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Zuckerberg's censorship claim 'false': International Fact-Checking Network

"This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today's context and for the historical record," said the global network of fact-checking organizations, including AFP, after Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's US program.

Agencies
Paris, France
Fri, January 10, 2025

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Zuckerberg's censorship claim 'false': International Fact-Checking Network This combination of pictures created on November 27, 2024 shows Mark Zuckerberg (left), CEO of Meta, on January 31, 2024, and former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on September 17, 2024. (AFP/AFP)

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eta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's claim that the fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram has veered into censorship is "false", the International Fact-Checking Network said Thursday.

"This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today's context and for the historical record," said the global network of fact-checking organizations, including AFP, after Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's US program.

In announcing the significant rollback of Meta's content moderation policies on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said the program had made "too many mistakes and too much censorship".

While Meta's decision to scrap fact-check operations currently only applies to the United States, the International Fact-Checking Network warned of the potentially devastating impact if the group were to end its worldwide programs covering more than 100 countries. 

"Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide," the network said.

"If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places," it added.

AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and Instagram.

In that program, content rated "false" is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading. 

Earlier on Wednesday, the European Commission rejected Zuckerberg's assertion that European Union data laws censored social media and said they only required large platforms to remove illegal content.

The European Commission, the EU executive, said its Digital Services Act did not force or request platforms to remove lawful content but only to take down content that may be harmful, such as to children or to the EU's democracies.

"We absolutely refute any claims of censorship," a Commission spokesperson said.

Zuckerberg said Meta would get rid of fact-checkers for Facebook, Instagram and Threads, starting in the United States, and replace it with a "community notes" system similar to that used by X. X's system allows contributors to write a note on a post they believe is misleading. The note is made public if enough contributors from different points of view rate it as helpful.

The Commission said that, for such a system to be used in the European Union, a platform would have to conduct a risk assessment and send it to the EU executive. A spokesperson said the EU did not prescribe the form that content moderation should take and that community notes could be a possibility.

"Whatever model a platform chooses needs to be effective, and this is what we're looking at... So we are checking the effectiveness of the measures or content moderation policies adopted and implemented by platforms here in the EU," the spokesperson said.

The Commission said EU users would continue to benefit from input from independent fact-checking of content posted in the United States.

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