‘Fact-checking’ has emerged as a big-ticket business model where certain individuals, who aren’t necessarily journalists, appoint themselves the arbitrators of truth and morality. In India and elsewhere in the world, the truth, the actual truth, is often suppressed and obfuscated under the garb of ‘fact-checking’.
On the 13th of June, a news report emerged which claimed that in the USA, nearly 100% of the fact-checkers’ contribution goes to the Democrats. It was reported that there is a new study that shows that most contribution goes to one political party in the USA – the democrats – at that all fact-checkers have a liberal bias.
“The study reviewed political donations over the past four election cycles. $22,580 of the $22,683 in political donations went to Democrats. Only three, obviously very small donations went to any Republicans!”, the report claimed.
Responding to this new, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, tweeted that all fact-checkers were biased.
“The so-called fact-checkers are huge liars and incredibly biased”, Elon Musk tweeted.
With the current owner of Twitter denouncing self-proclaimed fact-checkers as “huge liars and incredibly biased”, one recalls a Facebook admission from 2021 that substantiated what Elon Musk has tweeted today. Just two years ago, Facebook said that its fact-checks were merely opinions.
Back in December 2021, Facebook admitted that the “fact checks” used to police what the people of the United States read and watch were just “opinions”. The admission by the social media giant came during the hearing of a lawsuit brought by celebrated journalist John Stossel that exposed the unreal battle against alleged “misinformation” by the left-liberals.
For example, Stossel shared a couple of videos on climate change. None of the videos questioned the authenticity of climate change but talked about subjects like forest management and using technology to adapt. However, Facebook’s third-party content moderators flagged them as “false” and “lacking context”. The reason behind tagging the videos as false and lacking context was probably the tone Stossel used. Facebook moderators flagged it as the tone was allegedly not in sync with what left-liberals propagate about the topic.
When Facebook was sued for minimizing Stossel’s reporting’s reach and depriving him of revenue and readers, the social media giant claimed it was not their problem. The situation was the same for many content creators who do not align with what the left liberals think.
Another example was The Post’s column on Covid-19, where Steven W. Mosher asked if the pandemic-causing virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. The report was labelled as “FALSE” by the fact-checkers on Facebook. The sources that were used to label that report false include those from EcoHealth that had funded the Wuhan Lab.
The situation has been the same on several social media platforms where the power is in left-liberals hands. Who can forget that BJP’s IT Cell chief Amit Malviya’s post was labelled false by Twitter, but it led the vicious campaign against former BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma led by Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair. Everyone knows Zubair took the video out of context, trimmed it and published it on social media leading to an array of threats against Sharma. She is still living with a threat to her life while the likes of Zubair roam freely, choosing their next target.
Social media platforms remove the “false” or similar tag when questioned. Still, they wait for time until the reports no longer have the potential to substantially change society. Hunter Biden‘s story, for example, led to the de-platforming of The New York Post from Twitter. The concentration was diverted towards suspending The New York Post’s Twitter handle. The Hunter Biden story is still talked about, leading to more exposure. Still, the impact it could have had on Joe Biden’s career as the President of the United States was watered down substantially as Twitter acted swiftly and diverted the attention from the real topic.
IFCN, its bias and why Twitter and Facebook need to act
In order to regain their hold over public discourse, the Left Cabal in concert with their masters floated the IFCN whose primary job it is to accredit ‘fake checkers’ of their favoured political dispensation.
In November, 2018, BBC came up with a shoddy research to blame Nationalism for the rise in fake news. Ultimately, they were forced to backtrack after OpIndia published a series of article debunking their ‘research’.
One of the main reasons why the BBC got it so wrong is the fact that they relied on biased fact-checkers for their research. The bias crept in because they relied on IFCN-accredited ‘fact-checkers’ for their research.
Thus, what happens when researchers rely on IFCN for research purposes? They end up reaching faulty conclusions that eventually forces them to pull down their research in their entirety. The BBC research has several other flaws but one of the primary ones was their reliance on biased sources of fake news.
IFCN is not designed for an authentic mechanism to curb fake news. Its sole purpose is to assist the Left cabal in maintaining their grip over public discourse under the garb of fighting ‘fake news’. Thus, it is extremely dangerous that Facebook partners with only IFCN accredited ‘fact checkers’ to combat fake news.
Twitter, too, has relied on such ‘fact checkers’ to dub tweets as ‘manipulated media’, which continues to be a cause for concern. It is also to be noted that the Poynter Institute, which owns the IFCN, also owns the Tampa Bay Times, a media outlet which endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Presidency of the United States of America in 2016.
With both Facebook and Twitter agreeing that ‘fact-checking’ is a sham business where the players are huge liars, biased and dole out only their opinions, it is imperitive that both social media giants take a hard look at their policy of allying with these elements.
Twitter, on its part, after the take over by Elon Musk did give back the power to the people by introducing community notes, however, the stronhold of such biased elements continues to be strong on Facebook and must be countered.
