The Patriot Post® · In Brief: How Facebook Crushes Conservative News
No one circles the wagons like Leftmedia “fact-checkers.” We always put that term in scare quotes because they’re not interested in checking facts but rebutting opinions. Ironically, though, that often leads them to rebut actual facts because they don’t like those facts or what the facts mean about their Democrat Party masters. Ian Haworth, former Facebook engineer and now commentator for The Washington Free Beacon, explains one instance of how this happened.
It took just hours after a Washington Free Beacon report on a Biden administration plan to distribute crack pipes to drug addicts at taxpayer expense for the Facebook fact-checkers to mobilize.
In a “fact check” titled “Biden Administration Is NOT Funding ‘Crack Pipes, Heroin’ For Drug Use,” Lead Stories — a prominent member of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program — concluded the Free Beacon report was “not true.” Lead Stories based its determination on Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra’s declaration, made days after the report elicited considerable blowback, that as Lead Stories phrased it, “none of the federal funds for harm reduction programs for drug addicts can be used to provide crack pipes.”
“While a description of the HHS grants stated that the grantees would be required to buy materials like safe smoking kits and supplies to ‘enhance harm reduction efforts,’ such kits and supplies are just a few of the many materials that grantees can utilize,” Lead Stories added. The fact-checking system at Facebook, which I saw first hand during my time as a software engineer on Facebook’s “Misinformation” fact-checking team between 2019 and 2021, hands monumental power to supposedly nonpartisan fact-checking organizations to quash legitimate news.
Haworth recounts the actual facts of the story: Biden’s HHS implemented “a $30 million grant program that included the distribution of ‘safe smoking kits’ to drug addicts.” They included crack pipes. This was all corroborated fact, and yet thanks to “fact-checkers,” these facts were suppressed by Facebook.
The Free Beacon tried to fight the decision, but complaints fell on deaf ears. Lead Stories editor in chief Alan Duke insisted he had no responsibility to contact the Free Beacon before making a determination, which relied exclusively on the word of Biden administration officials. That’s right: Lead Stories diminished the story’s distribution on Facebook based on the word of Biden administration officials whose policies were suddenly under scrutiny.
He goes on:
The crack pipe brouhaha raises a central question: Why is Lead Stories qualified to make these determinations in the first place, particularly when it and other fact-checking organizations routinely ignore the undeniable fact that politicians lie — especially when they’ve been caught? Moreover, why did Lead Stories ignore the fact that both its fact check and the original Free Beacon report effectively relied on the same source, especially when we consider that the subsequent political fallout could impact the Biden administration’s public position?
Answering his own questions in a way, Haworth makes a key point: “Silicon Valley uses fact-checking organizations to shield itself from responsibility and wash its hands of political pressures to focus on financial objectives. Meanwhile, organizations like Lead Stories can pursue their financial and ideological hobby horses.”
Facebook pays Lead Stories, which gives Facebook an out for censorship. This is phony “independence,” and it’s destructive to our First Amendment rights.
He concludes:
When the fact-checker doesn’t care, and the Big Tech platform doesn’t want to know, there is nowhere else to turn. The fact-checkers know this, allowing them to profit from the fact-checking system while using their relationships with Big Tech to exert control over the political narrative.