Mark Zuckerberg Is Right: Facebook Should Not Be the Arbiter of Truth
The answer to misinformation on social media is not to empower private corporations as censors, but instead to reduce their power altogether.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks via video conference during the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law hearing on Online Platforms and Market Power, on July 29, 2020. (Mandel Ngan-Pool / Getty Images)
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.
In this case, however, as strange as it is to say — Zuckerburg is right. Of course, Ocasio-Cortez’s impulses are correct, and the Facebook CEO is right for reasons he would object to.