After Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcement that Meta will no longer fact-check, Google also sends a message to the European Union: The search giant is withdrawing from a new EU law that requires fact-checking.
Although technology companies may feel emboldened now to make such policy decisions in an attempt to win favor with President-elect Donald Trump, it is a little different in the case of Google – the company has never provided a true evaluation of its search products or videos on YouTube. , which is yours. So, at least as of now, Google isn’t backing down, it’s not committing to moving forward.
A letter from Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker to Renate Nikolay, the European Commission’s governor and technology, was found by . Axios and sets out Google’s rejection of the EU Code of Practice for Disinformation.
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The code would require Google to improve fact-checking capabilities at the search engine level and YouTube’s algorithms.
Signing up to these rules is voluntary as the disinfection code is not legally binding. However, many social networks including Google, Meta, and Twitter – before Elon Musk’s acquisition – were previously code-signed. As The Verge points out, even before the sudden policy change at Meta, the European Fact-Checking Standards Network found that many online forums that voluntarily signed “then renewed their commitments.”
The code was created before the EU’s official content supervision law, the Digital Services Act or DSA, comes into force in 2022. The DSA is legally binding so it will be interesting to see if any defamation code is enforced under the DSA and what the Big Tech Companies will do about it if that happens.
Google’s letter to the European Commission states that the company “will release all obligations to check the facts of the Code before it becomes the DSA Code of Conduct.”