TV historian Simon Schama has branded Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to axe independent fact-checkers as a ‘catastrophic sellout’ and ‘Orwellian’.
Last week Meta, which also operates the Instagram and Threads platforms, revealed it was scrapping the use of these verifiers and instead will allow other users to comment on the accuracy of posts.
The chief executive of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, said third-party moderators were too ‘politically biased’, as he opted for a system that will work like X, which has ‘community notes’.
Schama, 79, who is fronting a new BBC TV series about the origins of the culture wars, was asked about the decision in an interview with The New Review magazine in The Observer.
He said: ‘It’s Orwellian. Orwell is up there rolling his eyes.
‘It’s a catastrophic sell-out. The truth is not governed by majority popular vote. As my friend Mary Beard often says, history demands the vote of homework.’
Schama, who lives in the US, also said he was concerned about Donald Trump’s forthcoming presidency, describing his ‘enablers’, like entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, as ‘worrying’.
The historian, whose new BBC show is called Story of Us, said he believed Trump was ‘intoxicated by Putin’s example’.
Speaking last week, Zuckerberg said: ‘We’re going to get back to our roots…. restoring free expression on our platforms. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X.
‘It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
‘The fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, particularly in the US.’
President-elect Trump has previously been highly critical of what claimed was Meta’s anti-conservative bias.
It suggests Meta, which will drop the independent fact-checkers from Instagram as well, will now back a more conservative focus on free speech. It comes after Zuckerberg met Donald Trump in November after his US election victory.
The company has also donated $1m million to Mr Trump’s inauguration fund and appointed several of the politician’s allies to senior roles at the company.
Meanwhile, asked whether social media companies had ‘changed the game’ by moving away from content moderation, Science Secretary Peter Kyle told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg that Meta’s announcement had been ‘an American statement for American service users’.
He said: ‘There is one thing that has not changed and that is the law of this land and the determination of this Government to keep everyone safe.’
He added: ‘Access to the British society and economy is a privilege, it is not a right.
‘If you come and operate in this country you abide by the law, and the law says illegal content must be taken down.’
But campaigners have argued that the law does not go far enough in preventing harm.
Andy Burrows, chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation – named after Molly Russell who killed herself after viewing harmful content online – said Mr Kyle was ‘right that companies must follow UK laws’ but said those laws were ‘simply not strong enough to address big tech’s bonfire of safety measures’.
He said: ‘The frontline of online safety now sits with this Government and action is needed to tackle widespread preventable harm happening on their watch.’
His comments follow an intervention by Molly’s father Ian Russell, who on Saturday warned that the UK was ‘going backwards’ on online safety.
Mr Russell said the implementation of the Online Safety Act had been a ‘disaster’ that had ‘starkly highlighted intrinsic structural weaknesses with the legislative framework’.
Challenged on Mr Russell’s comments on Sunday, Mr Kyle said he had given ‘a very personal commitment to making sure that everybody, particularly people with vulnerabilities and every child is vulnerable, has protection’.