Letter to the editor: Fact-checking censorship

In her column “Meta is wrong about abandoning fact-checking” (Jan. 10, TribLive), Lori Falce criticized Meta’s decision to no longer use official fact-checkers. She criticizes Meta’s choosing to use community notes instead of fact-checkers (similar to X), implying that it will lead to rampant disinformation.

Somehow Falce has forgotten how often the official fact-checkers were wrong. When the New York Post ran a story about the Hunter Biden laptop, official fact-checkers branded the story Russian disinformation and Twitter banned the New York Post and anyone who shared that story. Imagine, the oldest newspaper in the country was banned from sharing a news story. Of course, the fact-checkers were wrong, as Biden and criminal prosecutors all acknowledge the laptop’s authenticity.

Other examples include social media posts stating that covid likely came from a China lab, the covid vaccine doesn’t prevent contracting the virus and the covid vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission. All of these were branded false by fact-checkers. The FBI now believes covid most likely leaked from a China lab, as was the conclusion of the House Oversight Committee. And everyone now knows from personal experience that the vaccine did not prevent you from catching covid or spreading it.

These are just a few examples. What Falce fails to realize is that “fact-checkers” became a means of censorship to prevent information from being shared that runs afoul of approved government narratives. Fact-checking via thousands of individuals weighing in via community notes has proven a reliable and inherently less biased approach.

Richard Parnell

Murrysville