The White House on Friday refused to comment on tech giant Meta’s shock announcement earlier this week that it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States.

“When any corporation or company makes a decision… we just are not going to comment,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

“So I’m not going to comment on this,” she said, adding that about content moderation.

She said, however, that social media companies have an “important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent to spread of misinformation.”

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 that fact-checkers were “too politically biased” and the program had led to “too much censorship.”

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 combating 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.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)