Mark Zuckerberg Is Right: Facebook Should Not Be the Arbiter of Truth

At a congressional hearing last week focused on antitrust issues, Mark Zuckerberg repeated his admonition that he does not want Facebook to act as a fact-checker. “We do not want to become the arbiters of truth. That would be a bad position for us to be in and not what we should be doing,” he said in response to a question from Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

It has become vogue in some progressive circles to demand that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies take responsibility and aggressively fact-check their website’s content, in effect become the arbiter of truth for the entire media. Even more resolutely democratic-socialist figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have echoed that demand.