Tag: fact checkers

Reuters Fact Checks Babylon Bee Article Stating ‘Allahu Akbar’ Has Replaced ‘Cheerio Mate’ As UK’s Favoured Farewell

Reuters is at it again with their team of ‘fact checkers’. They’re targeting The Babylon Bee, a satirical website, over an article that states the most favoured farewell  in the UK, ‘cheerio mate’ has been replaced with ‘Allahu Akbar.’

The humorous satire piece states, “A recent poll conducted by the University of Oxford just revealed that ‘Allahu Akbar’ has officially replaced ‘Cheerio, mate!’ as the most popular greeting in the UK,” adding that experts called the results of the “survey” a “flippin’ landslide, old bean.”

Kyle Mann, the Editor-in-Chief of the Babylon Bee, shared the lunacy on X, noting that “Reuters fact-checkers reached out for comment on our Babylon Bee story about ‘Allahu Akbar’ replacing ‘Cheerio Mate’ in the UK. I tried to help them out.”Mann then shared screenshots of the ridiculous message he was sent by Reuters 

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Joe Rogan EXPLODES on NYT’s Crazy “Fact-Check”

Joe Rogan ERUPTS on The New York Times for “fack-checking” RFK Jr. on toxic food ingredients while simultaneously proving him right.

“That made my brain hurt just reading it.”

The “fact-check” in question all started when The New York Times claimed RFK Jr. was “wrong” about differences in Froot Loops’ ingredients between Canada and the United States.

However, their own reporting admitted that the U.S. version contains harmful chemicals like Red Dye 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1, and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), while the Canadian version uses “natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots.”

“So they’re literally saying he was wrong, but he was right,” Rogan scoffed. “That is the f—king dangerous chemicals banned in Canada that we’re trying to get rid of in America!”

Rogan continued to question what possible motivation The New York Times could have to “fact-check” RFK Jr.’s efforts to remove toxic ingredients from the food supply.

“Like, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to remove all leftover credibility? Are you trying to k*ll it all?” Rogan asked. “Are you secretly working for the Chinese? Like, what are you doing?”

Rogan’s guest, Jimmy Corsetti, concluded, “It’s probably backed by Monsanto or something.”

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Losing Their Grip: Why Anti-“Misinformation” Crusaders Are Mourning the End of Control

In the brave new world of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP), it seems like “informed” is synonymous with “watched.” Birthed to combat the wildfires of online “misinformation,” CIP and its partners – including the defunct Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the short-lived Virality Project – thought they might have been celebrated defenders of truth. Instead, they became poster children for what happens when watchdogs get a little too cozy with power, diving into an experiment that teetered between public good and Orwellian oversight.

Election Integrity Partnership: A Marriage of “Good Intentions” and Government Influence

The Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition that included CIP as a key player, kicked off its operations with a noble-sounding mission: to shield our fragile electoral systems from the scourge of fake news. For the discerning reader, the term “integrity” in their name may raise eyebrows; it’s reminiscent of government programs cloaked in the language of virtue, their real work a little murkier. Partnering with government entities and social media giants like Facebook and then-Twitter, EIP set out to identify and “mitigate” misleading content related to elections. In other words, they assumed the job of selectively filtering out the lies, or as critics would say, the truths that didn’t toe the right political line.

For a while, EIP was in its element, functioning as a digital triage, purging the internet of what they deemed harmful content. But what started as “informational integrity” quickly became a federal hall monitor, policing citizens’ Facebook posts and Twitter threads with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Conservatives, in particular, saw this as more of a censorship scheme than a public service. Their view? EIP wasn’t there to inform – it was there to enforce.

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Fact-Checking or Fact-Shielding? Twitter Files Journalist Slams PolitiFact’s Defense of Government Pressure on Big Tech

Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact, a Meta fact-checking partner, has decided that the Biden-Harris administration is not engaged in censorship at an industrial scale.

This claim made by vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance is false, PolitiFact has asserted, because the Biden-Harris White House “contacting” (according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they were contacted to be pressured) social media companies to flag content for removal “didn’t cross the line into coercion.”

Not only that but pressuring these companies (yet allegedly never coercing) to censor online speech is not a threat to democracy, PolitiFact was told by a Colombia professor – if the censors decide that speech is disinformation about Covid or election results.

The scale and nature of the way the US government leaned on tech companies to stifle speech that did not suit its political agenda is, to date, best revealed in the Twitter Files.

One of the journalists who worked on publishing the internal documents, Michael Shellenberger, now examined this PolitiFact “verdict” and the arguments the organization used. He rejects the notion that suppressing voters’ free speech is somehow “not a threat to democracy.”

Shellenberger was equally unimpressed by PolitiFact trying to explain its opinion regarding Vance’s claim by referring to the Supreme Court, which they said ruled it was not unconstitutional for the government to exert the kind of pressure it did.

“But the Court did not consider the US government’s pressure of Meta or many other cases of government demands for censorship,” Shellenberger writes and notes that the ruling (in the Murthy v Missouri case) was based on the judges deciding there were no legal grounds to bring the case.

To the question – as old as the rise of the fact-checking industry – why did a fact-checker (in this case, PolitiFact) get things wrong, the journalist suggests it’s more a case of “playing on the same team”.

PolitiFact, he writes, is “part and parcel of the Censorship Industrial Complex.”

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Florida Based ‘International Fact Checking Network’ – a Prominent Censorship Group – Is FUNDED BY STATE DEPARTMENT and Operates in US to Silence Independent Media and American Voices

Investigative reporter “Bad Kitty Unleashed” on X released a BOMBSHELL REPORT on the US State Department funding the international censorship group International Fact Checking Network (IFCN).

IFCN, despite being funded by the State Department, operates in the US.

Bad Kitty Unleashed reported:

This is a massive scandal! The State Department, who legally can’t operate in the US, has been funding US fact checking since 2015! Yes, it’s earliest days!

The news orgs that operate under the IFCN flag, such as the Washington Post, do the leg work. Which then results in posts on Facebook etc being labeled and the algorithms throttling the post.

This official International Fact Checking Network is also partnered with Google. Poynter’s IFCN was funded by the CIA linked, State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy and Omidyar grants.

Recall Google initiated the first ever US censorship program and expanded it globally by using the First Draft Consortium. First Draft also worked hand in hand with the IFCN. Poynters Politifact was in the First Draft network.

Here’s more on the recently discovered US government-funded censorship programs.

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Fact Check: CNN Claims Kamala Harris Only Made One False Statement During Debate

CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris delivered only one false statement during Tuesday night’s debate on ABC News, CNN Senior Reporter Daniel Dale alleged.

VERDICT: False. Harris delivered at least 21 false statements and hoaxes, according to Breitbart News’s Alana Mastrangelo:

1. “Very fine people” hoax
2. Project 2025 hoax
3. False claims on Trump trade deficit
4. Putin can “do whatever the hell he wants”
5. “Dictator on day one” hoax
6. Blaming botched Afghanistan withdrawal on Trump
7. Putin “would be sitting in Kyiv”
8. “Bloodbath” hoax
9. Abortion “monitor” hoax
10. Rental property hoax
11. Central Park Five “execution” hoax
12. “Suckers and losers” hoax
13. False fracking claims
14. False oil production claims
15. National Sales Tax
16. Distorting unemployment figures
17. “I was raised middle-class”
18. “Terminating” the Constitution
19. “Sold us out” to China
20. “Not one” troop in any war zone
21. Taking guns away

Read more specifics on Harris’s false statements and hoaxes here.

Dale alleged that the only false statement Harris delivered was a claim that former President Donald Trump left the Biden-Harris administration the worst employment since the Great Depression.

“So, the Biden-Harris administration was not actually left the worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” Dale reported Tuesday evening:

They were left a 6.4 percent unemployment rate in January 2020, one that was certainly elevated, by recent standards — pretty high — but it was significantly down from the 14.18 percent level it reached early in the pandemic, so, it was already improving at the time the Biden-Harris administration took office, and that 6.4 percent level was the highest since the Great Recession, so, in the last 20 years, not going back decades.

Democrat allies in the establishment media widely applauded ABC News debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis for their performance.

Muir and Davis attempted to “fact-check” Trump at least seven times but never did so with Harris, according to an analysis by Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak. Harris regurgitated many hoaxes, notably the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax, but the moderators turned a blind eye. The “fact-checking” was in one direction, Pollak found.

At one point in the debate, Muir even fact-checked Trump’s claim that he was sarcastic when discussing the results of the 2020 election in a recent interview.

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CNN ‘Journalist’ Dragged For Fact Checking JD Vance’s Joke About Tim Walz

Earlier this week, JD Vance cracked a joke about Democrats holding their convention in Chicago so that Tim Walz would be able to say he’s been in a war zone.

Hilariously, a CNN reporter took the comment at face value and ‘fact checked’ it as wrong.

She did a journalism. Hard hitting research.

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Regime-Approved ‘Fact-Checkers’ Rush To Downplay Tim Walz’s Stolen Valor Controversy

It’s another day that ends in “-y,” which means legacy media hucksters are running dishonest interference for the Democrat Party.

The latest example comes in the form of a Friday “fact-check” by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. Known for his willingness to lie on behalf of Democrats, the Post’s “democracy dies in darkness” guru decided to offer his “assessment” of the controversy engulfing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

While lauded by regime-approved media for his National Guard service, Walz’s rollout as Kamala Harris’ 2024 running mate has been marred by reports and resurfaced clips indicating he committed “stolen valor.” As Matt Beebe has detailed at length in these pages, Walz abandoned his unit before it deployed to Iraq to run for Congress and has inflated his military rank throughout his political career.

Rather than present those facts up front for Post readers, Kessler begins his “fact-check” by citing a quote from Harris announcing Walz as her vice-presidential pick and the following paragraph:

Since [Harris’ announcement], Walz’s record has been under attack by Republicans, with claims that he abandoned his troops on the eve of a deployment to Iraq and that, in an instance of “stolen valor,” inflated his credentials and wartime experience.

The implication, of course, is that any and all scrutiny of Walz’s record and prior claims about his military service are solely the product of GOP partisanship — not the actual facts documenting Walz’s dishonesty. By deploying this deceptive tactic, Kessler aims to convince readers his subsequent “fact-checks” are valid, despite their representation as blatant attempts to run interference for Walz.

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Big Pharma Funds COVID Fact Checkers

FactCheck.org, the organization that flags “misleading” COVID-19 content for Facebook, is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization funded by pharmaceutical giant and vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson (J&J), YouTube commentator Jimmy Dore reported.

Dore said his own shows have often been slapped with a “misleading” label when he covered issues related to COVID-19 or vaccines.

“These fact check organizations aren’t there to check facts,” Dore said. “They’re there to push a political point of view and an agenda and to discredit people.”

Dore said when the organization “fact-checked” his work in the past, its claims were always “bogus.” He said FactCheck.org never reached out to consult him about his content, it twisted his words and it never even pointed to any erroneous facts.

Instead, he said, “They didn’t like my headlines,” and they would say they were misleading.

Johnson & Johnson’s viral vector COVID-19 vaccine received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in February 2021. After the shot was linked to dangerous blood clots, its use was suspended a couple of months later and it was eventually completely pulled from the market in May 2023.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was established in 1952 by Robert Wood Johnson II, who ran J&J with a bequest of shares from the pharmaceutical giant. Today, although the foundation says it has diversified its holdings, it holds nearly $2 billion in J&J stock.

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Lawmakers Request Delay on Meta’s Shutdown of “Fact-Checker” Favorite Content Surveillance Tool

Meta’s decision to shut down a content surveillance tool called CrowdTangle, announced earlier in the year and about to take effect next month, has met with opposition from a group of US lawmakers.

CrowdTangle, which the giant bought in 2016, has over the years been “repurposed” by “fact-checkers,” researchers focusing on “disinformation” as well as media who flag it.

Meta said it is replaced by the Meta Content Library, available to some researchers but not commercial entities (such as media outlets, a number of whom are currently running “fact-checking” operations).

Now 17 lawmakers (three Republicans among them) have written to Meta asking that it reconsider this decision, referring to CrowdTangle as a “transparency tool” both for researchers and journalists.

The letter, addressed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, says CrowdTangle is being used to “view and study” content on Facebook and Instagram, but also other platforms, searching for content ranging from foreign influence, and terrorism, to mental health.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

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