- By Prateek Levi
- Fri, 17 Jan 2025 03:22 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
Tech conglomerate Google has recently expressed to the European Union that it will refrain from adding a fact-checking feature to its search results and YouTube videos, according to a US media report.
The tech giant will not be doing the same while ranking or removing content from its platform, despite the fact that EU law requires it. An Axios report referenced a letter sent by Google's representatives to Renate Nikolay, Deputy Director General of the EU's content and technology division, to support its claim.
Introduced in 2022, the EU Code of Practice for Online platforms, trade associations and the advertising industry, requires these segments to keep a check on fake information, claims and motivated propaganda among other things. The Code was first introduced in 2018.
It must be noted that the fact-checking feature was never a part of its content moderation policy. According to the Axios report, Kent Walker, Google’s global affairs chief, described the fact-checking integration introduced by the European Commission’s Disinformation Code of Practice as "not appropriate or effective" for Google’s services, reflecting the tech giant's reluctance to commit to it.
The executive body of the EU, the European Commission, ensures that the policies agreed upon by the bloc are levied across all member states, it is also responsible for discussing international agreements on behalf of the EU.
Walker also referred to the company's policy that is currently active with regards to content moderation, claiming it as adequate and used the examples of various elections that were held around the world in the previous year, to affirm his stance on the Google fact-checking law.
"Google will continue to invest in improvements to its current content moderation practices, which focus on providing people with more information about their search results through features like Synth ID watermarking and AI disclosures on YouTube," Axios cited Walker as stating in the letter.
This development takes place a week after the social media giant Meta's Chief Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the EU data law mandated that only major tech platforms adhere to its fact-checking regulations and remove harmful content.
"Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there," Reuters quoted Zuckerberg as saying.
Last week, Meta stated that it would put a stop to all its efforts to fact-check and bring down the policing of speech across major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
The EU data law proposes that the code requires Google to include fact-check results along with its search results and videos on YouTube. With that, Google would also need to add a fact-checking feature to its ranking systems and algorithms.
The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) came into effect in 2022 in response to rising fake news and information on vacancies, fake healthcare information, misleading claims and conspiracy theories that risked many lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, claims the commission on its official website.
