They Are Not Fact Checkers, They Are Propagandists

            FACT-CHECKERS have been a very significant topic this year, especially as the intensifying electoral season saw social media roll out “independent” fact checkers to police content on their websites regarding the election, COVID-19, and other major topics of the season. Of course, these measures became greatly lambasted by all because of their dubious and flagrant partisanship, especially as such fact checks extended to President Trump. The topics of free speech, private industry and constitutional law, and impartiality became significant due to these actions.

As is usual, leftist outlets and voices belittled opposition to such measures, calling opponents misinformed and conspiracists, and claiming that no one in their right mind would have a quarrel with the oh-so-noble act of policing misleading content in lieu of such a pivotal election. Well, they would be right, making sure misinformation is curtailed leading up to an election is important, but if only they had actually policed actual misinformation that argument would stick. What the actions of platforms and the mainstream media during this year have shown is that the use of fact-checkers is nothing less than propagandism.

            The argument people will give you is that fact-checking is a very important practice, especially in politics, because of the evident significance of politics in public life and that a well-informed populace makes well-informed decisions (votes). The fact-checking of the 2020 electoral season, however, has been all but that, overflowing with partisan data and manipulations.

From the very beginning of the Trump presidency this has been occurring, and it has been growing rapidly, to the point now that the media has an unofficial monopoly on truth – just like how it has a monopoly on the industry itself – which is a flagrant insult to the impartiality the media claims it wants to defend by doing this.

The fact-checking uses a variety of tactics to make sure supposedly “impartial” fact-checks appear to be true and fulfill the function of slandering a target. The main strategy in this arena is “hyper-focused fact-checking” – or, more appropriately, anal retentive fact-checking – which takes very minute details, hyperbolizes their importance. This strategy makes use of a psychological phenomenon that is called “WYSIATI” (“What you see is all there is”).

WYSIATI is basically a predisposition to take things at face value, meaning that this category of fallacious fact-checks succeeded simply because you do not look deeper into it. The greatest example of this comes from the 2019 State of the Union, and from Politico, which falsely fact-checked Donald Trump’s statement that “one in three women is [sic] sexually assaulted on the long journey north”, because – according to a “…2017 report by Doctors Without Borders…only 31 percent of female migrants…had been abused”; that is right, because of Trump saying 33.333% instead of 31%, he was fact-checked.

            These sublime, coercive, and dishonest strategies go far beyond a fallacious expectation of uber-accuracy in political rhetoric. Simple political slogans, not meaning to be factual but simply meaning to be received well by a partisan audience, have been fact-checked. The New York Times fact-checked the SOTU speech too, falsifying Trump calling illegal immigration “an urgent national crisis.” The reason they gave for calling the statement false was because “illegal border crossings have been declining for two decades”.

Overlooking the fact the President was simply making a point about his own policy and for his Republican colleagues on the issue of immigration, The New York Times decided to take use of “WYSIATT” in order to lead its readers to believe that the immigration crisis was non-existent, simply by using hyper-precision and fact-checking partisan rhetoric. Not only was there actually a veritable immigration crisis around the time of this statement, but one must also ask, “Would The New York Times ever fact-check a Democrat who says there is a gun violence crisis, even though gun violence has been declining?”

These are far from actions that are in the best interests of unbiased truth and of a properly informed population; they are eschewed and created by partisanship in order to create a narrative, not a truth.

So, by their behavior alone, we can see fact checkers are far from being unbiased and truthful entities. In fact, by their identities, too, we can see they are biased! A buzzword thrown around regarding fact checkers is that they are “third-party” and “independent”, terms that create a sense of trust in these people and create complacency among Netizens about whether they are seeing a narrative or a truth.

These terms are fallacious in their entirety, and dishonest to users, because these “independent” fact checkers are all but independent and all but unbiased. This is the truth, namely about Facebook’s “independent” fact checkers, who are: Reuters, USA Today, PolitiFact, the Associated Press, and others, and many of these names have shown their left-wing biases in the past.

These sources that Facebook defers to for fact checking purposes are “vetted” by a group known as the International Fact-Checking Network, which itself is not a nice-and-dandy third party, as it is ran by the Poynter Institute (which also runs PolitiFact) which is heavily funded by left-wing donors and institutes, such as Pierre Omidyar (through several entities he owns) and the Open Society Foundation. This biased International Fact-Checking Network is a titan in the field, and likely has influence over the fact checking of over half the content on social media, with Google, aforementioned Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms using it (to learn about the Deep State ties of all these entities, click here).

            However, the vast inconsistencies and shortcomings in this interconnected network of truth-makers does not end there. On an individual level we can begin to see that our fact checkers are more so propagandists, because the individual agents working to verify and vet content have flamboyant biases. We can begin with Snopes, which not only started as a small and unprofessional hoax/UFO-fact checking site in the late-2000s, which not only has an institutional bias, but also apparently cannot hire and headhunt for workers without scraping the bottom of the barrel!

Snopes’ main political fact-checker, Kim Lacapria, is a former blogger, an “openly left-leaning” woman who enjoys “mermaiding” (whatever that could possibly mean) who has done things such as calling Tea Party members “teahadists” and made apologies for Bill Clinton. This seems to be a major contradiction of Snopes’ statement that Snopes is led by a “dedicated team of writers, editors, developers, and professionals who are passionate about fighting misinformation” when their own writers create disinformation. It is not as if Mrs. Lacapria had a character change, it is not as if she has been reborn into a more honest journalist, by far, since she still posts and writes “fact checks” that stretch the truth using uncertainties or coincidences, has an overall poor character, and various other drawbacks that bring into question her dubious journalistic integrity.

            These are the people who are vetting and mediating our flow of information? These are the people we are supposed to trust!? It is bad enough that we have given the mainstream media a pass on their monopoly of “news”, which is why they underreported the Hunter Biden scandal nor cover reports of programmed vote-flipping and Democratic voter intimidation. One cannot help but turn nauseous when they consider what deceit, what evils, whatever will occur if this real-world Ministry of Truth is allowed to persist and gestate further.

We can argue all we want about the merits of fact-checking, but that is not the point, because we do not have fact checking going on here, we have clear-cut propagandism that has been given a sugarcoated name to deceive the masses. A quote of George Orwell’s is brought to my mind as I write on this subject, and that quote is, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” We all know and detest the world Orwell describes in his harrowing magnum opus, and as that work turns more and more into a manual, perhaps it is time for us to aggressively commit the “revolutionary act” of fighting for the truth.