They can obliterate and demonetize online news platforms with a snide comment. They can destroy the careers of journalists and writers by "fact-checking" them to oblivion.
There's no "training" to be a fact checker. Standards of "truth" and "objectivity" vary widely. That makes fact-checkers far more dangerous to liberty than any online troglodyte or paranoid nutcase spewing filth and fantasies to their dozens of readers.
"Fact-checkers" hold more power than any group of people should. FactCheck.Org is a project of the Annenberg Policy Center, which funds the policy center through a grant from the Annenberg Foundation. It's enormously influential with major media and social media platforms.
The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) of the Poynter Institute gathers fact-checkers from 170 fact-checking groups from around the world in one organization. Both fact-checking groups are apoplectic that Mark Zuckerberg has ended their gravy train and access to the kind of power only dreamed of by leftist Americans by curtailing or eliminating most fact-checking at Facebook. It's expected that other online companies (where most fact-checkers are employed) will follow suit.
This has fact-checkers worried about their future employment.
Fact-checkers very much do not put themselves in this category. They are furious that their expertise is being questioned and that their power to censor speech will be taken away. They are so furious that they are actually attempting to argue that they never held this power in the first place. "We did not, and could not, remove content," wrote Lori Robertson, managing editor of Meta fact-checking partner FactCheck.org. "Any decisions to do that were Meta's."
This is misleading. Or, to put it in the parlance that FactCheck.org might understand: This claim is missing important context. The deal was that Meta would pay certain fact-checking organizations to monitor the platforms and would then take action to limit the spread of content that was deemed false. The fact-checkers knew they had policemen powers, albeit indirect ones. That's why they were well-compensated by Zuckerberg. According to Business Insider, payment by Meta itself was their "predominant revenue stream."
"Fact-checking isn't going away, and many robust organizations existed before Meta's program and will continue after it," said the director of the IFCN, Angie Holan. "But some fact-checking initiatives were created because of Meta's support, and those will be vulnerable."
Indeed, no one expects fact-checking as an industry to go away. But the people who abuse their power to censor just got a wake-up call, and that's a good thing.
PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize for its work covering the 2008 presidential campaign. “It was a moment of promise when people really believed that the internet could be a positive force to empower people around the world with the information they need to make decisions about voting in good and powerful ways,” said Bill Adair, who founded PolitiFact in 2007.
Is fact-checking really meant to "empower" people? Or is it knowingly or unknowingly guiding people to reach certain conclusions that the fact-checker wants them to?
Facts are frangible in the hands of people who know how to manipulate them to make it seem as if up is down, black is white, and you didn't hear what that politician really said and meant, so let me interpret it for you.
“This is all about politics,” said Adair, who now teaches at Duke University. The totally objective creator of PolitiFact wrote a book titled, “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy.”
Allowing people to decide for themselves what is true and what is false is what free people are supposed to do. Anything else reflects an authoritarian viewpoint that people are too stupid to govern themselves and must be led by "fact-checkers" and other superior beings.
Mistakes will be made. Lies will circulate. Bad people will say bad things.
But we'll still be free to decide for ourselves who and what to believe.
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