Following the spread of potential fake news on Facebook against the Australian Labor Party during Federal Election 2019 held on May, the company’s VP for APAC Simon Milner has now said that Facebook is not responsible for removing content which is considered to be false by one side of political debate, The Guardian reports. Milner has told Labor’s outgoing national secretary, Noah Carroll, that while the party may want the company to remove any content it considers to be false, Facebook only removes content which violates its community standards. The tussle between the Labor Party and Facebook has been ongoing since May 2019, over the "death tax" posts circulating on Facebook. The posts claims that the Labor Party will introduce the a "death tax" if its voted into power. As ABC News explains, the death tax - also known as death duties or an inheritance tax - was used by governments of the past to take a cut of someone's estate when they died. For obvious reasons. It was very unpopular. “We do not agree that is is our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false,” Milner wrote in the letter sent to Carroll a month after the day of election. However, in the letter, the Facebook executive also mentioned that death tax posts shared on Facebook were found to be false by the platform’s independent fact-checking procedures. Thus, the company had demoted the original posts and thousands of similar posts, but…
