“Fact-Checkers” are often just propagandists with a cute title. In a perfect world, fact-checkers would check just facts. However, all too often, the anointed arbiters of truth equate opinion as fact and label rhetoric or even parody as “false.” Donald Trump was “fact-checked” by the Washington Post 30,573 times. One of WaPo’s “fact-checks” was this statement:
“Our first lady has been a woman of great grace and beauty and dignity. And so popular with the people, so popular with the people.”
In response, WaPo cited a poll that the First Lady had a 47 percent unfavorable rating in January 2021. Trump was playing to an audience; he wasn’t dictating policy. It was petty but WaPo thought it important to “fact-check.”
Sure, Trump made stuff up, but Trump couldn’t even praise his wife without it being dissected and Melania Trump compared against an opinion poll.
WaPo’s presidential fact-checkers disappeared after Biden was elected. Biden’s constant and consistent gaffes and obvious lies should be the subject of his own dedicated online “lie tracker” page, but they are not. Why? Because WaPo isn’t interested in presidential truth-telling, it’s interested in pushing a point of view.
WaPo, AP, Facebook, Twitter, Google – they all have “fact-checkers.” All too often, they don’t, in fact, check facts — they check ideology and take a side. Politifact recently “fact-checked” Joe Biden handshaking thin air. According to Politifact, Biden wasn’t confused, he was pointing at the crowd with an open hand.
You might have seen a clip of President Joe Biden “shaking hands” with thin air. It never happened. Here’s the truth, as well as how misinformers manufacture and embellish embarrassing presidential moments:
— PolitiFact
(@PolitiFact)
April 20, 2022
Don’t believe your lying eyes, believe Politifact instead.
Politifact fact-checked Ron DeSantis when he told high school students that they could take their masks off and offered “They don’t do anything.” Politifact labeled that statement false. Yes, masks “do something,” like a screendoor on a submarine will, technically “stop” some water, but from a practical standpoint, cloth masks are near to useless. Jeremy Redfern did a thorough takedown of Politifact’s selective fact-picking, to no avail.
Hey @yacob_reyes, I spent some time sending you up quite a few controlled trials about the [in]effectiveness of masks for preventing viral spread. Why didn’t you include any of them in your fact check?
https://t.co/1FimgkEnRo
— Jeremy Redfern
(@JeremyRedfernFL)
March 5, 2022
Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” in 2013
was, in fact the literal truth.
I wrote an article five months ago about an AP story claiming Trump had fomented George Floyd violence. I pointed out, with facts, that AP didn’t check its own facts. Nonetheless, the article remains intact and the falsehoods remain. AP employs “fact-checkers” but apparently AP can’t be bothered to check its own “facts.”
RedState is constantly fact-checked. Even satirical pieces are fact-checked and read as fact. Humor is “fact-checked” by fact-checkers. I’m surprised my cartoons haven’t been fact-checked. The Babylon Bee has been fact-checked off of Twitter. No one with an IQ above Joe Biden’s hair plugs mistakes the Bee for news. It’s satire.
Libs of TikTok was fact-checked and suspended from Twitter. The Twitter account Defiant Ls was fact-checked for the sin of literally quoting, verbatim, comments by a leftists.
Google is a tech monster with an authoritarian reach. YouTube is owned by Google. YouTube has engaged in some of the most remarkable and egregious censorship of voices it doesn’t approve of. Wrong pronouns will get you a strike or banned outright. Enough strikes and its a Stalinist purge. You’re unpersoned. Biology is forbidden fruit. You cannot offer biology as a fact for issues of gender. Even math is up for debate.
Google can and does disregard actual facts while “fact-checking.” It farms out its fact-checking. Google likely contracts with more than one company in India for “fact-checks” but one “fact-checker” funded by Google is apparently using “people” who appear to either not exist, or if they do exist, have falsified their credentials.
Raheem Kassam is the editor at the National Pulse. He published an Instagram post that simply screenshot a Forbes article originally titled:
“Could A ‘Morality Pill’ Help Stop The Covid-19 Pandemic?”
Kassam wasn’t claiming any position nor did he critique the Forbes article. All he did was publish a screenshot. Then, the fact-checkers swooped in. He was told that his post was “False Information” and he was told to delete it.
Who determined his “screenshot was “false Information”? Kassam did some searching and determined that Google’s “fact-checkers” were a collection of “personalities” with single-name “people” with sketchy resumes. None of it added up. Some of the “fact-checkers” seemed to not really exist at all. There were no photos for some of the “experts,” nor was there a photo of their “office.” The purported address is in the middle of a New Delhi slum. Read his account here.
In short, Kassam was “fact-checked” by what appears to be a shady business with phantom “experts” located in an impoverished part of New Delhi, but because it was funded by Google it carried a “fact-checking” Ban Hammer. People have no practical way to dispute clearly false “fact-checks” as evidenced by what happened to Kassam.
It turns out that fact-checkers are not
necessarily the best source for “facts.”
