The UN rights chief insisted on Friday that regulating hate speech and harmful content online “is not censorship”, days after Meta scrapped its fact-checking programme on Facebook and Instagram citing censorship concerns.
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“Allowing hate speech and harmful content online has real world consequences. Regulating such content is not censorship,” Volker Turk said on X.
He said his office “calls for accountability and governance in the digital space, in line with human rights”.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that the group would “get rid of fact-checkers” and replace them with community-based posts, starting in the United States, complaining the programme had made “too many mistakes and too much censorship”.
Instead, Meta platforms including Facebook and Instagram, “would use community notes similar to X (formerly Twitter), starting in the US”, he added.
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Meta’s surprise announcement echoed long-standing complaints by Trump’s Republican Party and X owner Elon Musk about fact-checking, which many conservatives see as censorship.