Satire Website Babylon Bee Gets Fact-Checked by Facebook
Jose Nino
|
Facebook is ramping up its censorship campaign.
Lawyer and political activist Jon Moseley informed Big League Politics how Facebook has flagged posts on known satire site The Babylon Bee.
The post in question was “Ilhan Omar: ‘If Israel Is So Innocent, Then Why Do They Insist On Being Jews?”
When Moseley shared this post on his personal profile and a Facebook page he runs, Conservative Party, it was flagged by the fact-checker HOAX-ALERT.LEADSTORIES.COM.
This incident struck Moseley as odd.
He told BLP, “That the post was satire, and labeled as satire, and Facebook is fact-checking satire. They are warning people that the satire isn’t true.”
UPDATE: A representative from leadstories.com clarified that Facebook gives fact checking sities like leadstories.com “the option to label satire as “Satire” and that a satire flag does not have any effect on the distribution or position in the news feed. It only makes the little warning appear below the story”.
The representative added that “we occasionally label a trending post as satire in Facebook’s tool if it seems there are many people believing it is real. Sometimes we also spot a copy of a satirical story going viral on a different site that has stolen the content and in that case we will write a fact check about the original so we can label the copy as “False” (and the original as “Satire”).”
This latest development comes on a week when Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary are rolling out new fact-check changes.
According to a report from Tom Parker at Reclaim the Net, “Facebook-owned Instagram is now limiting the distribution of posts that its fact-checking partners label as “false.” Posts that are considered “false” will be removed from Instagram’s Explore tab and its hashtag results pages, which Parker notes are “two of the main ways Instagram users discover posts from accounts that they’re not following.”
Facebook currently employs 52 fact-checking partners in over 30 countries.
These fact-checkers have been declaring posts “false” on Facebook since December 2016.
Last week, right wing figures like Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Paul Joseph Watson were kicked off Facebook in what seemed like a coordinated purge by Big Tech. President Donald Trump responded by defending these conservative commentators and voicing his displeasure towards Big Tech bias.
Share: