Nina Jankowicz, who once served as President Joe Biden’s disinformation czar, has sharply criticized Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for his decision to scrap fact-checking in favor of a community-driven content moderation system. In her criticism, Jankowicz accused Zuckerberg of “a full bending of the knee to [Donald] Trump,” a statement that has drawn accusations of hypocrisy given Zuckerberg’s own role in censoring content for the Biden administration.
Meta’s decision marks a significant policy change, shifting from reliance on traditional fact-checkers to a system akin to the “Community Notes” feature on Elon Musk’s X platform. Zuckerberg defended the move, explaining, “Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”
Jankowicz rejected this reasoning outright, taking to Bluesky to decry the change. She claimed:
“Let’s be clear—the fact checkers have not ‘been’ politically biased as Zuck suggests, but have been perceived as such because of politically motivated efforts to smear them, one that Zuck is now participating in and capitulating to.”
She went on to describe Zuckerberg’s decision as an existential threat to journalism and an attempt to mimic Elon Musk’s more laissez-faire approach to moderation. “Facebook has already contributed to the demise of journalism, and this will be the final nail in the coffin,” she wrote.
Critics of Zuckerberg, however, have been quick to point out that Meta’s track record under his leadership reveals a history of bowing to political pressure—most notably from the Biden administration.
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg admitted that during the Biden administration’s early days, senior White House officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor certain content, including satire and criticism of COVID-19 policies.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content… and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Although Zuckerberg acknowledged that the final decisions rested with Facebook, he admitted that the platform made choices under pressure that, in hindsight, were mistakes.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote, emphasizing that Facebook should not have compromised its standards due to outside influence.
During the pandemic, Facebook added warning labels to posts deemed “false information” about COVID-19, deleted posts critical of vaccines, and suppressed discussions about theories later validated by mainstream experts, such as the possibility that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab.
This pattern extended to the 2020 election when Facebook demoted the visibility of the Hunter Biden laptop story based on warnings from the FBI about a potential “Russian disinformation operation.” Zuckerberg later admitted this suppression was another error, stating, “I think in hindsight we got it wrong.”
