They will be deeper holes for actual fake news, misogyny, racist rants, crazed conspiracy claims and addictive content harmful to the health of children.

Meta, Google, Google-owned YouTube, X, TikTok and others paint themselves as First Amendment defenders, but none of our rights are limitless. Just as you can’t buy a bazooka despite the Second Amendment, you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater and escape liability. Media outlets also have a First Amendment right to determine what NOT to publish.

With that in mind, allow me to tell you a story. Warning to younger readers: It’s an “old guy” story, from the time when I was a newspaper editor, but hang in there. 

When I became the editor and publisher of the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania in 1990, I felt one of my first jobs was to improve our editorial page, especially the letters to the editor, usually one of the best-read parts of any newspaper. I noticed we published letters written by pretty much the same people day after day. Call them local gadflies. The section had become tiresome and boring, except for those enjoying the sounds of their own hands clapping.

When I asked others in the community why they didn’t write letters, a typical response was, “Well, I might, but I don’t want to be associated with those folks.” 

So, we initiated a policy that we wouldn’t publish more than one letter a week (as I recall the number) from the same person.

The “regulars” protested. We were restricting their First Amendment rights. “No,” I replied. “You have plenty of outlets for your thoughts. You just don’t have a right to publish something multiple times a week in this newspaper.” 

Some of our angry regulars realized they could game the system by having their neighbors and friends send their letters under different names. Sometimes we caught it, sometimes we didn’t. We knew that could happen. But guess what? The quality of our page and the quantity of letters both improved. 

Does this sound familiar in 2025? No matter your mindset or motivation, you have more outlets than ever for your thoughts. You can even start your own blog or podcast. It’s cheap and easy. 

However, there’s a key legal distinction that makes accountability optional for Internet media outlets. If a traditional media outlet decided to pursue “anything goes” as a content strategy, the laws of libel and defamation could readily put it out of business.

Let’s say someone wrote in a newspaper letter that the local high school football coach was a “known pedophile.” Let’s say that wasn’t true. Let’s agree that’s obviously libelous. If you said that in a printed letter to the editor to the York Daily Record, not only could the coach sue you, but he could also sue the newspaper. In other words, a newspaper or magazine can be liable for any content on its pages, even when the publication didn’t create the content. We had a responsibility to fact-check letters just as we would articles by our own reporters.

Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Internet media platforms get a free pass on user content. This means that no matter how crazy or damaging the assertion; no matter how wrong or destructive the comment someone makes about you on Facebook, you can’t successfully sue the platform. You still can sue whoever posted the defamatory comment, but good luck tracking the person down or collecting much.

Most newspapers and broadcast outlets have websites, of course. When I worked for Enquirer Media in Cincinnati, Gannett lawyers cautioned us not to edit or change any user-posted content at Cincinnati.com. The policy was to run the comment as is or not run it at all. In the early days, when many news websites allowed anonymous commenting, the online comments on any story involving crime and race got so bad, so fast, that we blocked all comments on those stories. We were legally safe, but we felt an ethical responsibility as well as a business imperative not to have our website associated with such garbage. Maybe you call that “woke.” I call it being responsible. 

We weren’t staffed, even at a large company like Gannett, to police all the comments people were posting. That speaks to what was well-intentioned about the liability waiver in Section 230 to encourage robust free speech. How naïve we all were! We were naïve about how millions of bad actors would seize the loophole. More significantly, no one anticipated the emergence of gigantic, politically powerful social media companies that would exploit this unprecedented exception for reasons that have nothing to do with journalism or their alleged love of the First Amendment. 

They’d like you to think that they’re providing the pipe and users fill it up. It’s how they manipulate the content going through the pipe that allows them to prime the profit pumps. Britney Spears had it right when she said, “I’m not that innocent.”

The “dumb pipe” argument might be more compelling if Facebook’s feed showed your friends’ posts in a simple order from most recent to oldest – the way your emails and text messages get ordered unless you choose to adjust that. Instead, social media sites use algorithms and now AI to evaluate what you click on, how much time you spend, what you like and how you interact. The algorithm then controls what posts you see, in what order and when. 

We all know the reasons. They make money by keeping you engaged, sometimes to the point of addiction, to push targeted advertising messages and sell info about you to third parties. The key point: Meta exerts editorial control of your feed using modern, high-tech tools, just as old-school editors decided what was and wasn’t fit to print.

It’s a tightrope for First Amendment advocates, but I think we must find smart ways to hold the giant media platforms more accountable legally. There are ideas emerging, like states “age-gating” sites to prevent access to porn sites by younger users, which of course is being challenged in courts. Perhaps Congress could modify Section 230’s “free pass” to force more accountability for feeds that are primarily deployed for marketing purposes.

Unfortunately, serious reform is unlikely. The tech giants are among Washington’s biggest lobbying spenders. So far, they’ve made sure they face less regulation than the nail salon down the street. 

Even if you accept the notion that too much fact-checking and post-removing has reflected some type of woke, left-wing bias, “anything goes” is not a socially responsible solution. It’s time to get creative for the good of our democracy, ourselves, our national security, and our children. 

Dennis Hetzel worked extensively on First Amendment and open-government issues during his career as a reporter, editor, publisher, executive director of the Ohio News Media Association and president of the Ohio Coalition for Open Government. He lives in Holden Beach, N.C.

The Free Speech Center newsletter offers a digest of First Amendment and news-media news every other week. Subscribe for free here: https://bit.ly/3kG9uiJ

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

More than 1,700 articles on First Amendment topics, court cases and history