Frontal clash between Google and the European Union over “fact checking”

First it was Meta, which announced unexpectedly and through its CEO Mark Zuckerberg that it was ditching its fact-checking system in favor of community notes. The surprise move, which, although limited for now to the US, has raised hackles with the EU and its content review rules. Now it’s Google with its latest move It also goes to war with the aforementioned community rules.

And the company won’t add fact checkers to search results and videos on YouTube, and will not use them to rate or remove content, despite the requirements of the new EU law. It should be noted that Google has never used this verifier system on its platforms. neither for verification nor for restricting contentunlike Meta. And he will not do this now, after the requirements of the European Union.

According to AxiosGoogle has reportedly privately notified EU lawmakers that it has no plans to change its content review practices and is seeking to reaffirm its position before the voluntary code of best practice, which has been adopted and used by several companies, becomes law in the near future. forcing a company to use fact-checking tools.

In fact, the aforementioned media outlets note that it was Google’s President of Global Affairs, Kent Walker, who sent the letter to Renate Nicolai of the European Commission. It notifies the regulator that the integration of verifiers required by the new code to combat disinformation “not suitable and not effective” for Google services, so it won’t stick to it.

Google is kind to “community notes”, at least on YouTube

The commission’s vision, and barring any changes, would force Google to include data from verifiers along with search results and YouTube videos, in addition to it in its results-ranking algorithms.

Instead, Google says functionality added to YouTube last year allows some users add contextual notes to videos, “has significant potential.” This is essentially the same argument as Meta, which by the way is already widely used by X (Twitter).

Now it remains to be seen whether the changes to Meta and Elon Musk will take effect after Google’s refusal.