Washington:
US President Joe Biden on Friday condemned tech giant Meta's “shameful” decision to end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States.
“I think it's a real shame,” Biden told reporters at the White House when asked about the announcement. “It's important to tell the truth.”
Biden added, “Do you think it doesn't matter that something that's simply not true is printed and read by millions of people? I mean, I want to know what the heck that is. It is.”
“It goes completely against what America is all about. We want to tell the truth.”
Earlier, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment on the decision.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sparked alarm on Tuesday when he announced that his technology company would abandon fact-checking on its platform in the United States.
The tech mogul said fact checkers were “too politically biased” and the program led to “excessive censorship.”
Zuckerberg said that as an alternative, Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram would use “community notes” similar to Elon Musk-owned Platform X.
Community Notes is a crowdsourced moderation tool promoted by X as a way for users to add context to their posts, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combating falsehoods.
Mehta's decision comes after years of criticism from supporters of President-elect Donald Trump that conservative voices are being censored and suppressed in the name of fighting misinformation. Professional fact-checkers vehemently reject this claim.
AFP is currently working on Facebook's fact-checking program in 26 languages, including the US and European Union.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
