Fact-Checkers Don’t Always Check Facts. – Opinion

“Fact-Checkers” are often just propagandists with a cute title. A perfect world would have fact-checkers only verify 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.”

WaPo responded by citing a survey that showed the First Lady received a 47% unfavorable rating for 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. This never took place. 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,

After some trial and error, I sent you a number of controlled tests about this product. [in]The effectiveness of the masks to prevent 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.

Five months ago, I published an article about an AP report that claimed Trump was responsible for George Floyd’s violence. I pointed out, with facts, that AP didn’t check its own facts. The falsehoods and article remain intact. AP employs “fact-checkers” but apparently AP can’t be bothered to check its own “facts.”

RedState’s fact checking is ongoing. RedState is constantly fact-checked. Even humor pieces can be taken as facts. Humor is “fact-checked” by fact-checkers. I’m surprised my cartoons haven’t been fact-checked. Twitter has fact-checked the Babylon Bee. No one with an IQ above Joe Biden’s hair plugs mistakes the Bee for news. It’s satire.

Twitter suspended LibsofTikTok after it was checked for factual errors. Fact-checking was done on the Twitter account DefiantLs for literally copying verbatim comments from leftists.

Google is an authority figure in tech. YouTube is controlled by Google. YouTube has engaged in some of the most remarkable and egregious censorship of voices it doesn’t approve of. You can be struck or expelled for using the wrong pronouns. You can’t strike enough and it will be a Stalinist purge. You’re unpersoned.  Biology is a forbidden fruit. For gender-related issues, biology cannot be accepted as fact. Mathematical concepts are open to 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 Kazsam is editor of the National Pulse. In an Instagram post, he simply took a screenshot of a Forbes article.

“Could A ‘Morality Pill’ Help Stop The Covid-19 Pandemic?”

Kassam wasn’t claiming any position nor did he critique the Forbes article. The only thing he did was to publish a screenshot. The fact-checkers arrived. 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. All of this was not true. 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. You can read his entire 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.”