While social media giant Facebook portrays its fact-checking feature as neutral and independent, the personnel, funding streams, and credentialing mechanism behind the participating organizations indicates otherwise.
Facebook launched the fact-checking feature shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016.
It says it has since partnered with more than 50 fact-checking organizations around the world.
Facebook didn’t respond to a request for further information, such as its full list of fact-checkers and how much Facebook pays them for the service.
Posts flagged as false by the partners not only get furnished with a warning label and a link to the fact check, but are also throttled on the platform, meaning Facebook “significantly reduces the number of people who see it,” the company says on its website.
What gets fact-checked is determined by Facebook based on “signals, like feedback from people on Facebook.”
Facebook fact-checkers supposedly need to be certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).
Facebook describes the organization as nonpartisan, but the IFCN was set up by Poynter, a leftist "journalism nonprofit", and in 2019, was almost entirely funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar—a major DEMOCRAT donor—as well as Google and progressive billionaire George Soros. Facebook is also listed as one of the previous donors.
Who gets certified and who doesn’t is decided by the IFCN’s advisory board. One member is Glenn Kessler, former foreign policy reporter and now the head of the "fact-checking" feature at The Washington Post. Kessler and his team recently published a book called “Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth.” How impartial is that?
The other American is Angie Drobnic Holan, editor-in-chief at left-leaning PolitiFact, which is owned by Poynter. Holan characterized the other board members as “very knowledgeable about U.S. politics and fact-checking practices.”
Since September 2018, PolitiFact has conducted more than 1,400 fact checks for Facebook with 84 percent giving the verdict of “false.”
Its largest financial sponsor is major DEMOCRAT donor Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.
“Thousands of statements labeled as untrue or misleading are more properly considered the habitual verbal excess for a man known for his immoderate form of communication,” commented Mark Hemingway, senior writer at RealClearInvestigations.
“Further, a great many of the objections to Trump’s statements amount to argumentative quibbles that aren’t really ‘fact checks.’”
On Sept. 18, the IFCN announced a collaboration project of 10 fact-checkers and the two largest Spanish-language American broadcasters, Univision and Telemundo, “to fight mis/disinformation during a presidential campaign” and “expose the record 32 million Latino voters in the U.S. to accurate election-related information from Sept. 15, 2020 through Inauguration Day in 2021.”
The sponsor of the effort is WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook.
Facebook recently positioned itself as a major and unprecedented influence in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election after its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced new election-related content rules, a $300 million donation to local DEMOCRAT campaigns, and a drive to "help" 4 million people register and vote this year.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/facebook-fact-checkers-dominated-by-left-leaning-funding-personnel-organizations_3508014.html
