By Philip Blenkinsop
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission rejected on Wednesday Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg’s assertion that European Union data laws censored social media and said they only required large platforms to remove illegal content.
Meta Platforms scrapped its U.S. fact-checking programs and its CEO said he would work with President-elect Donald Trump to push back on censorship around the world.
“Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there,” Zuckerberg said.
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.
(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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