He finally agrees with those of us who’ve long argued that fact-checkers are sinners like everyone else and a crummy substitute for free speech. 

Some Facebook checkers were honest enough to seek the truth and talented enough to know it when they saw it. But many weren’t, and even the good ones were a disservice to journalism because they gave cover to lesser species deploying the system as a mechanism for censoring conservative reporting and opinion.

In the Washington Examiner’s experience, not a single instance of Facebook censors “flagging” a story was justified. When we challenged the suppression, the checkers refused to discuss it or, having talked it through, admitted they didn’t know the subject as well as we did and reversed their decision.

But it took days before their mistake or malice was reversed, by which time the damage was done and the story was read by fewer people than it would have been. Zuckerberg conceded, “A program intended to inform often became a tool to censor. … Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked” out. 

Facebook was not the worst offender. Censors at a disreputable outfit called the Global Disinformation Index put the Washington Examiner on a secret hit list used to cut off advertising revenue from targeted conservative news outlets. Our “offense” was to comment approvingly on data in the American Family Survey showing that conservative women are happier than liberal women, an opinion valid even if it makes angry and sad liberal women angrier and sadder.

GDI ostensibly focuses only on foreign misinformation, but that was a fraudulent promise and its nefarious practices were partly financed by federal taxpayer dollars in blatant disregard for First Amendment free speech protections.

Congress has cut off money to the Global Engagement Center, which passed it to GDI, but Washington Examiner reporting has found documents showing GEC staff may be reallocated to a different “hub” in the Washington bureaucracy where they can continue the same work.

We cannot expect the Left’s censors to abandon their efforts to suppress conservative reporting and opinion without a fight. They have convinced themselves that both are not just wrong but evil. As one Washington Examiner contributor wrote me after Zuckerberg’s U-turn, “I’d watch out for that sort of stuff — [algorithms and artificial intelligence doing the censorship] — in the implementation of Marvelous Mark’s dramatic promise.”

But the censors are in retreat. They have been routed by Elon Musk from X. They have been exposed as corrupt everywhere. They have been revealed as a tool for Democrats aided by the government. But voters have thrown Democrats out of office both from the White House and on Capitol Hill, and incoming Republicans promise to root out abuses that have gripped Washington in recent years. It will be up to the Washington Examiner and the rest of the news business to make sure they do.