Tag: fact checkers

Politif*cked: An Office Manager from Florida and a Gates-Funded Professor Are Censoring Studies Linking Mask Usage to Increased Deaths.

APolitiFact “fact checker” who has attempting to discredit National Pulse reporting on mask mandates and recent medical journal papers has almost zero experience in real news reporting, medical reporting, COVID-19 reporting, or even national news, The National Pulse can reveal.

The information is the latest in a slew of “fact checker” stories which reveal dubiously credentialed individuals working to remove anti-Big Pharma content from the internet at the behest of big tech companies and their sponsors in the pharmaceutical industry.

Floridian liberal Gabrielle Settles appears to have begun working for Politifact in March 2021, bylining at least 70 stories for the corporate-backed censor.

Settles, however, has no experience in dealing with any of this kind of information, having performed the majority of her “fact checks” simply by copying and pasting from the Centers for Disease Control website, and even veering off into “fact checking” pictures of Christmas cards and photos of singer Rihanna.

Prior to Politifact, Settles worked at a small, St. Petersburg outfit called “The Weekly Challenger”, and prior to that, as an “Office Administrator” at “Moody Radio” and a “contributing writer” at a blog called “The Power Broker Magazine.” The sites receive almost zero web traffic.

In fact, Settles’s journalistic contributions are extremely limited. But naturally, her contributions to partisan rhetoric are not.

The Politifact “reporter” – a job which includes no actual reporting – has a history of pro-Democrat and anti-Trump tweets. Naturally, she took umbrage with The National Pulse’s story on masks and deaths, derived from two separate stories of May 16th and May 26th.

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Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.

Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

This idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.

As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency” designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist” Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on their accusations.

Lauria compiles a mountain of evidence in refutation of NewsGuard’s claim that Consortium News published “false content” about the 2014 US-backed coup in Ukraine, copiously citing outlets which NewsGuard itself has labeled accurate sources of information with its “green check” designation system. It becomes clear as you read the article that NewsGuard’s real function is, as John Kiriakou put it, “guarding the country from the news.”

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‘Fact checkers’ claimed that the Biden regime was not distributing crack pipes… They were wrong once again

In February, news broke that the Biden administration was distributing free crack pipes as part of a program to distribute ‘safe smoking kits’ to cities across the country.  Hilariously, the grant used to fund the kits were part of a program aimed at advancing ‘racial equity’.

Fact-checkers pounced on the story immediately, labeling it false.  100PercentFedUp was fact-checked on Facebook for writing about the story.  Fact checks on major social media websites such as Facebook can lead to ‘shadow bans’, where a page’s reach is significantly reduced.

The fact-checkers claimed that the story, which originated from the Free Beacon, was inaccurate because the White House released a statement saying that the safe smoking kits they were funding would not contain crack pipes.  Despite the White House’s denials, they refused to discuss who applied for the grants or who would be receiving them, citing confidentiality.

Prominent Conservative activist Greg Price was kind enough to provide a compilation of these ‘fact checks’ on Twitter.

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‘Misinformation Fingerprints:’ The Pentagon Awarded ‘Fact-Checking’ Org NewsGuard a $750K Contract Last Year

In yet more evidence of the federal government/Deep State’s vested interest in advancing internet censorship (or, as they call it, tackling “misinformation”), the Department of Defense awarded NewsGuard Technologies a $750,000 contract in September of 2021 for the organization’s “misinformation fingerprints” project.

NewsGuard, which has been the subject of extensive Breitbart News reporting, is an establishment-backed project that aims to “rate” news outlets, policing the internet by telling users which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot.

According to USASpending.gov, the contract was awarded for NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” project, which it describes as a “a catalogue of known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”

It is unclear if hoaxes embraced by the establishment, such as the notion that material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” are in NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” database.

NewsGuard’s own co-founder, Steve Brill, spread that false claim, as did advisory board member and notorious political partisan Michael Hayden.

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Viral ‘Russian Mobile Crematorium’ Tweet is From an 8-Year-Old YouTube Video

A viral tweet that remains unchecked by “fact checkers” claims to show a Russian-operated ‘mobile crematorium’ in Mariupol, but the image is taken from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

Whoops.

The tweet was posted by news outlet NEXTA, which boasts nearly a million followers on Twitter. The tweet has received over 7,000 retweets and almost 11,000 likes.

“Mobile crematoria in #Mariupol,” states the tweet.

“Mayor of Mariupol Vadim Boychenko said today that #Russian mobile crematoria have started operating in the city.”

“According to him, tens of thousands of people could have died in Mariupol and the cremation, “covering up the traces of crimes”.

Except a simple reverse image search reveals the ‘mobile crematorium’ to be a screenshot from an 8-year-old YouTube video.

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Did the White House Get Caught Colluding with Fact Checkers Again?

It will come as no surprise to conservatives or anyone willing to think critically and fairly that the Biden White House enjoys a cozier relationship with the mainstream media than the Trump administration did. Fawning coverage of the White House’s new cat that distracted attention from Biden’s crises is a great case in point. The way in which mainstream outlets go after Biden’s critics is another example, and one that we at Townhall have experienced and watched unfold in real-time — as we reported. 

But thanks to a late-breaking story from POLITICO on Wednesday, it looks like there are even more symbiotic relationships at play between the White House press shop and supposedly independent fact-checkers or unbiased mainstream outlets.

Here’s what Alex Thompson and Max Tani reported:

Over the past month, the White House’s press shop has repeatedly promoted stories from The New York Times’ fact-checker, LINDA QIU.

Biden cited a Qiu piece himself earlier this month when he addressed House Democrats in Philadelphia. “Headline fact checker in the New York Times: “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices,” he said, reading the headline of the piece. “And it goes on to explain why gas prices are so high.”

Many members of the president’s press team have also become Qiu content boosters in recent weeks.

On March 10, deputy press secretary ANDREW BATES tweeted out the same Qiu fact check on why “Republicans Wrongly Blame Biden for Rising Gas Prices,” adding a touch of his own commentary. “The only way to be straight with readers is to include this context,” Bates noted.

Press secretary JEN PSAKI shared the same piece, noting “FACT CHECK on GOP.” 

On Monday, Bates shared another story by Qiu. “@nytimes Fact Check: ‘Attacks on Judge Jackson’s Record on Child Sexual Abuse Cases Are Misleading’ Hawley and Blackburn ‘have taken the judge’s remarks and sentencing decisions out of context, distorting her record,’” he tweeted.

POLITICO does note that “Not all of Qiu’s fact checks have been heralded by the White House,” as seen in her piece: “Biden’s Inaccurate Claims in Defending Afghanistan Withdrawal,” but that was last August, apparently before Qiu decided to play nice with the White House and go from supposedly independent fact-checker to a Biden clean-up crew member.

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Top ‘Fact Checker’ Labeled Hunter Biden Laptop Story a “Hoax”

The co-founder of one of the world’s leading ‘fact checker’ organizations, which presents itself as a supreme authority on which sources of information can be trusted, labeled the now completely confirmed genuine Hunter Biden laptop story a “hoax”.

Whoops.

Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the legacy media declared the laptop scandal to be a hoax, with Politico and others citing “dozens of former intel officials” who declared it to be “Russian disinfo.”

This prompted social media giants like Twitter and Facebook to censor discussion of the story, even locking out major news outlets like the New York Post from their accounts.

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French digital minister tells Big Tech platforms to scale up “fact-checking capabilities”

Telecom ministers from European countries have asked the major online platforms to ensure they have the adequate capacity to handle “misinformation” in Central and Eastern Europe, which they say are the major targets of Russian propaganda.

On March 8, officials from EU governments and representatives from the major online platforms met in France to discuss how to fight disinformation being spread by the Russian government. Initially, the agenda of the informal meeting was the Metaverse, how to bring more women to the technology sector, and environment. The agenda was changed in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In a joint statement, the ministers said: “The battles initiated by Russia in the current conflict are raging not only on the ground but also on the internet.”

France’s digital minister Cédric O said that online platforms had made some efforts to fight Russian propaganda, adding that the accounts of Russian state-controlled media outlets Sputnik and RT have been removed on the major platforms. However, O said it was important to put “pressure on the platforms to do even more.”

During the meeting, the ministers made two requests, according to a report by EURACTIV. They asked the platforms to respond to take down requests from governments more quickly. And, they asked them to increase their content moderation teams in the languages spoken in Central and Eastern Europe.

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‘Fact-Checkers’ Are Technocracy’s Digital Brownshirts

We are under siege. A nihilistic fanaticism is running free among us thanks to the emergence of a journalistic “ethos” that establishes an almost complete equivalence between the “truth” and those utterances that support the strategic goals of the great economic and digital powers of our time.

A few months ago Facebook censored an article in the British Medical Journal that highlighted serious irregularities in Pfizer’s clinical vaccine trials. Then two weeks ago, fact-checkers from the Spanish websites Newtral and Maldita burst into the public square to accuse professor of Pharmacology, renowned expert in drug safety, and ex-WHO adviser, Joan Ramón Laporte of foisting lies and disinformation onto the Spanish populace. This, in reaction to Laporte’s testimony before a Spanish parliamentary commission investigating the country’s vaccination effort.

Despite his towering credentials, his intervention was quickly tarred as problematic by the media and subsequently banned by YouTube. The crime of this new Galileo Galilei? Alerting the assembled parliamentarians to the existence of grave procedural irregularities in the trials for the vaccines, and questioning the wisdom of a health strategy that aims to inject every Spanish child over the age of six with a new, poorly tested, and largely ineffective medication.

This incident reveals that the fact-checkers will attack anyone who does not accept the truth as dictated by the great economic and government centers of the world. This is not the usual official media obfuscation to which we’ve become accustomed over the years, but rather a brazen McCarthyist intimidation device, designed to frighten citizens into submission by appealing to their lowest and most ignoble instincts, an approach lain bare in Maldita’s smug and Manichaean slogan: “Join and support us in our battle against lies.”

Under this harsh binary logic, an internationally famous scientist like Laporte is not even given the opportunity to be judged wrong or misguided in good faith. Rather, he is immediately accused of being a willful and dangerous liar who must be immediately banished from public view.

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