Tag: fact checkers

Social Media Fact Checkers Claim Their Work Isn’t Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

There’s good news, and bad: first, the fact that “fact-checkers” masquerading as unbiased and accurate moderators of content – while actually unreliable and bias-prone tools of censorship – are now recognized widely enough as just that, to trigger a reaction from some prominent actors.

But then – these “fact-checkers” are reacting in order to double down on their role as something positive, and justified.

Because there are no facts to support this attitude, one of the key “fact-checkers” is hiding behind an opinion piece. But the claim is there: “Fact-checking is not censorship,” a post on Poynter wants you to believe.

This, despite the organization, which acts to “certify fact-checkers” via the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), having a project that has resulted in mass suppression of posts on Facebook.

According to Facebook (Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, posts that get fact-checked experience a 95% drop in clicks. In other words, even if this content is not outright removed, it is made virtually invisible. That’s censorship by any other name.

So how in the world can Poynter claim that activities of those it certifies actually result in “adding to the public debate” rather than suppressing it?

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‘Arbiter of Truth’ & ‘Disinformation Guru’ Tells Public ‘Don’t do Your Own Research’

During a recent discussion, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and Executive Director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab Beth Schwanke spoke about beguiling the public into believing establishment sources.

The discussion specifically regarded what they deem as misinformation and disinformation on elections and how Americans should not have a mind of their own.

The Pitt Disinformation Lab executive lambasted self-led investigations, instead saying Pennsylvanians should just blindly eat up what the ‘trusted sources’ claim to be true. She also discussed January 6th and the 2020 election as a failure of control over the minds of citizens.

“One thing everyone can do to make sure they are seeing accurate information is to use trusted sources. So in elections that means using the Department of State, that means using your county elections office, it means using media organizations that follow, that adhere, to professional journalism standards like … your local NPR affiliate,” Schwanke said. “And it doesn’t mean you know, ‘doing your own research’ and just asking questions and sharing, you know, posts from – I don’t know, in my case, it’s Uncle Joe, right? It means being thoughtful about where your sources are coming from.”

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US Media and Factcheckers Fail to Note Israel’s Refutation of ‘Beheaded Babies’ Stories

In late November, the Washington Post (11/22/23) factchecked President Joe Biden’s repeated claims that babies had been beheaded during Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel.

Biden’s remarks during a November 15 news conference triggered the factcheck:

Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again, like they did before, to where they were cutting babies’ heads off to burning women and children alive.

Despite acknowledging a lack of confirmation of such atrocities, the Post stopped short of branding Biden’s statements false, and declined to dole out any of its iconic Pinocchios.

“It’s too soon in the Israel/Gaza war to make a definitive assessment,” Post Factchecker Glenn Kessler wrote, noting that even the most basic facts weren’t yet known.

“The Israeli prime minister’s office has said about 1,200 people were killed on October 7, down from an initial estimate of 1,400,” he said, “but it’s unclear how many were civilians or soldiers.”

That statement isn’t true. While the exact number killed amid the extreme violence and chaos of October 7 may never be finalized, an authoritative count of civilian deaths—as well as data that definitively refutes claims babies were beheaded—was available to anyone with access to the internet little more than a month after the attack.

That’s when Bituah Leumi, or National Insurance Institute, Israel’s social security agency, posted a Hebrew-language website (11/9/23) with the name, gender and age of every identified civilian victim and where each had been attacked.

Two days later Bituah Leumi (also transliterated as Bituach Leumi) posted an English-language news release (11/11/23) publicizing the website as a memorial to the civilian victims of the “Iron Swords” war—Israel’s name for Hamas’s attack and Israel Defense Forces’ response. (The news release refers to “695 identified war casualties,” but there are no wounded; all the victims are listed as “killed.”)

The journalistic importance of the memorial website was shown less than a month later, when Haaretz (12/4/23), Israel’s oldest newspaper, used the social security agency’s data to debunk some of the most sensational atrocities blamed on Hamas.

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Fact Checking The Fact Checkers: Experts Say Fluoridated Water Not Safe To Drink

As Americans wait to hear the outcome of a federal court’s ruling on water fluoridation, corporate fact checkers are attempting to confuse the public. Let’s fact check the “fact checkers”.

On the final day of the lawsuit between the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a “fact check” was released in an attempt to quell public concern regarding the dangers of water fluoridation. The so-called fact check, CDC, Experts Say Fluoridated Water Is Safe, Contrary to RFK Jr.’s Warnings, reiterated what Americans have heard for the last 80 years: water fluoridation is safe and helps reduce cavities. Anyone who says otherwise is simply some nut on the internet who doesn’t understand science.

FactCheck.org wasted no time letting the reader know that trustworthy institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and “multiple expert groups” want you to know that fluoride is totally safe and good for America. These groups include the American Dental Association, who is one of the original promoters of this practice, and certainly an organization that stands to lose if the public rejects fluoride as safe.

As indicated in the title, FactCheck.org was focused on tweets from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., including one from February 4th where he said, “As president. I’m going to order the CDC to take every step necessary to remove neurotoxic fluoride from American drinking water.”

FactCheck.org also took issue with a tweet from Jason Bassler, co-founder of The Free Thought Project independent media website, and now also part of the TLAV team. Bassler’s tweet was also posted on Instagram by other accounts. Neither of the accounts attracted more than 1,500 likes. The website took particular issue with his statement that “multiple studies confirm fluoride is a neurotoxin that violates the Toxic Substances Control Act and reduces IQ in kids.”

According to FactCheck.org, the data on water fluoridation and neurotoxicity are “less clear-cut” than the social media posts claimed. Let’s take a look at their claims and statements by government officials, and compare them to what we heard in the fluoride lawsuit.

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Meta Launches Real-Time Content Censorship Unit for 2024 Elections

When Facebook (Meta) wants to safeguard its “right to censor,” the company presents itself as basically just another private company out there minding its own business.

But when election campaigns get in full swing, especially in the US, but also the EU, the way Meta reacts, announcing all sorts of yet new policies and new units to deal with information related to elections, shows that it could have a massive influence on their outcome.

And while it’s repeatedly said that (mostly arbitrarily “defined”) misinformation is the scourge of democracy, there is another, this time, no doubt about it: censorship, sometimes based on such flimsy excuses as basically somebody’s subjective opinion – for example, “potential threats.”

None of this seems to be important to Meta, who have just announced how they are “preparing” for the elections in the EU this summer.

There’s a slew of news on this front: Meta will have what it calls an Elections Operations Center whose job will be identifying “potential threats.” And then real-time “mitigation” (i.e., censorship) will follow.

Oh happy news: despite all the controversies around “fact-checker,” Meta has announced it is continuing to rely on them, and even boasts about having “the largest fact-checking network of any platform.”

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Google To Start Running “Prebunk” Ads and Quizzing YouTube Viewers To Fight So-Called “Misinformation”

Prebunking – until relatively recently it was just one of the fringe concepts in the relentless “war on misinformation industrial complex.”

A short way to describe it is as a dystopian version of debunking false or incorrect information. But here the idea is to stop users (“help them identify”) unwanted content, before they can even see it.

A short way to describe what’s wrong with the “war on misinformation” is that it all too easily turns into a smokescreen for plain censorship of lawful and factually correct speech.

And now, prebunking is moving from ideations pushed by murky “fact-checking” and similar outfits, to the very top of the mainstream – Google.

The company that in effect controls the search market and some of the largest social platforms in the world (outside China) has announced that its latest anti-misinformation campaign will incorporate prebunking.

No doubt with an eye on the US election later in the year, Google’s attention is now on Europe, specifically the EU ahead of the European Parliament vote in June.

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Harvard Study Finds ‘Fact Checkers’ Overwhelmingly Hold Left-Wing Views

A new Harvard study that will shock the world has found that misinformation ‘fact checkers’ overwhelmingly hold left-wing political views.

Who could have seen this one coming?

Data from Harvard Misinformation Review shows that out of 150 “misinformation experts,” only 5 per cent lean “slightly right” in their political opinions.

10 per cent are centrists and the other 85 per cent lean slightly left, left-wing, or far-left.

The study also explains the blindingly obvious fact that individuals with left-wing beliefs won’t be able to spot left-wing misinformation because they’ll either ignore it or actively like it.

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Congressionally Chartered National Conference on Citizenship Recruits Volunteers To Monitor and Flag “Misinformation”

You probably couldn’t pay a lawsuit a bigger compliment than a bunch of activists and their umbrella organization involved in censorship complaining that it has had “a chilling effect” on their work.

But that’s what a recent panel, hosted by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), heard regarding Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri). The lawsuit is “infamous” in those circles for putting some brakes on the government pressuring tech companies to do its censorship bidding.

And, those gathered went into how they recruit what one report calls volunteer censors whose task is to monitor social media and flag content as “misinformation.” (When working to set the tone and steer the narrative on platforms, they call themselves, “trusted messengers.”)

The National Conference on Citizenship, however, is a congressionally chartered organization, and yet it is part of a network that is looking for “misinformation” in private messages.

Back during the highly contested 2020 US elections, online censorship was essentially government business, with its public “face” being the Election Integrity Partnership, that originated with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Having in the meantime received various levels of pushback from not only citizens but also lawmakers and even tech firms, “the censorship industry” is looking for ways to reinvent itself.

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Snopes REVERSES ‘fact check’ claiming Joe Biden didn’t wear hard hat backwards

Misinformation hall-monitor website Snopes was forced to reverse a fact-check on Saturday after making the false claim the Joe Biden did not wear a hard hat backwards during a recent photo-op with construction workers.

When Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) posted the photo of Biden to X with several other construction workers, users responded slamming Biden for wearing the hard hat backwards.  

One user zoomed into the photo and posted, “Why his hard hat is wore backward?” 

Others were quick to respond to Biden’s often middle-class image that is portrayed in media, saying, “Hat backwards because ‘he’s a man of the people.'” 

“He’s never done a hard days work has he,” the X user continued.  

The post from Klobuchar started to gain traction and has been seen over 2.4 million times as of Saturday afternoon. As the photo went viral, Snopes was quick to publish a fact-check of claims that the Biden had been wearing the construction gear wrong.  

In a now changed post, Snopes writers said, “The photo is genuine. And it does look, at first glance, like Biden was wearing that hard hat backwards. But after comparing it to other photos and videos of the same event, we were forced to reach the opposite conclusion: The hat on Biden’s head was facing forward, bill to the front, not backward.” The media company rated the claim it was backwards as “false” in their reporting when published on Jan. 26. 

By Saturday afternoon, Snopes had reversed course on the claim after posting the fact-check on X with the caption, “Folks are saying Biden was wearing his hard hat backwards in the photo op with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and some construction workers in Superior, Wisconsin. But was he?” 

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PolitiFact’s Parent Company Is Paying Local Journalists To Write About Transgenders, ‘Extremists,’ And ‘Good Effects’ Of Biden

The group that runs the prominent fact-checking site PolitiFact is using money from Left-leaning activists to pay journalists “grants” of $10,000 or more to write about “extremism,” “anti-transgender groups,” and the successes of Joe Biden’s budget-busting American Rescue Plan.

The Poynter Institute, which holds itself out as a nonpartisan group of journalism experts, is using money from the Joyce Foundation, the Gill Foundation, and the Catena Foundation to fund classes for journalists across the country guiding them on how to cover topics such as “climate change” and “transgender medical care.” Some participants will then be paid grants, bankrolled by activist foundations, to write about particular topics for their employers.

Almost all the Beat Academy classes have an apparent political bias, often mirroring the activism of the funders. On February 1, for example, participants in the “Extremist Politics” session will “learn how to background candidates for extremist ties,” including on “school boards.” They will “gain access to extremism resources and researchers.”

Three participants will be awarded “$10,000 reporting grants” to write about “extremism.”

The next session on February 29 trains journalists to write articles criticizing Joe Biden from the left, saying, “Biden promised to make life better in disadvantaged and marginalized communities by targeting them with billions of dollars tied to climate change, affordable housing… and more. Is it working?” The panelists will explain “the forces and factors that eased and impeded the ability of deserving communities to access these funds.”

Two journalists will be paid a total of $20,000 to write articles heralding the successes of Biden’s massive spending package the American Rescue Plan: “Enrollees can apply for one of two $10,000 reporting grants to capture how certain communities have used the funds to good effect.”

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