The Patriot Post® · Facebook's 'Fact-Checkers' Wrongly Target Us ... Again

Our “Memesters Union” is no stranger to controversy over the humorous images we produce on a daily basis. Facebook has, shall we say, “disagreed” with our stance on several memes, and this week brought another instance.

USA Today’s “fact-checkers” engaged in their usual opinion debates masquerading as objective checking of facts, deciding that a meme similar to one we produced was inaccurate. Facebook now hides our meme behind this “independent fact-check” so it can tell you why The Patriot Post is supposedly sharing “partly false” information.

Facebook is wrong and, ironically, pushing misleading information.

The debunked meme (from 2019) had a picture of Joe Biden with former West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd under the text (poor grammar in the original), “Biden with Grand wizard Of KKK. So who again is playing you, lying to you, using you for the votes, Creators of the KKK, opposed civil right of blacks. Yup thats the Democratic party.”

Our meme (from last week), shown below, did not make the claim that Byrd was a “grand wizard” of the KKK, which USA Today smugly debunked. Our meme simply states Byrd was a “KKK leader.” That is indisputably true, as even USA Today admits. Byrd recruited folks to begin a KKK chapter and rose to the rank of “Exalted Cyclops.” He later renounced and lamented his affiliation with the organization, but that doesn’t erase his years-long work for it.

Despite our meme being indisputably true, Facebook’s public-shaming notice also ominously warns, “Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share misleading content will see their overall distribution reduced. … Deleting misleading content won’t affect these outcomes.”

Indeed, this isn’t our first encounter with “fact-checkers” who get the facts wrong, and we doubt it will be the last. And, of course, we may never know exactly what degree of this punishment Facebook might bestow upon us since administrators never bother to specify their judge, jury, and executioner rulings in individual cases. These things happen with no warning and no recourse. It doesn’t matter that the image we shared didn’t even match the one in the final ruling of the “fact-check.”

The entire “fact-checking” genre is a disgrace to journalism that should be left on the scrapheap of history.