Fact-Checkers
Contextual Quote
“The factual record of fact-checkers is not the primary issue. No individual or organization is perfect. This is precisely why the fact-checker approach of censorship and suppression is so dangerous. If you or I make a mistake, someone else can explain why we’re wrong, in public. When the fact-checkers make a mistake, and then appropriate or are given the power to decide any alternative is “disinformation” or “misinformation” or “hate” and so censor and suppress everyone else, error correction is impossible.”
- Arcotherium 9 [1]
Description
Arcotherium:
“In order to suppress “misinformation,” tech companies needed some source of truth. But no source of objective truth on all possible topics of discussion exists in the real world, and Facebook or Google or some government saying “we will decide what you’re allowed to talk about online” would not have survived scrutiny. So to determine what was officially true for the purposes of moderation, tech companies turned to third-party fact-checking organizations, which sprouted like weeds during the closure of the Internet. These groups attained total epistemic authority over the public square between 2015 and 2022.
Most official fact-checking organizations were and are certified by one of two groups: the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), which creates a chokepoint in the fact-checking ecosystem. There is significant overlap between the IFCN and EFCSN; many organizations are certified by both and EFCSN’s chair also sits on the IFCN’s advisory board. The EFCSN was founded in 2022 with the consolidation of several dozen pre-existing European fact-checking organizations under one umbrella. The EFCSN is funded mostly by the European Union, with additional contributions from Meta and Google, the last funding a truly Orwellian “prebunking at scale” project. The IFCN was founded by the Poynter Institute, a school of journalism, in 2015, after a $1M foundation grant. The Poynter Institute hired an ex-SPLC employee to create a list of 515 news websites to be blacklisted by advertisers, including mainstream conservative ones like the Washington Examiner, in 2019. The IFCN’s funding sources are very similar to those of the fact-checking organizations it certifies: tax-privileged foundations, Google and Meta, and the US State Department. “From its launch in 2015, the IFCN has received funding from the following organizations: Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Duke Reporters’ Lab, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook/Meta, U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network (Luminate), the Open Society Foundations, Fritt Ord Foundation, Duke Reporters Lab, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Park Foundation.” If we add the European Union and the British and German foreign offices, this list covers the major funders of almost every fact-checking and anti-disinformation organization. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was founded in 2019 as an “alliance of news media, social media, and technology corporations” to “combat disinformation” and is closely linked to the British government via the BBC. Unlike the EFCSN or the IFCN, the TNI does not certify organizations; instead it coordinates incumbents, such as Microsoft, the European Broadcasting Union, Twitter, YouTube, Radio Canada, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Agence France-Presse, to move against “disinformation” as quickly as possible across as many channels as possible.
These three organizations exist to certify or coordinate fact-checkers with governments and platforms, but what of the fact-checking organizations themselves? The first five official fact-checking partners of Meta in 2016 were PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, Snopes, ABC News, and the Associated Press. As the ecosystem expanded and professionalised, a galaxy of smaller and more specialized groups sprang up, with the larger fact-checking organizations often using them as their own sources of ground truth. A few examples of these organizations include the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab (founded 2016, it is funded by the US State Department, National Endowment for Democracy, and UK Foreign Office, among others), the Global Disinformation Index, a UK nonprofit that builds advertiser blacklists (founded 2018, funded by the UK Foreign Office, the European Union, the German Foreign Office, the Open Society Foundation, and the US State Department, among others), and the Stanford Internet Observatory (founded in 2019, it was funded by the National Science Foundation, before being defunded when Republican politicians realized it kept labelling conservative arguments as misinformation).
Ironically, the best descriptor of fact-checking organizations uses their own terminology: they are professional purveyors and enforcers of malinformation, that is, true information that gives a false impression. There are many ways, even sticking strictly to factuality, to deceive, of which the most important to fact-checkers are decisions on which claims to fact check, how loosely to interpret claims (no one speaks with perfect precision all the time, so you can fact-check the same imprecise but broadly correct statement as mostly true or mostly false), which authorities to defer to as sources of ground truth (you can find credentialed experts to say almost anything), what context should be taken into account, and what the statement is ostensibly implying (so the same statement can be declared either true or malinformation).
Those trusting fact-checkers tend to be more correct than a random person on the total set of possible questions, but extremely and systematically misinformed on key issues of public importance, such as virulence of COVID-19 or the number of unarmed blacks killed by police.“
(https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet)