Zuckerberg dumps fact-checkers

How can the era of censorship truly come to an end?

Dear friends,
Mark Zuckerberg has announced that it’s the end of the Fact-Checking era on Meta. He categorizes factchecking under "out-of-control political censorship."

He hinted at this a few months ago already, when he admitted in a public letter that he regretted suppressing the spread of information about Hunter Biden’s laptop while “waiting” for fact-checkers.

Now Zuckerberg openly states: these fact-checkers are politically biased and destroy more trust than they create. I’d say, what Zuckerberg is now communicating isn’t exactly breaking news for most of us. What we’d really like to hear from him is an explanation of why he seems to have only just realized this.

And abandoning fact-checking won’t necessarily mean censorship will stop. I recently heard Bill Gates mention in an interview on CNBC News: we are working on an AI platform that will screen the entire internet for hate speech and messages that incite violence. "And for messages encouraging people to skip vaccinations.", he then added. Clearly, Bill hasn’t learned much from the fiasco of the COVID-19 crisis.

On a positive note, I’d say: this is a great opportunity to ask ourselves again, how can we avoid becoming censors ourselves? How can we genuinely tolerate other opinions? How can we truly listen to someone who thinks fundamentally differently?

Genuine listening, like genuine speaking, requires you to set your ego aside for a moment. It means refraining from judging the speaker based on your own ideals and beliefs. It asks you to open the narcissistic shell of your Ego and give the voice of the Other a chance to truly enter and touch the strings of your Soul.

It’s in those conditions that censorship truly ceases to exist. I won’t attempt to provide a further answer here to the question of what genuine listening really entails. I’ll leave the question here as a question.

Mattias