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Facebook will not be 'arbiters of truth', says Zuckerberg after Trump threat

WION Web Team
California, United StatesUpdated: May 29, 2020, 04:28 PM IST
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Founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph:(AFP)

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Two years after admitting under political pressure that Facebook must do more to prevent disinformation campaigns on its platform, founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the company should step away from regulating online speech.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his company ''will not be the arbiter of truth'' after US President Donald Trump escalated a war with rival social media platform Twitter over that company’s efforts to begin factchecking some of Trump’s posts.

In an interview, Zuckerberg said ''I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. Private companies probably should not be, especially these platform companies, should not be in the position of doing that.''

Meanwhile, Trump after sharply criticising Twitter for fact-checking his tweet signed an executive order that intended to limit the freedom of tech organisations over the content posted on their mediums. 

On Tuesday, Twitter for the first time fact-checked Trump's post which claimed mail-in ballots are " subsequently fraudulent". Twitter had called the claims as "unsubstantiated" and put a warning label in the post. 

Two years after admitting under political pressure that Facebook must do more to prevent disinformation campaigns on its platform, founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the company should step away from regulating online speech.

In March 2018, a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked with Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign, harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters for use in targeting political ads.

The company later acknowledged that hackers had scraped information from profiles of more than 2 billion users worldwide.

Those developments saw a contrite Zuckerberg summoned before Congress in the spring of 2018, where he apologized for allowing imposter accounts with foreign backers to target American voters with advertising meant to polarize political opinion.