US President Joe Biden on Friday (January 10) slammed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the social media giant’s step to end its fact-checking program. Calling the move “shameful” Biden said that the move was ‘contrary’ what America was about.
“It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about. We want to tell the truth. We haven’t always done it as a nation. Telling the truth matters,” said Biden.
“The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say, ‘By the way, we are not gonna fact check anything’, and you know, you have millions of people reading, going online, reading this stuff… I think it is really shameful,” he added.
Biden was speaking with journalists after his remark on economy.
There was no immediate comment from Meta after what Biden said.
Meta was one of the major social media platform which banned then-president Donald Trump after Capitol Hill riots on January 6, 2021.
Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that Meta was ending its fact-checking program and was replacing it with a model similar to ‘Community Notes’ on X.
Community Notes on X enable users to add context to claims being made on the social media platform. This in effect, sometimes proves to be a useful tool to flag false information.
Zuckerberg on Friday repeated his allegation of coercion from Biden administration during Covid pandemic. He was speaking with Joe Rogan on his podcast.
“This hit the most extreme. I’d say it was during the Biden Administration when they were trying to roll out the vaccine program. Now I’m generally pretty pro rolling out vaccines, I think on balance the vaccines are more positive than negative but I think that while they’re trying to push that program they also tried to censor anyone who was arguing against it,” said Zuckerberg.
“They pushed us super hard to take down things that were honestly true. I mean, they basically pushed us and said, ‘You know anything that says that vaccines might have side effects, you need to take down’ and I was just like well we’re not going to do that'”, Zuckerberg added.
