It’s upto Facebook to respond on its fact checking programme, say FB fact-checkers after IT minister raises concerns

Fact checkers working with Facebook said it was up to the social media giant to respond to union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad’s letter to company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, raising concerns over its fact-checking programme in India.

The platform cannot absolve itself of its responsibility to protect users from misinformation and outsource it to “shady organisations with no credibility”, the minister for law, electronics, IT and communications wrote to Zuckerberg. “A major issue with Facebook is the outsourcing of fact checking to third party fact checkers … We have seen in India that right from assessors for onboarding fact checkers to the fact checkers themselves harbour publicly expressed political biases,” he said.