Editor-DN
Washington:
The White House on Friday declined to comment on tech giant Meta’s shock announcement earlier this week that it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States.
“When a corporation or a company makes a decision, we don’t comment on it,” White House press secretary Karen Jean-Pierre told reporters.
“So I’m not going to comment on that,” she added of content moderation.
However, he said social media companies “have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation.”
Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg sounded the alarm Tuesday when he announced that his tech company was conducting fact-checking on its platforms in the United States.
The tech tycoon said the fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and that the program led to “too much censorship.”
Alternatively, Zuckerberg said Meta’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use “community notices” similar to Elon Musk-owned Platform X.
Community Notes is a crowd-sourced moderation tool promoted by X as a way for users to add context to posts, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combating falsehoods. .
Metta’s decision comes after years of criticism from supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, among others, that conservative voices were being censored or suppressed under the guise of fighting misinformation, a claim that professional facts are not. Testers strongly reject.
(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
