Google says it won’t comply with upcoming EU fact-checking law

Google has told EU authorities that it does not intend to comply with a fact-checking law that will soon take effect in the region, Axios reported, citing a letter sent by the company. Google will not add fact-checking content to search results, YouTube videos, or use fact-checking content when ranking or removing content.

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The company has never run fact-checking programs as part of its content moderation policy, but before the recent EU elections it supported a European fact-checking database. The Code of Practice on Disinformation, published by the European Commission, began as a voluntary set of “self-regulatory standards for combating disinformation”, but in the future its requirements will become mandatory.

Google’s global affairs president, Kent Walker, said in a letter to the European Commission that rolling out a fact-checking program was “simply not appropriate or effective for our services.” The company, in his opinion, did an excellent job with moderation last year, when elections were held in many countries around the world. Last year, the company gave YouTube users the ability to add contextual notes to videos and said the feature had “significant potential” — replicating the Community Notes feature on social network X and likely features that will soon debut on social network Meta✴.

Google will continue to develop existing content moderation solutions, including its SynthID technology for tagging AI-generated content and other methods for disclosing information about AI-generated works on YouTube, Mr. Walker added. There has been no reaction from the EU to his statement yet.