(LifeSiteNews) – Facebook parent company Meta will be working with conservative activist Robby Starbuck to keep political bias out of its artificial intelligence (AI) project in perhaps the most significant sign yet that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg really does want to change the tech giant’s left-wing ways for good.
The Hill reported that Starbuck, best known for his work bringing public attention to corporations’ “woke” practices and marshalling public pressure on them to change, and Meta have reached a settlement in the former’s defamation suit against the latter over Meta AI falsely identifying Starbuck as a participant in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
The details of the settlement are not public beyond a joint statement announcing that “Meta and Robby Starbuck will work collaboratively in the coming months to continue to find ways to address issues of ideological and political bias and minimize the risk that the model returns hallucinations in response to user queries.”
I’m glad that we have resolved this matter with @robbystarbuck. You can find our joint statement between Meta and Robby below. pic.twitter.com/Lpft6kWUVM
— Joel Kaplan (@joel_kaplan) August 8, 2025
As many of you know, I sued Meta early this year due to chatbot responses about me that were 100% false. Today @Meta and I are announcing an amicable resolution to my lawsuit. Let me give you some details…
When I filed my defamation suit, Meta reached out to me immediately,… pic.twitter.com/b3W1rVT4d2
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 8, 2025
Starbuck indicated he was pleased that his lawsuit achieved its loftiest goal: “fix this for everybody so this doesn’t become a massive, you know, really terrible story in the future where AI affects elections in ways that no one is comfortable with.”
The partnership appears to indicate a seismic shift at Meta, whose Facebook social network was for years one of the biggest offenders in left-wing bias and censorship in the tech world.
Last year, Zuckerberg began to acknowledge and disavow the social network’s compliance with Biden administration requests to censor content challenging establishment COVID-19 narratives, and announced in January 2025 that parent company Meta would be taking steps to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.” The company also abandoned a number of diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) policies, including the placement of female hygiene products in male restrooms.
In April, Meta laid out its goal to “remove bias” from its Llama 4 artificial intelligence language model, so that it “answers questions, can respond to a variety of different viewpoints without passing judgment, and doesn’t favor some views over others.” Later that month, the Meta Oversight Board ruled that two social media posts that “misgendered” gender-dysphoric individuals should remain standing as they did not violate the platform’s Hate Speech policy.
In March, Facebook announced community notes, inspired by an X (formerly Twitter) feature by the same name, which would “draw on a broader range of voices that exist on our platform to decide which content would benefit from additional information,” as an alternative to the platform’s previous “fact-checking” program, which was heavily criticized for relying on third-party groups that often had left-wing biases.
Last month, the feature demonstrated its effectiveness and difference from the old days by correcting a false claim by former leading Democrat Hillary Clinton that Georgia pro-life laws were responsible for a woman’s death by sepsis in 2022 after taking abortion pills and that the attending hospital failed to proceed with a potentially life-saving procedure even though the state abortion ban would have allowed it.
