Narcissism Of The Fact-Checkers

Money, partisanship, and authoritarianism behind demand for censorship

Fake news about the riots in France was yet more proof that misinformation is widespread on social media platforms, said experts last month. “This video of several cars falling from a multi-story car park,” tweeted Shayan Sardarizadeh, a fact-checker with BBC Verify, “is from the set of the action film Fast & Furious 8 and unrelated to the current French riots.”

But the fact check was hardly a major journalistic coup. The Twitter account that posted the tweet, @GoryPhoto, was a clearly-marked parody account. GoryPhoto’s bio even included the disclaimer, "mostly lies and slander."

What’s more, Twitter’s crowd-sourced fact-checker, Community Notes, had already flagged the “Fast and Furious” tweet as fake six hours before Sardarizadeh tweeted. “Readers added context they thought people might want to know” read Twitter’s Community Notes. “This is a scene from Fast & Furious.”

Still, experts and journalists with the New York Times, AP, and BBC warn that fake news travels six times faster than factual news. “The system that connects us,” said former CNN journalist and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa at a recent summit on disinformation, “spreads lies faster than facts — six times faster.”

But the idea that fake news travels six times faster than factual news is itself fake news. The source of the claim, which journalists frequently repeat and never fact-check, is an MIT study of a tiny number of tweets, not news articles.

And the roughly 126,000 tweets that MIT researchers analyzed to inform the study’s findings are equivalent to the number of tweets published in a mere 21 seconds today. In other words, they generalized from 21 seconds of tweets to the whole of the Internet to make their sweeping claim.

More dangerously, fact-checkers spread disinformation and demand censorship based on that disinformation. During the pandemic, Facebook alone removed 20 million posts and labeled more than 190 million claims related to Covid-19, relying on International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) approved organizations to accomplish this massive “content moderation.”

Recently, another group, FactCheck.org claimed to have debunked the idea that north Atlantic right whales are threatened by wind energy development along the East Coast of the United States. “Federal agencies and experts say there is no link to offshore wind activities, although they continue to study the potential risks,” they noted.

But as both Public and the Washington Post have reported, top US government scientists recently affirmed that “surveying for, building, and operating industrial wind projects could harm or kill whales.”

In May 2022, one of them, Sean Hayes with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the wind projects “could have population-level effects on an already endangered and stressed species.” For the record: “population-level effects” includes extinction.

There are many cases of fact-checkers spreading disinformation that then results in censorship. Facebook censored stories claiming Covid-19 might have come from a lab. Last week, Public documented the role played by Anthony Fauci in creating junk science to create a fake debunking of the lab leak, which the White House and others used to justify censorship. 

Fact-checkers have thus been forced to make an embarrassing series of retractions. PolitiFact, the dean of all fact-checking organizations, was forced in 2021 to retract its false debunking of a doctor who said COVID-19 was a “man-made virus created in the lab.” And just last week, the BBC was forced to retract its false claim that UK politician Nigel Farage was not de-banked for political reasons because, as it turned out, he was.

French President Emanuel Macron may have similarly spread disinformation after some reported that he had called for shutting down the internet in response to rioting. At first, Snopes and other fact-checkers claimed the allegation was false. But then, just a few days later, the Guardian reported that Macron had indeed announced that “when things get out of hand, we may have to regulate them or cut [social networks] off.”

Despite the terrible track record of fact-checkers getting the facts wrong, spreading misinformation, and demanding censorship, the fact-checking industry has shown no remorse, humility, or self-awareness.

Around the world, fact-checkers engage in biased fact-checking and demand censorship of others while displaying no apparent concern that they themselves may be guilty of the exact thing for which they are criticizing others.

Why is that? Can anything be done to make fact-checking more… factual? Or is fact-checking doomed to be biased, hypocritical, and authoritarian? 

Rise Of The Fact-Checking Industrial Complex