In Defense of Fact-Checkers
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week that he will end third-party fact checking at Facebook and Instagram inspired this essay from a distraught fact-checker, Karl Barnstine. Barnstine (he/they) is a senior intern fact-checker at the Jayson Blair Institute of Truth.
As we embark on a second Trump oligarchy, the ability to tell the unvarnished truth after stripping it of context to fit a preferred narrative faces extinction.
Snopes, a reputable media fact-checker, did the responsible thing in 2024 and immediately stated Trump did not praise neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”
Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg announced the cessation of third-party fact-checkers to scrub conservative thought from his social networking platform, stating that such truth-telling outfits are “too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
I vomited into my Harris-Walz ushanka when I heard that.
Without fact-checkers, Facebook will soon be crawling with falsehoods like:
- Men cannot become women.
- Children shouldn’t view pornography in elementary school libraries.
- Israel is not committing a genocide.
Rating: False, all of them.
The fact-checking industry is not politically biased. We merely focus on Republican disinformation because Democrats rarely, if ever, spread any. And if they do (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop is a Russian PSYOP the media must censor), it’s a piffling mistake not worth mentioning.
Crucially, when someone alleges a Republican stated something reprehensible and it’s not true, we instantly go to bat for the GOP.
Case in point, when Donald Trump praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people” in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, he didn’t actually praise neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” Even though Joe Biden campaigned in 2020 on Trump praising neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” Biden got confused the way all well-meaning, elderly presidential candidates do.
Snopes, a reputable media fact-checker, did the responsible thing in 2024 and immediately stated Trump did not praise neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” He said they should be “condemned totally.”
Nitpickers might wonder why Snopes took seven years and not seven minutes in 2017 to analyze Trump’s video/audio to reach its conclusion. As the inveterate truth-teller Joe Scarborough would say, I’m about to tell you the truth: It was advantageous for people to think Trump admired neo-Nazis because the fact-checking industry wanted him to lose the 2020 presidential election — but not for political reasons. We like Democrats more than Republicans. That’s an apolitical fact.
A direct instance of Facebook fact-checkers getting it wrong and right stems from the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pa. Facebook labeled the iconic photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist as altered, explaining “Independent fact-checkers reviewed a similar photo and said it was altered in a way that could mislead people.”
Facebook fact-checkers didn’t want that photo disseminated at all because it made Trump look masculine, tough, and resolute — traits media fact-checkers find abhorrent in men — and could cause impressionable voters to rally around him.
Regardless, Facebook admitted its error, stating “the fact check applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo.”
In the end, Facebook was factual after the fact.
Many have derided fact-checkers as being lenient toward Democrats. False. Just the other day, President Biden declared the 28th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment, legally binding even though only 27 Amendments exist. While creating law out of whole cloth seems a bit dictatorial — something fact-checkers envision Trump doing to re-institute slavery on day one — good ol’ Joe was being hyperbolic in his waning days in office and clearly wasn’t addled by dementia or a myriad of other neurological disorders.
Rather than fact-checking Biden’s declaration as not only false but, frankly, insane, Reuters wrote the following headline: “President Joe Biden declares Equal Rights Amendment Law; impact is unclear.”
Anyone who’s watched the Saturday morning cartoon with that animated Constitution singing and dancing about the amendment process knows Biden can’t will something into law, a fact Reuters didn’t get to until the second-to-last paragraph of its story: “The National Archivist said on Dec. 17 that the ERA cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to ‘established legal, judicial and procedural decisions.’”
PBS was more forgiving: “Biden declares Equal Rights Amendment ‘law of the land’ in probably symbolic statement.” Not only did PBS neglect to outright state Biden’s forgivable dishonesty, it opined what the president was thinking to make him look less foolish. Thank goodness the American taxpayer subsidizes such unbiased, quality journalism.
Had Trump done the exact same thing, the headline would’ve been: “Trump falsely claims ERA ‘law of the land’; Republic in Peril.”
Why the disparate treatment? Fact-checkers will divine any Democrat’s intention as being virtuous and never extend the same courtesy to Republicans, so as not to confuse readers who must be told how to view the nefarious GOP.
Fact-checkers nationwide wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg decrying his decision. Of note, “Access to truth fuels freedom of speech, empowering communities to align their choices with their values.”
That is the truth, just so long as fact-checkers decide what those choices and values should be.
READ MORE from Matt Manochio:
Unravelling the Events of Trump’s Spectacular Year
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