RIP, Meta Fact-Checkers. Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out.
In July 2022, the Washington Free Beacon inaugurated the popular video series "Joe Biden’s Senior Moment of the Week."
Less than a week later, responding to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Biden spoke of a 10-year-old in Indiana who had to travel out of state to terminate her "presidency" and read his teleprompter cues aloud: "End of quote. Repeat the line." You can watch the video here.
The distribution of that video was suppressed on Facebook—tagged as "False Information checked by Independent fact-checkers"—after FactCheck.org, one of Meta’s partisan fact-checking partners, declared that Biden had been "falsely accused" by us and others of "having issues while using a teleprompter."
"Posts on social shared a shortened clip of that part of Biden’s remarks to falsely claim that he mistakenly read the cues off the teleprompter when he said ‘end of quote’ and ‘repeat the line,' insinuating that he is becoming senile," fact-checker Brea Jones wrote, citing a White House press secretary’s statement that the president’s wording was "intentional."
That incident was one of many, many, many in which left-wing fact-checkers cited Democratic government officials to suppress critical or embarrassing news coverage and offers a case study of how fact-checkers worked arm-in-arm with bureaucrats to stamp out inconvenient truths. The press is supposed to have an adversarial relationship with the government officials it covers, yet Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers routinely relied on partisan administration spokesmen to fact-check our work.
In another instance, fact-checkers labeled a Free Beacon report on the Biden administration’s plan to fund the distribution of crack pipes "partially false" based entirely on the backpedaling statements of administration officials provided after our report went to press. In that case, the fact-checker, Alan Duke of something called Lead Stories—whatever that is—was a former CNN producer and personal injury lawyer who has donated thousands of dollars to Democrats.
At best, many of these fact-checks offered an alternative opinion. At worst, they facilitated the spread of disinformation by government officials and aided their efforts to discredit and silence the handful of news outlets actually interested in holding them accountable.
They will not be missed, and we hope they enjoy learning to code.
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