So Facebook has enlisted the help of so-called “fact-checkers” to root out and red-flag those stories from organizations deemed as “fake news” sites – and now we’re supposed to rest assured the mainstream hounds are on the hunt? Methinks not.
Facebook actually said it is going to introduce warning labels for stories deemed “fake news,” based on “fact checking” from the likes of Snopes, ABC and PolitiFact.
Those stories seen as fake will be flagged and stamped with this so-called damning mark: “Dispute by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers.”
Well, well, well. But who’s going to dispute the disputers?
Snopes, that supposed go-to site to determine the truth of news situations that emerge as controversial, was outed earlier this year as a liberal hatchet group.
As the Daily Caller posted in June:
“Snopes’ main political fact-checker is a writer named Kim Lacapria. Before writing for Snopes, Lacapria wrote for Inquisitr, a blog that – oddly enough – is known for publishing fake quotes and even downright hoaxes as much as anything else. …
“[Lacapria] described herself as ‘openly left-leaning’ and a liberal. She trashed the Tea Party as ‘teahadists.’ She called Bill Clinton ‘one of our greatest’ presidents.”
Sounds a bastion of non-bias, right?
And let’s not forget one of ABC’s biggest names, George Stephanopoulos, is not only one of Bill Clinton’s biggest allies, having worked directly for him at the White House. But he also curiously failed to mention the $75,000 in contributions he made to the Clinton Foundation in 2012, 2013 and 2014, even while reporting on the organization for ABC.
How curious.
PolitiFact, meanwhile, is a project of the Tampa Bay Times, and according to an analysis by Bryan White, the operator of the independent PolitiFactBias blog, “is not that honest fact-checker.”
He wrote, after conducting an analysis of the site, Newsmax reported: “PolitiFact is not that honest [a] fact-checker. Once widely regarded as a unique, rigorous and reasonably independent investigator of political claims, PolitiFact now declares conservatives wrong three times more often than liberals. More pointedly, the journalism organization concludes that conservatives have flat-out lied nine times more often than liberals.”
That being said, Facebook vice presidenntt Adam Mosseri assured of his company’s good intent, in a statement posted on Facebook.
“We’ll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations,” Mosseri said, speaking of the outside fact-checkers. “If these fact checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why.”
