Washington:

There will be “real-world harm” if Meta expands its decision to scrap fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, a global network warned Thursday while disputing Mark Zuckerberg’s claim such moderation amounts to censorship.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s surprise announcement this week to slash content moderation policies in the United States has sparked alarm in countries such as Australia and Brazil.

The tech tycoon said fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and the program had led to “too much censorship”.

But the International Fact-Checking Network, which includes AFP among its dozens of member organizations globally, said the censorship claim was “false”.

“We want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record,” said the network.

Facebook pays to use fact checks from around 80 organisations globally on the platform, as well as on WhatsApp and Instagram.

There could be devastating consequences if Meta broadens its policy shift beyond US borders, to programs covering more than 100 countries, the International Fact-Checking Network warned.

“Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide,” the network said.

“If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places,” it added.

‘Real world consequences’ 

In Geneva Friday, the United Nations rights chief also insisted that regulating harmful content online “is not censorship”.

“Allowing hate speech and harmful content online has real world consequences. Regulating such content is not censorship,” Volker Turk said on X.

AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking scheme.

In that program, content rated “false” is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading.

Supinya Klangnarong, co-founder of Thai fact-checking platform Cofact, said Meta’s decision could have concrete effects offline.

“Understandably this policy from Meta is aimed at US users, but we cannot be certain how it will affect other countries,” she told AFP.

“By allowing the proliferation of hate speech and racist dialogue could be a trigger towards violence.”

Cofact is not an accredited member of the International Fact-Checking Network or of Facebook’s fact-checking scheme.

Zuckerberg courts Trump

Meta’s policy overhaul came less than two weeks before US President-elect Donald Trump takes office and it aligns with the Republican Party’s stance.

Trump has been a harsh critic of Meta and Zuckerberg for years, accusing the company of bias against him and threatening to retaliate against the tech billionaire once back in office.

Zuckerberg has been making efforts to reconcile with Trump since his election in November, meeting at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and donating one million dollars to his inauguration fund.

The Meta chief also named Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) head Dana White, a close ally of Trump, to the company board.

Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said Tuesday the decision came after “extreme political pressure.”

The move “will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family.”

Australia said Meta’s decision was “a very damaging development”, while Brazil warned it was “bad for democracy”.

Meta’s move into fact-checking came in the wake of Trump’s shock election in 2016, which critics said was enabled by rampant disinformation on Facebook and interference by foreign actors, including Russia, on the platform.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The clean cut hair has grown, his college kid’s hoodie is now a gold chain, and his politics have swerved hard right.

Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook and Instagram, on Tuesday accused governments and so-called legacy media of pushing censorship, and vowed to take his world-dominating platforms back to their “roots.”

“We’re restoring free expression on our platforms,” he asserted in a video posted on his social networks on Tuesday, in which he announced the end of fact-checking in the US.

The out-of-the blue pivot to Trumpian talking points has perplexed many of Zuckerberg’s closest watchers, but the tech pioneer’s sudden alignment with the right wing is not the first time he has moved to preserve his dominance of social media.

And it also might reflect a position that is closer to his political instincts. Since the earliest days of Facebook, Zuckerberg has always been eager to move unencumbered when it comes to advancing the interests of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and now Threads.

From the outset Zuckerberg has surrounded himself with Silicon Valley’s libertarian voices, including longtime advisors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, the latter being Meta’s longest-serving board member.

But the success of Facebook as it grew from a college networking site to the world’s primary communication platform quickly brought scandal and forced Zuckerberg to act to fend off government intervention.

Fact-checking and tighter content controls, which Zuckerberg said he was “getting rid of” on Tuesday, were born of such scandals.

After the 2016 US presidential election, widespread criticism about misinformation on the platform, particularly regarding foreign interference and viral false stories, prompted Facebook to implement a fact-checking program.

“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote at the time.

This initiative represented a significant shift in Facebook’s approach to content moderation, which had always been an after-thought, or even a source of scorn, for the disruptors of Silicon Valley.

The subsequent Cambridge Analytica scandal in the late 2010s, which revealed the unauthorized harvesting of millions of Facebook users’ personal data, further intensified scrutiny and resulted in Zuckerberg’s being hauled before Congress and a beefing up of Facebook content policies.

‘Kissing the ring’

Since then, Zuckerberg has demonstrated increasing political acumen, managing to avoid significant US government regulation while appearing cooperative with politicians and contrite with an angry public.

And despite the bad headlines, usership of the sites platforms has only increased over the years.

To some Tuesday’s shock announcement is still a play to keep the government at bay, except this time the political tide has turned to Trump, who has made repeated threats against Zuckerberg, accusing him of being too supportive of liberal causes.

“This is a case of kissing the ring,” said tech analyst Carolina Milanesi.

“He’s doing what it takes to make sure that Trump is going to leave him alone.”

A more surprising turn is that his pivot rightwards puts Zuckerberg in line with Elon Musk, who has become a close associate of Trump but is a rival to Zuckerberg.

Quite recently, the two men pledged to fight each other in a mixed martial arts cage fight, as their chest-beating rivalry veered into the ridiculous.

“There is kind of this huge, technocratic billionaire meeting of the minds with Trump and the right, and this buying into this idea of censorship,” Kate Klonick, Associate Professor of Law at St. John’s University Law School, told a Lawfare panel.

Others suggest that Zuckerberg is afraid Musk will get Trump all to himself.

“There’s potentially a bit of billionaire jealousy,” said Andrew Selepak, media professor at the University of Florida.

The stakes are huge, especially as Zuckerberg competes with Musk and other tech giants in advancing artificial intelligence.

But for Selepak, Zuckerberg “seems more sincere” when it comes to Tuesday’s U-turn.

“It looks like he’s making a political shift, a bit like Musk,” who had previously supported Democrats, mainly out of concern about climate change.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

An image of vehicles travelling on a steep bridge is going viral on social media platforms with users claiming that it shows visuals from Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich.

What did the viral post say?: Sharing the photograph, an X (formerly Twitter) premium user captioned it saying, “Unique picture of the bridge on Dargah Road in Bahraich District of Uttar Pradesh. #bahraich.”

The image is being widely circulated on different platforms, such as X and Facebook. More archives of similar claims can be found here, here, and here.

What are the facts?: The viral image has no connection to either Uttar Pradesh or India. The bridge is actually located in Japan’s Matsue and is named ‘Eshima Ohashi Bridge’.

How did we find that out?: A simple reverse image search on the viral image directed us to similar visuals published on an Instagram handle called ‘civilengineeringdiscoveries’.

• The images were shared on 19 February 2020 and its caption said, “Japan’s Eshima Ohashi bridge.”

• The viral image could be seen uploaded as well on the fourth slide.

• Taking this forward, we conducted a keyword search and found visuals of the same bridge published on stock image website Getty Images.

• It was uploaded on 20 January 2015 with the caption that said, “MATSUE, JAPAN – JANUARY 28: Cars run the Eshima Ohashi bridge on January 28, 2014 in Matsue, Shimane, Japan.”

Other sources: An article published in Mirror UK said that the Eshima Ohashi bridge is the third largest of its kind in the world, which spans across Lake Nakaumi and joins the cities of Sakaiminato and Matsue.

• We searched for the bridge on Google Maps and found similar visuals as seen in the viral image. This led us to conclude that the viral image indeed showed visuals from Japan and not India as claimed.

Conclusion: This image of a bridge is not related to Uttar Pradesh or India.

(This story was originally published by The Quint, and republished by NDTV as part of the Shakti Collective)

New Delhi:

The Centre is best suited to determine whether a particular fact related to it is correct or wrong, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday while making the government’s stand clear on the PIB’s Fact Check Unit.

He was replying to a supplementary query during the Question Hour in the Rajya Sabha related to the Supreme Court’s stay on the Centre’s notification on setting up a fact-checking unit.

“The amendment in the IT Intermediary Rules which has been stayed by the Supreme Court, is still under contest but the fundamental principle is, our point is, anything related to the government of India, only the government can say whether it is a correct fact or a wrong fact. That is our stand,” Vaishnaw, the Union Information and Broadcasting Minister, said.

The Supreme Court in March this year stayed the Centre’s notification on setting up a fact-checking unit under the Press Information Bureau (PIB) to identify fake news about the Union government.

The Fact Check Unit was notified on March 20 under the Information Technology Rules, 2021, by the Ministry of Electronics and IT.

A bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud set aside the March 11 order of the Bombay High Court which had refused to grant interim stay on setting up the FCU under the amended IT Rules to identify fake and false content on social media about the Union government.

Replying to another supplementary question, Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting L Murugan said the Centre has no plans to establish regional fact checking units under the PIB.

While speaking on incidents of factually incorrect information being circulated, without naming West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Murugan cited the example of a chief minister who recently came to Delhi to attend government think tank Niti Aayog’s meeting and claimed that her microphone was switched off, terming the statement “misleading”.

“Last week also a chief minister came here in Delhi to attend a NITI Aayog meeting. In that meeting she mentioned that her mike was switched off. But we had an issue that this statement is misleading,” said the minister.

However, he clarified that the Centre does not have plans to establish regional fact checking units.

“We don’t have a plan to establish fact check units at the regional level.

The Fact Check Unit is in Delhi. We have a very good system here,” Murugan said.

When the minister was challenged to prove by a member his statement that incidents of fake news are most rampant in West Bengal, he agreed to authenticate his claim with data.

A Fact Check Unit (FCU) has been set up under Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, in November, 2019 to counter fake news relating to the central government. After verifying the authenticity of news from authorised sources in ministries/departments, FCU posts correct information on its social media platforms.

PIB under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has its headquarters at New Delhi and 5 zones comprising 19 regional offices in various states.

The regional office at Kolkata comes under East Zone and at present has 18 permanent employees and 1 contractual employee. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Facebook has acknowledged that it mistakenly identified a widely shared image of Donald Trump as “altered.” Facebook’s algorithms detected the image, which depicts Trump raising his fist in the air following an assassination attempt, and labelled it as possibly deceptive. Platform X users claimed that the photo had been marked as altered on their accounts. Facebook responded by saying that unbiased fact-checkers had examined an identical image and discovered it to be false.

Dani Lever, the director of public affairs at Meta, explained on X that the labelling was incorrect. The Facebook’s internal technical system was intended to detect a different version of the image, not the iconic photo of Trump. Facebook expressed regret for the mistake and any misunderstanding it may have created.

“This was an error. This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed, and we apologize for the mistake,” Lever wrote.

This was an error. This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo. This has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake. https://t.co/y613GuuJpV

— Dani Lever (@Dani_Lever) July 29, 2024

Lever confirmed the mistake when Fox News Digital reached out for a comment.

The altered image Lever referenced featured the Secret Service members surrounding Trump smiling. Many media outlets previously fact-checked the images as “altered,” though it confirmed the accuracy of the original image.

None of the agents in the original image are smiling as they surround Trump, who has blood on his face and his right arm in the air. The image – which was captured by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci and distributed by the AP – appeared with coverage of the shooting by many legitimate news outlets.