The president of the United States, Joe Biden, described this Friday Meta’s decision to change the third-party verification program to one based on community notes as “shameful” and criticized that it is “completely contrary to everything that is USA”.
“I think it’s really embarrassing”Biden said, criticizing that “any idea of moving away from fact-checking (…) is simply contrary to American justice.”
The president, who will leave office on January 20 after Donald Trump’s electoral victory, has insisted that “telling the truth matters”. “I know I’m on national television, but you are all local reporters and national reporters,” he stressed.
“It’s completely contrary to everything that America is about. We want to tell the truth. “We haven’t always done it as a nation.”he stressed.
The firm said Monday that it would adopt a content verification system based on community noteswith an eye on the one currently used by the social network X, to combat misinformation in its services.
Since 2016, Meta has had a team of independent fact-checkerswhich reviewed the content shared through their social networks and rated them according to their accuracy through different detailed and original reports.
The technology company has decided to end the third-party verification program it launched in 2016, through which independent expert organizations offered users more information about what they were seeing online, with the aim that they had more context and could combat misinformation.
The new direction of Meta
The technology giant Meta joined a growing group of companies dismantling their diversity programs and pointed to the legal and political “changes” in this area in the United States.
The end of Meta’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, announced to employees and reported by Axios, comes shortly after the company suspended its verification program and in the midst of the sector’s approach to the ideas of the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump.
Meta’s personnel manager, Janelle Gale, indicated in her internal message the decisions of the US Supreme CourtUU, which point to “a shift in how courts approach DEI” and to the “burden” of that concept itself, as a “practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”
“The legal and political landscape around diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing”highlights Gale, who assures that the company seeks to “serve everyone” and that “opportunities should not be given, or taken away, due to protective characteristics.”
Specifically, Meta will eliminate its DEI team and refocus various practices related to it in the hiring of employees and suppliers, after previously eliminating their representation quotas for women and ethnic minorities, the message indicates.
These changes occur after the notable approach of Meta’s main executive, Mark Zuckerberg, towards Trump, whom years ago he seemed to repudiate, but with whom he met after his electoral victory and whose January 20 investiture will donate one million dollars.
“Freedom of expression”
Zuckerberg has promoted a change in strategy due to the US elections, in his opinion “a cultural turning point” towards prioritizing freedom of “expression”, as declared last week.
Goal reorientation includes resignation of Meta Global Affairs President Nick Cleggand the entry into the board of directors of Dana White, the CEO of UFC, the most popular fighting show in the country, and a figure as close to Trump as magnate Elon Musk.
In recent months other companies have dismantled their DEI programs, such as Walmart, the largest retailer and private sector employer in the United States, and firms such as Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply or John Deere, some of them threatened by boycotts on social networks.
Many of the DEI initiatives in the country were established after the protests against racial injustice in the United States in 2020 for the murder of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
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