In the wake of Meta’s shock decision to abandon fact checkers and dial down content moderation in the US, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has said the platform has no “immediate plan” to abandon its fact checking program in Australia.
According to Meta, independent fact checking units working under contract to Meta in Australia will continue their work despite the social media platform switching to a X-style community notes system in the US.
Rowland told ABC RN that the government believes social media platforms have a responsibility to police misinformation—but also that Australians may further question why some content appears in their feed and not others.
“We are aware as a government that, starting in the US, Meta will be ending its third-party fact checking program. We have been advised by Meta Australia that there’s no immediate plan to end the third-party fact checking program in Australia, including prior to a federal election, but I think that Australians will be questioning the amount of speech, the amount of civic content, for example, that Meta has indicated people will continue to see on their feeds,” she said.
“As a government, we make clear that the tech companies do have that social, economic and democratic responsibility, regardless of where companies operate, they must still abide by Australian laws and Meta has indicated to the government that they intend to do that”.
“We are beginning with rolling out Community Notes in the US and will continue to improve it over the course of the year before considering expansion to other countries. Before rolling out any changes to our fact checking program outside the US, we will carefully consider our legal and regulatory obligations in each country, including Australia,” a Meta spokesperson told B&T.
Last week, Meta announced it is scrapping its small army of independent fact checkers and replacing them with ‘community notes’ to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on its platforms, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced.
In a video, Meta boss Zuckerberg said that Facebook and Instagram would prioritise free speech and that third-party fact checkers “had become too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created”.
Community notes will shift the responsibility to users to flag lies and other harmful content on Meta’s platforms Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp. It has been heavily criticised by online safety advocates including eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant.
Last week, Rowland released a statement saying: “Misinformation can be harmful to people’s health, wellbeing, and to social cohesion. Misinformation in particular is complex to navigate and hard to recognise”.
“Access to trusted information has never been more important. That’s why the Albanese Government is supporting high quality, fact checked information for the public through ongoing support to ABC, SBS and AAP”.
