Last week, President Joe Biden joined Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and a group of construction workers in Superior, Wis., and what should have been a simple photo-op became the latest indictment of supposedly objective fact-checking.
What happened was that Klobuchar posted a photo of herself and Biden with some of the construction workers, and in the photo, Biden is wearing his hard hat incorrectly.
The President’s bipartisan infrastructure bill: ALL BEER, NO FOAM pic.twitter.com/dYi0J6vS4u
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) January 25, 2024
It was an amusing photo that not only symbolized Biden’s incompetence but also demonstrated how out of touch he really is with the people he panders to. The story itself wasn’t particularly consequential. In fact, it’s trivial compared to how Biden’s inadequacies are affecting the country and the entire world. But the fact-checking website Snopes managed to make this story much more significant.
In an attempt to save Biden from a short-term embarrassment that would be forgotten rather quickly, Snopes decided to address social media accusations that Biden was wearing the hard hat wrong in a fact-check, predictably rating the claim as “false."
"The photo is genuine," Snopes conceded. "And it does look, at first glance, like Biden was wearing that hard hat backwards. But after comparing it to other photos and videos of the same event, we were forced to reach the opposite conclusion: The hat on Biden's head was facing forward, bill to the front, not backward."
Related: Need More Proof That Joe Biden Knows He’s Going To Lose in November? Here It Is.
Keep in mind that this is a widely "respected" fact-checking site that failed to do the research you'd expect from a "fact-checking" site to ensure that Biden was defended and quell the mockery.
Instead, Snopes got eviscerated on social media by users telling the site it was 100% wrong, and that prompted a mea culpa from Snopes.
"We received a ton of comments in a very short time challenging our assumption that wearing a hard hat 'backwards' means wearing it with the brim facing to the rear, and 'forwards' means wearing it brim to the front," an editor's note on the site now reads. "On the basis of that assumption, we originally rated the claim that Biden was wearing a hard hat backwards as false." After citing the evidence that the hard hat was indeed being worn incorrectly, the site explained that it accepted this evidence and changed its rating to "true."
Why does this matter? It matters a huge deal. Big Tech has used these supposedly objective fact-checkers — and the media has cited these reports — to justify the suppression and censorship of stories. That's wrong under any circumstance, but when you add partiality and political bias into the mix, it's so much worse.
We've seen fact-checkers get things wrong plenty of times, and sometimes they've admitted to it later. But these sites are supposed to be impartial and thorough in their research because their fact-checks carry significant weight with the gatekeepers who decide what information is legit and what is misinformation that you aren't allowed to see. This particularly bogus fact-check showed that there is no story too small that these biased left-wing fact-checkers won't turn into an effort to defend the left.
By influencing what information is deemed accurate or inaccurate, fact-checkers like Snopes wield considerable influence over the public discourse; therefore, it is critical that they exercise their authority responsibly. And it's been sometime now that they haven't.
