Google has sent a letter in response to a new EU law requiring fact-checks on its search results and YouTube videos. Their response? Google won’t be adding the checks.
Google has never used fact-checking in its content moderation, despite the massive cultural dominance of its search results and YouTube videos — to say nothing of the hallucinations offered by the AI summaries that Google has been appending to most search engine results pages.
The European Commission’s recent Disinformation Code of Practice aims to combat disinformation online. However, like a lot of tech giants in 2025, Google is signalling a lack of interest in playing along.
The Letter
The news was broken by Axios, which obtained a letter penned by Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general for the European Commission’s content and technology wing.
In it, Walker states that Google won’t commit to the required fact-checking, saying it “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services.”
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Meeting the EU regulations would call for Google to include fact-checking results alongside Google and Youtube searches, as well as incorporating fact-checks into its ranking systems and algorithms themselves.
According to Axios, Walker instead pointed to the “significant potential” of the user-generated contextual notes that YouTube enabled last year, which function similarly to Twitter/X’s Community Notes program.
Google’s Issues With Disinformation
Google’s AI summaries have been dinged for inaccuracies in the recent past ranging from recommending Elmer’s glue in pizza sauce to claiming former US President James Madison graduated from the University of Wisconsin 21 times. Granted, those examples are from last year, but I’ve spoken to colleagues in just the last month who have noted inaccuracies in Google’s summaries.
Needless to say, this isn’t a great look for the most well-known search engine on the planet.
But making the changes required to turn out dependable results consistently would require significant changes to the tech giant’s algorithm. Judging from its new letter, Google either doesn’t have confidence that it can make those changes, or doesn’t think that it can keep profits high enough while doing so.
Google Isn’t the Only Tech Platform That Won’t Moderate
In 2025, it seems that ditching fact-checkers and moderation is a trend for tech giants.
Most recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally announced a Meta policy change that will see an end to fact-checks and a reduction in moderation across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
But the original source for the current trend might be the years-old Twitter takeover by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, who has presided over a Community Notes program that Meta, and now Google, will be cribbing from.
Whatever the case, tech giants appear to be adapting a “not our problem” approach to the content on their world-reshaping platforms.
