President Joe Biden called Meta’s decision to discontinue its fact-checking program “very shameful” and criticized it on Friday.
In response to inquiries from reporters after making comments regarding the economy, Biden stated that the action would make it possible for millions of people to read things that are just untrue.
It simply goes against everything that America stands for. We wish to be honest. As a country, we haven’t always done it. “We want to be honest,” Biden stated.
The notion that a billionaire could purchase something and declare, “By the way, we’re not going to fact check anything,” and that millions of people would read it online, he added. In any case, I find it really dishonorable.
An inquiry Friday night was not immediately answered by Meta.
Biden’s remarks follow California Governor Gavin Newsom’s claim that there hasn’t been a sufficient effort to combat misinformation about the wildfires. Newsom has been under fire from conservatives for his conduct both before and after the wildfires spread across a large portion of Los Angeles.
We need to address this misconception, I ask you. The winds of misinformation and disinformation are as strong as hurricanes. falsehoods. During a briefing on the fires on Friday, Newsom told Biden, “We’re going to have to address that as well. People want to divide this country.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, declared on Tuesday that the company’s social network platforms would discontinue their fact-checking program and switch to a user-focused approach like to X’s Community Notes. Additionally, he declared that Facebook and Instagram would loosen their policies regarding political content.
In a Friday episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Zuckerberg said that Facebook employees had received criticism from Biden administration officials for requesting that content be taken down from the site.
According to Zuckerberg, these Biden administration officials would basically summon our team and yell at them while cursing. We simply reached a point where we said, “No, we won’t and won’t remove things that are true.” That is absurd.
A request for comment regarding Zuckerberg’s comments was not immediately answered by the White House.
Last year, Zuckerberg wrote to Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, claiming that the White House had repeatedly pressed Facebook to take down humorous and satirical articles about COVID-19.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” the chief executive officer of Meta wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
After Zuckerberg visited with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home after the election, Meta announced that it had donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.