Roger Pielke says good riddance to a major social media company’s fact-checking operation.

The decision last week by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, to immediately stop using “fact checkers” — groups hired by Meta to determine what information is true and what is false, and thus what should be removed — represents not just a return to common sense but also good news for both science and democracy.

Of course, I have an interest in Meta’s decision, having been one of the experts whose writings were regularly prohibited from being shared on Facebook based on its content moderation system. That system includes both fact-checkers and automated filtering, which is also being recalibrated to allow more speech.

I am a professor and researcher who studies and writes on contested topics, including climate change, transgender athletes, and the origins of COVID-19, at that messy place where science meets politics.

My work on climate change is what Facebook routinely deleted. I am a curious candidate for such aggressive moderation. I have studied climate change science and policy for more than 30 years and published extensively in peer-reviewed literature. My research is widely referenced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a highly respected United Nations body that periodically assesses science related to climate change.

At the same time, I have also taken heat from climate activists for calling out their frequent overheated claims about disasters that go well beyond what science can support. Perhaps my greatest sin is that I have consistently argued that while climate change is real and serious, there are other issues that matter for climate policy as well, including energy costs, security, and access.

These views, and my support for including fossil fuel interests (representing more than 80 percent of global and US energy use) in climate policy discussions, may have put my writings on the moderated list. Of course, it is possible that my work was among the 20 percent of removed content that Meta now admits was mistakenly taken down. No one at Meta has ever told me why.