The European Commission has reacted with reservation to Meta’s decision to replace fact-checkers in the United States with a new community notes system, sparking a debate about how the tech giant will fare under the European Union’s strict internet controls.
In a major shift, Zuckerberg also called fact-checkers “too politically biased,” saying they “destroyed more trust than they created.”
“After [Donald] Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy,” he said. “We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the United States.”
He called Europe a place of “censorship.”
“Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there,” he said.
Thierry Breton, former digital policy chief for the European Union, said that the bloc’s sweeping disinformation law could ban X if the social media platform fails to comply with its terms.
In response to Meta’s changes, the European Commission outlined its stance on fact-checkers and the potential consequences of DSA noncompliance.
“We have no particular comment on something happening in the United States,” European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters on Jan. 8, adding that the DSA applies only in the EU.
He said that the work of fact-checkers in the EU is based on “high-level ethical and professional standards” and that independent fact-checkers can be considered as an effective way to “mitigate systemic risks” stemming from “disinformation.”
He said a noncompliance decision confirming the breach under the DSA could lead to fines of up to 6 percent of the company’s global annual turnover.
Fact-checking organizations play a role in identifying and flagging content that could be considered disinformation in the EU.
It claimed that linking fact-checking with censorship is “harmful” and that this “is the driving force behind harassment and attacks on fact-checkers.”
Decentralized Censorship System
In a 2024 report, Norman Lewis—visiting research fellow at the think tank MCC Brussels, and formerly, PwC director and director of technology research at Orange UK—said the EU is institutionalizing laws against hate speech and disinformation that represent a “fundamental attack on free speech and democracy in Europe.”The European Commission relies on officially designated fact-checkers, some of whom are NGOs.
These entities flag specific pieces of content for platforms to review. Platforms are then obligated to act, either by taking down the content or investigating it further.
“It is a system which institutionalizes non-accountability,“ Lewis told The Epoch Times. ”Platforms have to comply arguing that they have no choice if they want to continue operating in Europe.
“The fact-checkers are not accountable to anyone. In the end, the commission can claim they’re not censoring but Big Tech is, despite the fact that the commission created the environment that forces this censorship.
“If they don’t act upon it, then there are very severe penalties.
“My report highlights that the commission outsources content monitoring rather than doing it themselves. They’ve deliberately created a decentralized censorship system where their censorious intent is always an arm’s length outcome.”
Lewis said it’s fair to remove content promoting terrorism or illegal activities, but the system also targets more subjective content, such as hate speech. The lack of clear definitions and accountability leads to the removal of a significant amount of legitimate content.
“You will see the remarkable number of incidents and things that have been taken down. And if you search for hate speech, there are thousands and thousands of posts,” he said.
“The problem is that this is opaque: The public can’t access this data to see what exactly that content is. It might be very dangerous; it could be violent sexual abuse or calls for violence.
“But it could also be legitimate, for example, opposition to the Green Deal or to EU immigration policies or gender identity.”
Lewis said that Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement about censorship, and “his intention to remove fact-checkers and the actions of Elon Musk on X are going to directly challenge” the EU, even though Meta has so far said this move will not apply to the EU.
‘Game-Changer for Free Speech’
Jeremy Tedesco, Alliance Defending Freedom’s senior vice president of corporate engagement and senior counsel, told The Epoch Times by email that the latest development means that the United States is about to “set the right tone for free speech.”“Meta’s announced changes could be a game-changer for free speech,” he said. “We’ve already seen the impact of X’s overhaul under Elon Musk, and there’s no reason Meta couldn’t turn things around just as quickly and completely.”
Facebook should “never have relied on so-called fact-checkers of any political stripe to police speech online,” Tedesco said.
“But as Zuckerberg said in the video, we’re now in a new era for free speech, one where powerful social media companies like Meta will have much to gain and little to lose by allowing everyone to speak freely online,” he said.
Tedesco said the “answer to speech you don’t like is always more speech, not censorship.”
“America is unquestionably the world’s leader in safeguarding these core liberties, but there’s no question that our federal government has failed to fulfil its duty in recent years,” he said.
“The American people have spoken loud and clear at the ballot box—we’re done with viewpoint-based censorship. And we expect our elected leaders to set the right tone for free speech on the world’s stage.”
“Under the DSA, collaborating with such independent fact-checkers can be an efficient way for [very large online platforms] to mitigate risks stemming from the malicious use of the platform related to the spread of disinformation or negative effects on civic discourse,” he said.
The Epoch Times contacted the European Fact-Checking Standards Network for comment, but didn’t receive a response by publication time.
