“Social media sites should be required to flag false information.”

In January 2025, Meta stopped paying professional fact-checkers to label false posts in the US. Mark Zuckerberg said the labels had become a tool for censorship. Europe has gone the other way. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, large platforms have legal duties to deal with disinformation, and US officials, including a House Judiciary Committee report, have called those rules censorship. The question is now a transatlantic fight, not just a platform policy choice. Supporters of required flagging say platforms are too big and too influential to leave misinformation unlabeled. Opponents say a “false” label is a judgment call, that fact-checkers have shown bias, and that a legal requirement hands someone the power to decide what’s true.

Neil Brown (president, Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact, agrees): “Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything. And Meta always held the cards.” He added that “it’s time to quit invoking inflammatory and false language in describing the role of journalists and fact-checking.” Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Meta, disagrees): said the old system “attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution,” and that “a programme intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.” He framed ending fact-checking as a return to “free expression.” Cody Venzke (senior staff attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, free speech advocate, disagrees): argued in a July 2026 statement on a Colorado law that forcing platforms to display government-backed labels “would compel speakers to opine on the supposed harms of speech itself—and to communicate the government’s views on that speech.” His conclusion: “The Constitution ensures that these decisions are for speakers and listeners — not the government.”