As reported by Business Insider, the social media site says it will begin fact-checking, labeling and then burying so-called “fake news” and hoaxes, after executives say the company was heavily criticized for its role in “spreading a deluge of political misinformation” during the recent U.S. presidential election.
Facebook, in other words, plans to make official the censorship of non-conformist, truth-filled news reporting that it was caught doing in the months before the election. In an interview with Gizmodo, former Facebook news curators revealed that so-called “conservative” news and reporting was purposely suppressed in favor of far-Left sites that were actually reporting fake news.
Censorship now official at Facebook
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” one of the former curators told the site. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”
Censorship tends to do that – have a "chilling effect" on whatever angle of a story is being intentionally suppressed. Now Facebook wants to make it formal policy.
According to Business Insider, this is how the new Facebook censorship program will work: The company has teamed up with a “shortlist of media organizations” that include ABC News and Snopes, part of an “international fact-checking network” that is led by Poynter, a nonprofit journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla. Once third-party fact-checkers have determined that a story is “fake,” it will be labeled and then buried in the news feed. Officials told Business Insider that the social site will also use algorithms to determine whether a story that has been deemed to be phony is going viral.
"We've focused our efforts on the worst of the worst, on the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain, and on engaging both our community and third party organizations," Facebook News Feed chief Adam Mosseri said in a company blog post.
Fine. As a news organization ourselves, we applaud efforts to root out phony news stories and fraudulent reporting. The problem here is that Facebook, led by a lockstep Leftist in Mark Zuckerberg, isn’t interested in making sure that only genuine news makes it to the valued news feed; he is interested in suppressing divergent opinions and inconvenient facts, especially when they are being reported by news organizations that do not fall in line with the corporate or liberal narratives.
We should start calling it ‘Fakebook’
So does this mean that Facebook will soon weed out and bury fake, discredited stories from the Washington Post claiming that Russia hacked the U.S. elections in order to sway voters away from Hillary Clinton to support Donald Trump?
Or perhaps the New York Times, which has reported that U.S. spy agencies have a “consensus” about this? That’s fake, because the intelligence community has no consensus on this, and in fact, intel chiefs have distanced themselves from a CIA claim that the hacking occurred. In fact, an NSA whistleblower says the Russia hacking narrative is bogus because “hard evidence points to an inside leak” instead.
What about the nefarious claim by CNN that the Chinese recently took a U.S. undersea research drone because President-elect Trump took a congratulatory phone call from the president of Taiwan – a claim made with absolutely no evidence whatsoever?
Or how about stories that ABC News fakes? And Snopes, which has a clear Left-wing bias?
Or stories promoting GMOs, when in fact they are harmful and damaging to our food chain?
There definitely is a cottage industry of click-bait phony news on the Internet, no question about it. But the so-called “mainstream media” is most guilty of spreading false stories and political hack attacks disguised as “news.” And yet those are the sources of “news” that Facebook will increasingly rely on in the coming months and years.
Maybe we should begin calling the social media site “Fakebook,” because its news feed will be full of it.
In the meantime, TruthWiki lays bare the bias behind “fact-checking” sites here and here. If you want a real social media experience featuring uncensored news and information, join ours here.
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