Meta’s Ban Of Fact Checking Divides Jeffrey Katzenberg And Linda Yaccarino In Separate CES Sessions: “No Boundaries” Won’t Work, He Says; “Welcome To The Party,” She Gloats

deadline.com:

Media veterans Jeffrey Katzenberg and Linda Yaccarino offered starkly different reactions to Meta’s decision to stop fact-checking Facebook and Instagram in separate appearances at CES.

Mark Zuckerberg’s move, announced earlier Tuesday, is widely seen as a bow to pressure from Donald Trump. The reaction to the president-elect and others on the right, who believe social media has censored conservative voices, was a topic at separate CES conversations on two different stages Tuesday in Las Vegas.

Katzenberg, during an appearance at a sidebar conference organized by industry ad consortium OpenAP, said the move by Mark Zuckerberg would only worsen the slide of social media into a sketchy place, opening the door to competition. “There’s no control, there’s no boundaries,” he said. “It’s whatever people want to do, and since we know today a single voice has a megaphone that reaches the world, if you don’t have some sort of set of boundaries and guidelines and rules and regulations,” then a rival could pounce.

Yaccarino, a former founding member of OpenAP during her days heading up sales at NBCUniversal and now CEO of X, offered a starkly different take during a keynote conversation held across town. “How cool is that?!” she crowed when asked at the top of the conversation for her reaction to the Zuckerberg news. (Watch her full keynote HERE.) Community Notes, the dramatically scaled-back gesture at content moderation implemented by Elon Musk after he bought Twitter in 2022, is “good for the world,” she declared. “Think about it as this global, collective consciousness keeping each other accountable. … It couldn’t be more validating to see that Mark and Meta recognize that.” X’s message, she added, is, “Mark, Meta: Welcome to