American President Joe Biden on Friday condemned the “disgraceful” decision by tech giant Meta to end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States. TASR informs about it based on the AFP report.
“I think it’s really shameful,” Biden told reporters at the White House, stressing that telling the truth is important. “You think it’s okay for them to print or have millions of people read things that simply aren’t true? What’s their point?” Biden asked. “It goes completely against everything America is about. We want to tell the truth,” the US president added.
Meta announced on Tuesday that it is ending independent third-party fact-checking on its platforms. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, fact-checkers are “too politically biased.” Such authentication will now be left to the users, similar to what social network X is currently doing led by Elon Musk.
Meta pays approximately 80 organizations to fact-check its platforms. As part of this verification program, fewer users see content marked as false, and if someone wants to share it, they will be shown an article explaining why the information is misleading. Zuckerberg’s decision came less than two weeks before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump and is in line with the position of the Republican Party.
Trump has long been a critic of Meta, which he accuses of being biased against him. However, according to AFP, Zuckerberg is now trying to reconcile with Trump, while he even donated a million dollars for his inauguration and accompanying events on January 20.
