Dems bash Meta for scrapping fact-checks: 'Genuflecting to Donald Trump'
House Democrats are hammering Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, after the company announced the platform-wide end of its fact-checking program.
The lawmakers said the shift is part of a larger trend across tech and media companies to curry favor from President-elect Trump, who frequently uses social media to advance false claims — and to accuse fact-checkers of biased censorship when they push back.
"This is just genuflecting to Donald Trump, that's what this is,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), former head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I've already had a lot of concerns about how social media companies don't stop disinformation. I think this is just continuing that.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, offered a similar warning, saying Meta’s move will come at the expense of fact-based discourse, an educated electorate and a healthy democracy.
“It obviously allows for greater proliferation of disinformation and propaganda,” Raskin said. “This has been the right-wing agenda for several years, to put pressure on the private social media-tech companies to abandon fact-checking.
“And so that's succeeding.”
The backlash arrived after Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that it was eliminating its fact-checking program, which relies on a small army of third-party contractors who review content and add labels in cases where content pushes a misleading or false claim.
The program was installed after Facebook was accused of a failure to police its content during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Russia and other........
© The Hill
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