Today’s fact-checkers no longer have time to keep their own publications honest because they’re leading a crusade to hunt down and expose dangerous untruths everywhere else. An example from
The New Yorker magazine, once justly famous for the care and quality of its in-house fact-checking department, illustrates the change. In 2018, Talia Lavin, a fact-checker at the magazine, used her personal Twitter account to falsely accuse a disabled U.S. Marine combat veteran working as a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of having a Nazi tattoo because she mistook an insignia used by the unit he served with in Afghanistan for a fascist symbol. After deleting the tweet while criticizing ICE for exposing her error, Lavin resigned from
The New Yorker. “I just feel like I made a small mistake and it’s destroyed my life,” she said at the time.
Hardly. Lavin’s mistake became a public audition that launched her career as a new-style “fact-checker” and “expert” on extremism. Weeks after leaving
The New Yorker, she was hired by Media Matters as a “researcher on far-right extremism.” In less than a year she had signed a book deal.
What’s notable is that Lavin’s initial act was part of a far larger campaign in which people who think of themselves as left-wing activists and journalists execute White House national security directives. The Biden administration’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism,” released last June, was one of many national security documents that called for expanding the government’s surveillance authorities and legal powers in what amounted to a new Patriot Act on steroids. The strategy calls for increasing social media monitoring and implementing new screening policies for government and law enforcement employees, which also happens to describe exactly what Lavin was doing.
The current American fact-checking apparatus was constructed to solve an unproved assertion: that a lack of government regulation over social media swung the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. “The country’s most prominent fact-checkers fought a losing battle against the flood of fake news during the presidential campaign,” declared an article in Politico published shortly after the election. The article rested on the false premise that there existed at the time a recognized hierarchy of “prominent fact-checkers.” The reality was that in the earlier journalistic landscape, fact-checking was a job mostly reserved for recent college graduates whose apprenticeship in the journalistic trade involved making sure that busy reporters correctly reported the date of Moldova’s first democratic election after the fall of the Soviet Union. You can only marvel at the audacity of powerful NGOs planting stories in the press to foster an illusion about the power of fact-checkers that in short order created that very reality.
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Disinfo v. Democracy
At first, Mark Zuckerberg resisted charges that social media policing, or the lack thereof, was responsible for the results of the 2016 election, saying it was “a pretty crazy idea” and that it was “extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome.” But under pressure from leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton, a coordinated push from the party’s halo of nonprofits, and a coup from
his own employees, who include some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, Zuckerberg buckled.
On Nov. 17, 2016, a new organization called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published an open letter to the beleaguered Facebook CEO. “We would be glad to engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,” the IFCN generously offered on behalf of the letter’s signatories, a group of 20 nominally independent fact-checking organizations grouped under its network. The following month, Facebook announced that the IFCN would be its main partner in a new fact-checking initiative that would vet information—all information—on the world’s largest and most influential social media platform. So who is the IFCN again?
The IFCN was launched in 2015 as a division of the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based media nonprofit that calls itself a “global leader in journalism” and has become a central hub in the sprawling counter-disinformation complex. Poynter’s funding comes from the triumvirate that undergirds the U.S. nonprofit sector: Silicon Valley tech companies, philanthropic organizations with political agendas, and the U.S. government. The nonprofit sector, as it’s euphemistically called, is an immense, labyrinthine engine of ideological and financial activism that was valued at almost $4 trillion in 2019, the overwhelming majority of which is dedicated to “progressive” causes. The IFCN’s initial funding came from the U.S. State Department-backed National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
With no formal membership, the IFCN acts as the high body for the dozens of fact-checking organizations grouped under its umbrella that have endorsed its code of principles. According to the organization’s website, its mission is “to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”
The IFCN’s fact-checking operation offers something different to all of the various players who directly and indirectly shape its mission. For government officials, it provides a means to outsource both political messaging and the responsibilities of censorship. For technology companies, it’s a method of exercising control over their own regulators by putting them on the payroll. And for journalists, watching their industry collapse and their status erode as the public turns on them, its steady work in one of the media’s only remaining growth fields, as information regulators.
The consequences for anyone who resisted the new mandate were serious. Social media companies and newsrooms that did not get with the program and empower the brigades of truthy technocrats were accused of helping Russia, bringing fascism to America, supporting white supremacy, and worse.
Contrary to the preferred self-image of data scientists, neutrally officiating claims from the sidelines, fact-checkers tend to see their work in salvationist terms. In his final day on the job in 2019, the IFCN’s founding director, Alexios Mantzarlis, published a blog post where he wrote: “fact-checkers are no longer a fresh-faced journalistic reform movement; they are wrinkly arbiters of a take-no-prisoners war for the future of the internet.” Mantzarlis provided a useful overview of their guiding mission, which is to turn back the tide of populism empowered by the internet and restore the hierarchies of knowledge, which, in the technocratic mind, are the proper foundation of liberal societies. Mantzarlis now works at Google as a policy lead.
The pandemic would shine an especially harsh light on the role of fact-checkers as information cops for America’s power elite—and the dangers of that role. Far from identifying “dangerous misinformation,” fact checkers were instrumental in the multipronged effort to suppress inquiries into the origins of the global pandemic that has killed nearly 6 million people. In February 2020,
The Washington Post chided Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton for promoting a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” that COVID-19 had escaped from a lab. In May 2020, the
Post‘s Glenn Kessler, who is a member of the IFCN advisory board, said it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. Those were the facts ... until a year later, when Kessler published a
new article explaining how the “lab-leak theory suddenly became credible.”
How to understand the epistemological process that could lead a seasoned fact-checker to do a 180 on a matter of utmost public importance in less than a year? The simple answer, which has nothing to do with Kessler’s individual character or talents, is that when it really counts, the fact-checker’s role is not to investigate the truth but to uphold the credibility of official sources and their preferred narratives. Kessler’s mind changed at the very moment when the Democratic Party machinery began charting a new course on an issue that was hurting the party at the polls.
A key feature of the modern fact-checking apparatus is that individual errors can quickly become system failures. That the various members of the IFCN, spread out over news organizations across the world, overwhelmingly agree with each other is no surprise, since consensus is the point of their work. But in a closed network, error-based consensus can easily acquire the weight of legal regulation, with seeming unanimity serving as “proof” that opposing opinions are laughably ill-informed, or dangerous, or simply insane. That is precisely what happened when Google, Facebook, and Twitter, with the full weight of the “facts” behind them, collectively censored information about the “fringe” lab-leak conspiracy.
Then there are questions that more directly impact public health, like vaccine safety and masking. Last November, the
BMJ, a British medical journal founded in 1840, published an article based on claims made by a whistleblower who had worked for Ventavia Research Group, while the company was contracted by Pfizer to assist in its COVID-19 vaccine trials. According to the
BMJ report, the whistleblower, Brook Jackson, alleged that during the trials Ventavia had “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported.” After a week of record traffic for the
BMJ’s website, the magazine discovered that posts sharing the article on social media were being tagged with the familiar warning, “independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.”
Says who? The determination was made by Lead Stories, one of the partnered organizations in Facebook’s network that, in a
data sample taken in January 2020, was responsible for half of all fact-checks that month on the social media platform. It doesn’t take a particularly close reading to see that while the
BMJ’s original investigation is scrupulously put together with hard evidence and measured claims, the Lead Stories takedown is built on sloppy insinuation, sleights of hand, and an underlying credulity toward official sources. In its “fact-check,” Lead Stories draws attention to the fact that Jackson’s Twitter account “agreed with anti-vaccine activist and COVID misinformation-spreader Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s criticism of
Sesame Street‘s storyline in which Big Bird encourages kids to get a COVID-19 vaccine.” That’s just the kind of ad hominem, hard to follow, logic-chopping argument that would get laughed out of the room at a high school debate camp but has become the final word on real matters of public health.
Nor is any appeal of these decisions practically possible. When the
BMJ’s editors appealed to Lead Stories to remove the “missing context” warning label it had placed on the original
BMJ article, the fact-checking site’s editor, Alan Duke, denied any responsibility. “Sometimes Facebook’s messaging about the fact-checking labels can sound overly aggressive and scary,” Duke responded to the journal. “If you have an issue with their messaging you should indeed take it up with them as we are unable to change any of it.” The
BMJ’s editors then turned to Facebook, where they were told: “Fact checkers are responsible for reviewing content and applying ratings, and this process is independent from Meta.” Is that clear enough for you? Kick rocks, sucker.
My point here is that the convergence of government power with fact-checking is neither a conspiracy nor an accident. A 2018 report from the
Columbia Journalism Review offered “lessons for platform-publisher collaborations as Facebook and news outlets team to fight misinformation.” It also offered a warning:
“If Facebook creates entirely new, immensely powerful, and utterly private fact-checking partnerships with ostensibly public-spirited news organizations, it becomes virtually impossible to know in whose interests and according to which dynamics our public communication systems are operating.”
