-By Warner Todd Huston
With the left’s newest war cry of “fake news” now always at the ready to deploy as a weapon to quash any right of center news outlet, Facebook has announced that it will now use three left-of-center organizations to “review” conservative sites to see if they are producing “fake news.” So, what could go wrong? Plenty.
Facebook insists it is doing its part to torpedo those “fake news” sites that so many liberals claim gave Trump the White House. But this is all just a smoke screen.
In fact, this effort has nothing whatever to do with making sure “news” is truthful. All it really is, is just another attempt by liberals to re-instate their once indisputable status as the “gatekeepers” of the media, an assumption that created a screening process through which only their approved, liberal “news” could get past. It was this “gatekeeping” wall that caused the loss of Vietnam, for instance, as the entirety of the liberal media lied to Americans that the war was lost and the U.S. should get out of Vietnam despite that the U.S. military won nearly every engagement it ever entered into during that conflict.
Facebook is being fueled by calls from such losers as Hillary Clinton who wants to quash the “fake news” that got Trump elected. Early in December, the two-time losing Democrat presidential candidate delivered a speech assailing “malicious” fake news hyperbolically claiming that its growth has “put lives at risk.”
And so, according to The Wall Street Journal, “Facebook said it has identified several markers of sites that consistently peddle fake news, and it will demote posts from those sites in people’s news feeds.”
But the social media giant is not quite setting itself up as the sole arbiter of which conservatives sites should be banned from any list of legitimate news sources. It is also eliciting the help of three liberal “fact checking” groups to help out.
“The fact-checking organizations — Snopes.com, PolitiFact, ABC News, Factcheck.org and the Associated Press — will sift through the problematic stories to determine if they are fake,” the Journal reported.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, a huge donor to Hillary Clinton and a well-known left-winger who pushes illegal immigrant “rights,” posted about his company’s new policy on Thursday saying in part, “Facebook is a new kind of platform different from anything before it. I think of Facebook as a technology company, but I recognize we have a greater responsibility than just building technology that information flows through.”
“While we don’t write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize we’re more than just a distributor of news,” Zuckerberg continued. “We’re a new kind of platform for public discourse — and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed.”
Zuckerberg’s full report can be seen below:
Naturally, as soon as the new policies were announced, the news was met with alarm from the very people Facebook is looking to destroy, namely anyone with an opinion that tends center right.
A list of conservative writers and pundits reacted with grave suspicion of the left-wing Zuckerberg’s decision to use left-wing organizations to determine what news is “fake.”
“This is a disaster for news coverage,” wrote the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro. “It’s an attempt to restore gatekeepers who have a bias as the ultimate arbiters of truth. If these organizations begin questioning articles and penalizing outlets for simple political disagreements rather than outright factual falsities, conservatives will have to go elsewhere for their news.”
Shapiro also pointed out another problem the media has. For instance, it reported as straight and factual news everything Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid ever uttered despite the fact that Reid is a notorious liar. Even as it is provably true that Reid lied on the floor of the Senate day and and day out, the media always uncritically reported his words as if they were all true.
After all, it is as much what the liberal media leaves out as what they actually say.
Other conservatives also remarked on Facebook’s new effort to screen out “fake news.” Mark Hemingway, a writer at the conservative Weekly Standard had a visceral reaction to the Facebook announcement writing simply, “OH HELL NO.”
https://twitter.com/Heminator/status/809474082563588096
Seth Mandel, an op ed editor at the New York Post, also slammed the move in a Thursday tweet saying, “Smart leftist propaganda: They call their partisan opinion bloggers “fact checkers” so when you argue they say ‘look, they object to facts'”
https://twitter.com/SethAMandel/status/809493445089882112
And they are right to worry over Facebook’s decision to become the arbiter of what is allowable discourse in America. After all, during the late campaign for president the website Gizmodo.com reported that Facebook’s trending news team — the group of humans who were responsible for creating the Facebook lists of hot news stories — were all liberals who had purposefully kept stories from conservative news sites off their list.
So, why should anyone believe that Facebook will be fair and balanced with this newest effort to quash news Facebook doesn’t like? Especially considering the fact that a liberal’s idea of what constitutes “fake news” is highly suspect to begin with. As I wrote a few days ago, the left invented fake news long before there even were any politically conservative news outlets out there to counter the left’s lies.
Sadly, the “news” media is entirely programed by fake news. Since the advent of the Internet a handful of liberal groups powered by Clinton-aligned leftists have determined what the media report on. The websites Media Matters for America, Alter-Net, the Daily Kos, Think Progress And Huffington Post have set the ground rules for what other media outlets will cover. These site publish stories that suddenly become the party line on the rest of the news from the big three TV networks to newspapers like The New York Times and magazines like Time.
Certainly Zuckerberg’s problem is that he is preparing to let three left-wing “fact checkers” become his researchers. All three of the “fact checking” organizations Zuckerberg has hired have been caught peddling left-wing opinion as “facts.” And this in and of itself is undermining good journalism.
“By undermining media credibility with opinion disguised as objective truth-telling, “fact-checkers” have actually widened the trust gap between audiences and newsrooms,” the Washington Examiner’s T. Becket Adams wrote Wednesday.
Adams went on to quote Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson:
“Fact-checking” websites “are ostensibly dedicated to promoting objective truth over eye-of-the-beholder lies, but … often simply serve as mouthpieces for centrist orthodoxies, thereby further delegitimizing the entire notion of ‘fact’ itself,” he wrote. “[W]ebsites like PolitiFact frequently disguise opinion and/or bulls—t as neutral, data-based inquiry.”
He continued, adding, “such websites frequently produce meaningless statistics, such as trying to measure the percentage of a candidate’s statements that are false.”
“Fact-checkers [frequently] claim that while claims may literally be true, they are nevertheless false for giving ‘misleading’ impressions or missing crucial context,” he added.
This creates an obvious problem.
“The fact-checkers might think that by going beyond the literal meaning of statements, and evaluating the impressions they leave, they are in fact doing a greater service to truth and reality,” he wrote. “In fact, they are opening the door to a far more subjective kind of work, because evaluating perceptions requires a lot more interpretation than evaluating the basic truth or falsity of a statement. It thereby creates far more room for bias and error to work their way into the analysis.”
Sadly, the very “fact checkers” that Facebook is claiming should be the arbiters of what should be allowed to be seen by the American people have been caught lying to push liberalism in their “fact checking.”
Snopes, for instance, has been caught repeatedly pushing left-wing ideology and liberal talking points as “facts.” Jus to name a few cases, this year the site was caught trying to cover for the lack of American flags at the Democrat National Convention. In another case it played semantic games to let Hillary off the hook for defending a child rapist when she was a young lawyer. And in yet another case, Snopes was found lying about Obama’s Iran ransom payments in order to give Obama cover for his lies.
PolitiFact is no different. It has been caught numerous times pushing a liberal agenda as “fact” and using its platform illegitimately to smear Republicans as liars. PolitiFact has been caught lying about Hillary Clinton’s gun control agenda, Lying about Donald Trump, and was even caught trying to hide the fact that it originally rated as “true” Obama’s wild lie that we could keep our doctors and healthcare plans if we liked them — a claim that was proven to be an outright lie once Obamacare was passed and nearly everyone’s insurance was canceled and/or materially altered (and for the worse in every case).
So, these are the organizations that Mark Zuckerberg and Fakebook intend to use to quash right of center news sites.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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