This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, January 28, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced a change in how meta would moderate content moving from fact-checking to community notes,

critics charged that the company was rolling over for the new Trump administration.

With an incoming FCC chief openly warning firms that they're part of a censorship

cartel for their association with certain fact checkers, it's not a crazy notion.

But how fair is it?

Cato's John Samples and David and Sarah come out.

David, let me start with you.

If you ignore the last five years of what's been going on at Facebook, now meta,

you might be shocked and you might draw, I don't know, kind of a difficult to square

conclusion about why meta chose to change its content moderation away from outside fact checkers toward a more community note system.

Can you walk us through as you understand the sequence of events here with Facebook making this big change?

Yeah, certainly.

So I think there's an interesting thing to play here, which is that going back to even to,

and you can listen to Mark, talk to Joe Rogan about this and other places, it's clear

that, you know, somewhere around 2016, you know,

the legacy media, you know, powerful, you know, people who are in the knowledge industry

are telling Facebook, telling Mark, telling people in social media that they are to blame for

Donald Trump's election and for all sorts of, you know, Brexit, all sorts of things

that are happening in the world. And so that's probably the initial push into, you know,

mass fact-checking of Facebook, instituting various increasing amount of policies around hate speech,

...