The US President Joe Biden said on Friday that the recent decision by social media giant Meta to substitute “liberal” Community Notes for a strict fact-checking procedure was “completely contrary” to American values.
The decision was generally seen as an effort to appease Donald Trump, the president-elect, whose conservative constituency has long argued that tech platforms’ fact-checking practices are a means of restricting free speech and censoring right-wing content. “I think it’s really shameful. Telling the truth matters,” news agency quoted Biden as saying.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said on Tuesday that the Palo Alto business was discontinuing third-party fact-checking in the US and entrusting regular users with the responsibility of dispelling myths under a model called Community Notes, it caused a stir.
If Meta expands its policy change outside US boundaries to include the company’s activities in more than 100 countries, the International Fact-Checking Network has issued an alarming threat.
“Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide,” IFCN, which includes AFP among dozens of its global member organizations, said in an open letter to Zuckerberg.
“If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places,” it added.
Zuckerberg’s claims that fact-checkers are “too politically biased” were also dismissed by the network as “false,” claiming that the organization had “consistently praised their rigour and effectiveness.”
