EXPOSED: Facebook Fact Checkers Say Liberal Opinion is ‘Objective Fact’
Peter D'Abrosca
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Thursday, Big League Politics caught a notoriously liberal “fact-checker” citing the opinion of an anonymous ANTIFA blogger in order to discredit a Daily Mail news story.
October 2, the day after the deadly massacre in Las Vegas, Daily Mail reported a story about a group called Melbourne Antifa praising killer Stephen Paddock as a “comrade” who made “Trump supporting dogs pay.”
The post was deleted after a short time, and subsequently the entire page was removed from Facebook.
In an effort to carry water for the political left, Snopes rushed to discredit the Antifa page’s validity, claiming that that page was not the “real Melbourne Antifa.”
To verify this claim, Snopes reached out to a truth power-broker, anonymous blogger “slackbastard,” whose (unconfirmed) real name is supposedly Andy Fleming.
Feeling uncomfortable with trusting an anonymous blogger, Big League Politics reached out to Mr. slackbastard to find out how he – and consequently Snopes – knew the Melbourne Antifa page was fake. It turns out, they know because… well… they just know:
Snopes is undoubtably an important player in media. Facebook uses Snopes’ information – and the information of organizations like Snopes – to arbitrate what is true and what is false.
So how does Facebook fact-check the fact-checkers?
“Our current fact-checking partners, including Snopes, are all approved by Poynter/the International Fact-Checking Network, who publishes its ethics guidelines, which includes the ‘accuracy standard’ that states fact-checkers, ‘maintain high standards of reporting, writing, and editing in order to produce work that is as error-free as possible,'” Lauren Svensson, a Communications Manager at Facebook told Big League Politics.
“Moreover, fact-checkers follow a standard set of criteria when determining the veracity of stories on Facebook, and these are based on objective facts,” she continued.
But that is obviously not true. Big League Politics just caught Snopes red-handed asserting the opinion of an anonymous blogger as an “objective fact.” In reality, Facebook fact-checkers can simply declare what is true and what not by citing a liberal opinion with which they agree.
As mentioned by Svensson, the organization that approves Facebook’s fact-checkers is the Poynter Institute, a media studies non-profit. A little research into Poynter confirms that it is an unquestionably leftist organization.
According to Capital Research, George Soros’ Tides Foundation has donated $275,000 to Poynter. The Ford Foundation, no longer connected with the auto company, has donated $2.4 million to Poynter. Notably, the Ford Foundation has also donated millions to Soros’ Center for American Progress and David Brock’s Media Matters for America. Poynter’s list of donors includes other liberal foundations like the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation.
Poynter’s president is Timothy A. Franklin, who joined in 2014 after serving as managing editor of Bloomberg News in Washington, D.C. Yes, the man in charge of Facebook’s “non-partisan” fact-checking organization took over after holding a plum position at Bloomberg, which is not exactly a conservative-friendly media outlet.
By the way, Poynter owns PolitiFact, which some consider to be Snopes’ main rival.
According to the Capital Research Report:
“A Rasmussen poll before Election Day found that 29 percent of likely voters believe the media’s fact-checking of political candidates, while 62 percent think the media just “skew the facts to help candidates they support.
One only has to look at the fact-checking statistics over this past election year to understand why voters have this view. PolitiFact gave its “Pants on Fire” label, the most severe rank for a lie, to Donald Trump 57 times. Hillary Clinton earned that distinction just seven times.
A Media Research Center analysis in June 2016 found that [now-President] Trump received the “False”/“Mostly False”/ “Pants on Fire” label from PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter 77 percent of the time. Clinton received just “False”/“Mostly False” for 26 percent of her statements.”
Facebook has long been in the business of silencing conservatives. Giving themselves the power to decide what is true and what is false is simply the tech giant’s latest Orwellian ruse.
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