Tech giant Google has conveyed to the European Union (EU) that it will not add fact checking features to search results and YouTube videos, a US media report claimed on Thursday.
The tech firm will also not use them while ranking or removing content on its platform, despite EU law requirements. An Axios report cited, to back its claim, a letter written to Renate Nikolay, Deputy Director General under the EU’s content and technology wing by Google’s representatives.
The EU Code of Practice, introduced in 2022 for online platforms, trade associations and the advertising industry, requires them to keep under check fake claims, misinformation, motivated propaganda among others. The Code was originally enacted in 2018.
Notably, Google has never added the fact-checking feature under its content moderation policy.
Kent Walker, Google’s global affairs chief termed the fact-checking integration enacted by the European Commission’s Disinformation Code of Practice “not appropriate or effective” for services offered by Google, expressing the tech giant’s unwillingness to commit to it, the Axios report added.
The European Commission is the executive body of the EU, which ensures that the bloc’s policies and laws are implemented across Member States. It also deliberates on international agreements on the EU’s behalf.
To further affirm Google’s stance on EU fact-checking law, Walker referred to the company’s existing policy with regard to content moderation, calling it adequate and cited various elections that were held around the world last year to back his claim.
“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 quoted Walker as saying in the letter.
The development came a week after social media major Meta’s chief Mark Zuckerberg asserted that EU data law required only big tech outlets to conform to its fact-checking rules and remove objectionable content.
“Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying by Reuters.
Last week, Meta said it would halt efforts to fact-check and scale down policing of speech across major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
As EU data law suggests, the code required Google to include fact-check results alongside its search results and videos on YouTube. It would also require Google to add a fact-checking feature to its ranking systems and algorithms.
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) was brought into effect in 2022 in the wake of, as the Commission claims on its official website, fake news on vaccines, false healthcare information, hoaxes with misleading claims and conspiracy theories put many lives in danger during the Covid-19 pandemic.