White House Says “Not Going To Comment” On Meta Ending US Fact-Checking

Washington:

The White House on Friday declined to comment on tech giant Meta's bombshell announcement earlier this week that it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters: “We are not going to comment on any company or company's decision.”

“So I'm not going to comment on that,” she said, adding that content moderation is also on the table.

But she said social media companies “have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation.”

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sparked alarm 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.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)