LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman Warns Against Big Tech’s Fact-Checking Rollback
Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn (LNKD), isn’t on board with Silicon Valley’s shift away from fact-checking—an approach most recently adopted by Meta (META), which last month decided to relax its fact-checking policies in favor of user-driven warnings. “What I’d like to see more from the tech industry is less of a rollback where freedom of speech might mean anti-vax misinformation or other kinds of things,” said Hoffman while speaking at the AI Action Summit in Paris today (Feb. 10).
In January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s nine-year-old fact-checking system, which relied in part on third-party organizations, would come to an end. The tech company is instead set to adopt a “community notes” model reminiscent of what is used by Elon Musk’s X, which relies on users instead of experts to flag misinformation.
When asked about Zuckerberg’s recent pivot, Hoffman said, “LinkedIn more reflects my point of view on these things.” The career-focused social networking site, acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in 2016, maintains a policy banning false and misleading content.
Regardless of “however you get to the equivalent of fact-checking,” it’s important to continuously innovate in that direction, said Hoffman. “I think having civil dialogue, and a space for that, is incredibly important,” he added.
Reid Hoffman’s Silicon Valley ties
Hoffman, who currently has an estimated net worth of $2.6 billion, is deeply interconnected to the tech industry. An early PayPal (PYPL) executive and member of the original “PayPal Mafia,” Hoffman has been a board member at companies like Microsoft, AirBnb (ABNB) and OpenAI, in which he was an early investor.
Hoffman has backed dozens of other A.I. startups through the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. In 2022, he co-founded Inflection AI, a company known for its chatbot Pi. Earlier this year, he launched Manas AI, a startup focusing on drug discovery.
While his Silicon Valley peers have largely cozied up to the Trump administration, Hoffman, a prominent supporter of Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, has been more reluctant to embrace the new government. That said, he lauded the President’s efforts to support A.I., notably the Stargate project, a $500 billion joint venture among OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle. “It is extremely important for all governments to be in dialogue with the tech industry,” Hoffman said.
Collaborations of such scale is necessary given the potential impact of A.I. advancement, which Hoffman called the “cognitive industrial revolution.” In addition to major productivity increases, A.I.’s challenges will include overseeing a societal transition to the new technology, he added.
Unlike some tech leaders, however, Hoffman isn’t advocating for a halt in A.I. development but instead believes the right regulation will form as the technology progresses. “Some people say: pause, stop until we can figure out all these possible invisible harms,” said Hoffman. “There are millions and millions of possible negatives, and you don’t get the future you want by just trying to wipe out all the negative ones.”