This photo illustration created on January 7, 2025, in Washington, DC, shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and a phone displaying the download page for the Facebook app. Drew Angerer, AFP

WASHINGTON — US President Joe Biden on Friday condemned tech giant Meta's "shameful" decision to end its third-party fact-checking program in the United States.

"I think it's really shameful," Biden told reporters at the White House when asked about the announcement. "Telling the truth matters."

Biden added: "You think it doesn't matter that they let be printed, or millions of people read, things that are simply not true? I mean, I want to know what that's all about.

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"It's just completely contrary to everything America's about. We want to tell the truth."

Earlier, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had refused to comment on the decision.

Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg triggered alarm on Tuesday when he announced his tech company was ditching fact-checking on its platforms in the United States.

The tech tycoon said fact-checkers were "too politically biased" and the program had led to "too much censorship."

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As an alternative, Zuckerberg said Meta's platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use "Community Notes," similar to the Elon Musk-owned platform X.

Community Notes is a crowd-sourced moderation tool that X has promoted as the way for users to add context to posts, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combatting falsehoods.

Meta's decision comes after years of criticism from supporters of President-elect Donald Trump, among others, that conservative voices were being censored or stifled under the guise of fighting misinformation, a claim professional fact-checkers vehemently reject.

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AFP currently works in 26 languages with Facebook's fact-checking program, including in the United States and the European Union.

© Agence France-Presse

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