Tag: fact checkers

How The Deep State Weaponizes AI To Control The Narrative

The Deep State just upgraded from clunky human fact-checkers to AI that scales narrative control at lightspeed.

As Tony Seruga wrote on X:

No more paper trails, subpoenas, or exposed biases – just seamless manipulation.

Automated Shaping at Scale

AI floods zones with thousands of subtly varied “organic” rebuttals in seconds.

Pre-bunks emerging stories before they trend.

Detects your writing style, reasoning patterns, and source chains to dynamically throttle—no crude bans needed.

Infrastructure Already Live

CISA’s old “election security” coordination with platforms?

Content-agnostic and ready for new “harm” definitions.

Palantir, CrowdStrike & intel partners embed AI trained on classified data into commercial tools.

WEF’s “whole-of-society” push demands exactly this AI governance.

The Upgrade

Old fact-checkers left audit trails (funding, revolving doors).

AI is a black box: “The algorithm decided.”

Trained on curated data that associates inconvenient truths with “low quality.”

Plausible deniability baked in.

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Fact check: Advocating for independence is not treason

On May 5, Forever Canada leader Thomas Lukasuk said the movement to secede from Canada is “a form of treason” and something “most of us Albertans and Canadians don’t stand for.”

This follows British Columbia Premier David Eby saying it was treason when members of the Alberta Prosperity Project went to the United States to discuss Alberta’s independence movement with American officials.

Canada has a legal framework in place for any province to pursue independence from Confederation through a democratic referendum as per the Clarity Act. It is irresponsible and incorrect to accuse anybody of treason for acting within those parameters.

To commit treason in Canada would involve using force or violence to overthrow the government, or (without lawful authority) sharing military/scientific secrets with a foreign state that could harm Canada’s defence.

Peaceful petitioning, public rallies, citizen initiatives under Alberta law, referendum advocacy, and even political meetings/lobbying with foreign officials (like U.S. representatives) involve none of these.

Premier Eby and Thomas Lukaszuk are chilling free speech and legal political advocacy by falsely accusing law-abiding advocates of committing a serious crime.

Their inflammatory use of terms like treason misleads the public and escalates tensions between Alberta citizens.

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School Shootings NOT the Number One Cause of Child Death – Statistical Nonsense Debunked

A European friend approached me today, asking about guns in the US, saying, “There are so many guns in your country. It will take a long time to collect them all and get rid of them.” She was shocked when I responded, “We don’t want to get rid of them.”

After she got over her immediate horror and confusion, she asked, “But aren’t you afraid of school shootings?” I said that I was not, while also making it clear that I opposed them. “Most Americans are against school shootings,” I added.

Then she said, “I read that school shootings are the number one cause of death of children in the US.”

I responded, “I believe you believe you read that, but you didn’t. No one is actually making that claim. Mainstream media and anti-gun lobbies are playing with statistics to make you think that is what you read.”

This or similar statements about school shooting deaths are now repeated constantly, not only in personal conversations but also on television talk shows and in the talking points of the anti-gun lobby. The claim, of course, is complete nonsense.

On average, school shootings result in fewer than 40 deaths per year, and not all of the victims are children. There was an uptick during the Biden administration and after COVID, but from 2000 through roughly 2020, the average was closer to six deaths per year.

And this is why no serious authority has actually made such an egregious claim. Rather, headlines are designed to make people believe that is what they read. The actual claim, according to CDC data, is that firearm injuries were the leading cause of death among children and teens ages 1 to 19 in 2020 and 2021.

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FACT CHECK: Sorry, Randy, no public evidence has linked Alberta’s referendum petition to foreign interference

Former Liberal cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault claimed during a CTV panel discussion that Alberta separatism is being fueled by “forces outside our country” and misinformation.

However, no public evidence has been presented showing foreign governments or foreign actors directed or controlled Alberta’s citizen initiative referendum petition campaign.

The RCMP has publicly stated it found no evidence of foreign interference connected to Alberta’s separatist movement.

At the same time, Elections Alberta has not yet verified the signatures collected for the proposed referendum petition.

That means claims about widespread fraud, manipulation, or foreign-directed activity tied to the petition itself have not been publicly established.

The ongoing debate surrounding Alberta independence has included accusations involving misinformation, foreign influence, and improper conduct. 

But many of those claims remain political assertions from federalists, rather than verified findings from law enforcement or Elections Alberta.

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Fact check: Canadian law does allow provinces to hold sovereignty referendums

Commentary circulating online following the Alberta referendum court ruling is incorrectly claiming that provinces cannot legally hold referendums on separation or sovereignty.

That is not what Canadian constitutional law says.

Columnist Andrew Coyne claimed Canadians “can’t lawfully hold a referendum” on “the sovereign territory of Canada.”

But Canada has already held two provincial sovereignty referendums in Quebec, in 1980 and 1995.

Neither referendum was declared illegal.

In fact, the federal government responded to the 1995 referendum by asking the Supreme Court of Canada to clarify the legal framework surrounding secession in the 1998 Secession Reference decision.

The court concluded that a province cannot unilaterally separate from Canada under existing constitutional law. However, it also held that a clear vote on a clear question in favour of secession would create a constitutional obligation for governments to negotiate.

That framework later formed the basis of the Clarity Act.

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HELL FREEZES OVER: CBS News ‘Fact Checks’ Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass From Debate, Says Spencer Pratt Was Right 

Something has shifted in the race for mayor of Los Angeles after Spencer Pratt’s amazing performance in the debate earlier this week.

Even CBS News has done a ‘fact check’ on incumbent Democrat candidate Karen Bass, something that is usually reserved for Republican candidates. It’s extremely rare for the media to call out a Democrat candidate in this way.

The fact check had mostly to do with claims made about the wildfires, which are clearly going to play a much larger role in this race than Democrats were hoping.

John Nolte writes at Breitbart News:

Here is a partially edited transcript from the debate that’s relevant to the first CBS News fact check about the mayor’s epic mishandling of the 2025 Palisades Fire that destroyed nearly 7,000 structures and killed 12 people:

SPENCER PRATT: A lot of people talk about climate change and hurricane-force winds. The winds in the Pacific Palisades never reached higher than 40 mph. For those first six hours, they didn’t go above 27 miles per hour.

The whole point of this exchange is that Bass is running around blaming the fire on Climate Change.

KAREN BASS: He talked about the winds — that is just completely inaccurate. If that were accurate, then the planes would have been able to fly. And so if the winds reached close to 100 miles an hour and the planes were unable to fly.

PRATT: Yes, she mentioned me. So this is — she’s an incredible liar. Everyone on their phones, Google it. 40 weather stations in the Pacific Palisades. It never went above 40 miles per hour. She is referencing the Altadena fire.

BIASED LEFTIST MODERATOR: I have to interrupt you. No name-calling, please.

PRATT: Yeah, but no name calling? She just lied though… No more lying. We need the truth.

Here’s the CBS News fact check:

Weather modeling reviewed for my reporting shows winds in the Palisades during those first several hours of the fire were, in fact under 40 miles per hour. Planes could and did fly. Stronger winds intensified later in the evening. And that distinction matters because the earliest hours of a wildfire are often the most critical for containment.

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Former Iranian State Media Editor Now Works for ‘Nonpartisan’ US Media Bias Group That Rates Conservative Publishers as Untrustworthy Compared With ‘Reliable’ Liberal Outlets

A former paid scribe for an Iranian state-affiliated newspaper now works for a U.S. media watchdog group that produces a controversial “media bias” chart that consistently rates liberal outlets as more reliable than conservative ones, the Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports. Universities like Cornell and journalism nonprofits like Poynter have cited and praised the media bias ratings of this organization, Ad Fontes Media, like it’s a neutral third party.

Meet Meisam Zamanabadi, an Ad Fontes Media analyst who was raised in Iran and served as an editor at Hamshahri, an Iranian newspaper owned and operated by Tehran’s municipal government that has been associated with hardline politicians and drew international condemnation after holding a Holocaust denial cartoon contest in 2006. Posts from his blog indicate that Zamanabadi worked at the paper in 2008 and 2009, when Iranian parliament speaker and chief regime negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf served as mayor of Tehran.

Zamanabadi now resides in California and works for Ad Fontes, the Colorado-based “public benefit corporation” behind the Media Bias Chart, which evaluates U.S. news outlets by political leaning and trustworthiness. The chart “consistently rates left-wing sources as more reliable and often less biased than their conservative counterparts,” writes Goodman. Socialist magazine Jacobin, for example, enjoys a higher “reliability” rating than long-established, edited publications such as National Review, the New York Post, and the Free Beacon. On television, the chart says Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are less reliable than their MS Now counterparts Chris Hayes and Jen Psaki.

News of Zamanabadi’s work for Ad Fontes—which markets its “analysis” to schools as a tool for teaching media literacy and claims that its ratings are “non-partisan”—comes as the watchdog faces questions about its own objectivity and ethics. Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission requested records about Ad Fontes’s business practices as part of an investigation into “possible collusion” in a scheme to get advertisers to withdraw their support for conservative content, the New York Times reported. The Trump FTC says these spending pullbacks are illegal boycotts.

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US State Dept Settles Free Speech Suppression Lawsuit

The US State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, accepting a consent decree that bars it from using, financing, or promoting technology designed to suppress or “fact-check” the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and domestic media outlets.

The settlement also prohibits the Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs for those purposes, whether through formal agreements or informal arrangements.

We obtained a copy of the joint motion for you here.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented The Daily Wire and The Federalist, secured what amounts to a binding admission that the government had been doing exactly what it was accused of. The Department now acknowledges that its plaintiffs’ speech on COVID-19, sexual ethics, the biological nature of sex, and election integrity was constitutionally protected all along. It took three years of litigation to get the government to say that out loud.

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Former WaPo ‘Fact-Checker’ Admits He ‘Screwed Up’ by Dismissing Lab Leak Theory 5 Years Later

Former Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler admitted Thursday that he was “completely wrong” to label the COVID lab leak theory as “doubtful” in 2020, conveniently coming clean five years later after recently leaving the publication.

During an interview with The Editors, Kessler’s 2020 Washington Post fact-check article entitled, “Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful,” was discussed.

“I screwed up… I was completely wrong,” Kessler told editor Ira Stoll. He expressed “infinite regret” and tried to brush it off by saying, “Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect.”

The problem is that when Kessler wrote this headline, the country was tearing itself apart with fear.

As President Donald Trump was rightfully blaming China for the Wuhan lab leak, others in the media were dismissing the president, while sowing doubt and blaming it on transmissions from bats to humans.

The nation lost valuable time by arguing over the origin of the virus, and it hobbled Trump’s ability to lead.

This allowed China to shirk its responsibility a bit longer and delayed Trump’s ability to place the blame where it rightfully belonged. It also took the focus off Dr. Anthony Fauci’s involvement.

That amounts to a huge mistake. It could even be argued it was done on purpose to sabotage Trump and avoid aggression toward Chinese interests. This isn’t something that can simply be apologized away.

Yet Kessler continued his contrition speech all the same.

“When you’ve got a title like ‘the fact checker,’ when you make a mistake, people notice,” he said. “So, you know, you’ve got to own it.”

He even had the gall to say his entire body of work outweighed the error, despite being previously accused of running a “propaganda mill” by the New York Post editorial board.

“I wrote or edited 3,000 fact-checks. Yes, there might be a dozen bad apples there,” Kessler added. “It’s easy and kind of facile to pick at a particular piece and say that defines a person.”

But we’re not talking about a mistake that can be fixed with an editor’s note, or a spelling error that can be tweaked with the click of a button.

This headline drove a narrative that resulted in real life consequences. It helped contribute to mass censorship against any dissenters.

The media drove the narrative on how America should tackle the virus, and what policies would work best, especially in the early weeks and months of the outbreak.

“One of the reporters on the piece came up to me the next day and said, ‘I think you made a real mistake by putting ‘it’s doubtful,’” Kessler confessed. “‘Because I’m uncertain where it stands, and you framed it in a way that made it seem more definitive than what we came up with.’”

He added, “That’s on me. I screwed up. She recently left The Washington Post to go to another place. In my goodbye remarks, I mentioned, this explains why you should always listen to Sarah, because she’s right, and I was completely wrong about this.”

He was referring to Sarah Cahlan, who co-authored the piece.

He admitted that he ignored advice from one of the reporters who wrote the article. And the headline still hasn’t been changed! One year later, a note was added to the 2020 article that still didn’t confirm COVID came from a lab.

Part of the note read, “A year later, the source of the coronavirus is still unknown. But in recent months new evidence has tipped the lab leak theory onto firmer ground.”

Why wasn’t Kessler suspended or punished for such a glaring error? Quite the opposite happened when Kessler was allowed to stay on, and took a buyout less than three weeks ago after working there for almost 30 years, according to the New York Post.

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Elon Musk’s X to Deploy AI to Write Community Notes, Speed Up Fact-Checking

In a major tech-driven update, Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has announced it will deploy AI technology to automatically write Community Notes and enhance the speed and accuracy of fact-checking. This move signals a deeper commitment to tackling misinformation, improving content transparency, and empowering users with context.

Let’s break down what this means, how it will work, and what impact it might have on the social media landscape.

Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) are a feature that allows users to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading or controversial tweets. The system relies on crowdsourced input from contributors who can write, rate, and approve notes that are visible to all users once they reach a certain level of consensus.

Until now, these notes were created manually by human contributors. But with the introduction of AI, the process is about to get a serious boost in efficiency and scale.

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