Fact: FaceBook's Hired Idiot "Fact" Checkers Don't Check Facts.
They Check Narratives. And They Slap "False" Labels On Stories Which Are True But Which They Don't Like.

Matt Taibbi's excellent Substack site has a good article up, exposing the fact -- the proven, admitted fact -- that FaceBook's "fact" checkers don't check facts.

They check narratives.

They suppressed -- limited, throttled, blocked users from sharing -- a perfectly factual, accurate, and true story by an investigative journalist with a long history of factual accuracy in exposees corporate and industry shadiness and bad practices.

He published this in the British Medical Journal -- a prestigious journal. No fly-by-night clickbait site.

The problem? In this case, he exposed that the quality control of the labwork for the Pfizer stage III trials for the covid 19 vaccine was sloppy.

This was a bit of a hot topic in 2021.

And Monopoly Tech definitely had a rooting interest in Pfizer's fortunes.

And even if they didn't -- the Democrats in Congress and in the White House routinely threaten them with antitrust action unless they execute the government's censorship priorities and censor all the information the government wants censored.

Nothing the journalist, Paul Thacker, said was untrue.

Had it been untrue, Pfizer's attorneys would have objected.

FaceBook's "Fact" checker -- "Lead Stories," a third-party "Fact" checker they contract out to so that you can't sue FaceBook -- slapped a "Hoax Alert" in the URL of their link to the story and branded it as false, stopping users from sharing it -- and claiming the story was "missing context."

What did that mean? All the context for the story was present. It was detailed, complete, and well-reported.

Here's what it meant: Nothing.

"Missing context" was a made-up category FaceBook invented to slap on true stories that they didn't like.

"Missing context" is what they say when a story is true but they don't like the narrative a story implies, when a story supports a narrative that Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the leftwing tech oligarchs disagree with.

(By the way, if you'd rather listen to this piece rather than read it or read my excerpts, Matt Taibbi reads it in full here, on YouTube.)

Facebook has yet to respond to queries about this piece. Meanwhile, the site that conducted Facebook's "fact check," Lead Stories, ran a piece dated November 10th whose URL used the term "hoax alert" (Lead Stories denies they called the BMJ piece a hoax).

He points out that Lead Stories employs a "tactic" that more and more "fact" checkers employ, which is "denying claims that were never made in the story," as if the author made these false claims.

That makes the author seem like a liar.

I think what they're trying to do is deny the things that people retweeting the story or sharing it are implying the story may mean.

But that's the sort of thing you would write in an article. In a journal entry. In a blog post.

But Lead Stories doesn't do that. FaceBook doesn't contract companies to write articles.

They contract people to write... "Fact" checks.

So instead of writing an article saying, "this British Medical Journal article may be true, but it still doesn't prove what a lot of people are asserting it proves," they instead slap "HOAX ALERT!" on it and just basically defame the author and the British Medical Journal, because it's easier.

And because they know that s.230 protects them from defamation.

See, if FaceBook just wrote an editorial, they could argue that this piece, while true, shouldn't be relied on as some proof that the vaccine is dangerous or whatever.

But they don't want to write an editorial.

If they write an editorial, they're publishers for that editorial -- and they can be sued for it.

So instead they write plainly defamatory "fact" checks and call people liars and write HOAXALERT in the URL.

And they're protected by s.230 for that.

Because, see, that's not being a publisher, that's being a platform.

So they do that.

And that NeverTrump and Conservative, Inc. will keep ensuring that s.230 continues protecting FaceBook from such casual, I-defamed-him-because-it-was-easier-to-defame-him-than-write-an-article defamation.

The real issue with Thacker's piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.

In a remarkable correspondence with BMJ editors, Lead Stories editor Alan Duke explained that the term "missing context" was invented by Facebook:

To deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real... Sometimes Facebook's messaging about the fact checking labels can sound overly aggressive and scary. 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.

"Missing context" has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient. As Thacker notes in the Q&A below, "They're checking narrative, not fact."

So... that's FaceBook's own third-party contractor admitting that this is FaceBook's own made-up bullshit label that they use to slap on true stories to make them "false."

The significance of the British Medical Journal story is that it showed how easily reporting that is true can be made to look untrue or conspiratorial. The growing bureaucracy of "fact-checking" sites that help platforms like Facebook decide what to flag is now taking into account issues like: the political beliefs of your sources, the presence of people of ill repute among your readers, and the tendency of audiences to draw unwanted inferences from the reported facts. All of this can now become part of how authorities do or do not define reporting as factual.

"But that's not a fact check," says Thacker. "You just don't like the story."

Taibbi also notes that the FaceBook "fact" checkers had other non-factual objections to the story: Namely, who was retweeting it. And who was linking it.

For example, they didn't like that Robert F. Kennedy -- a vaccine skeptic, or anti-vaxxer, I don't really know which -- was sharing the story.

But how does that bear on the truthfulness of the story itself?

Obviously, it doesn't. But FaceBook's hired defeamer Lead Stories admits this is one of the factors they considered in slapping a "missing context" label on a good journalist's story, damaging his reptuation.

An anti-birth-control pill site will naturally quote from science journals that note negative effects of birth control medications. That does not render these science journal articles misleading or "missing context," even if Mark Zuckerberg wants all women aged 20-40 on the pill, and doesn't want them thinking bad things about the pill.

"Inconvenient to Mark Zuckerberg" is not "false" or "missing context" and it sure the hell is not "HOAX ALERT!"

...

This new "fact-checking" standard bastardizes the whole idea of reporting. It's also highly convenient for corporations like Pfizer, which incidentally have extensive records of regulatory violations. As Thacker details below, firms have successfully manipulated reporters and Internet platforms into seeing a binary reality in which all critics are conspiracy theorists.

"We don't have main and minor [points of view] anymore," he says. "What we have is truth, and conspiracy."

After the BMJ episode, a "Missing context" flag should be understood for what it is: an intellectual warning label for true but politically troublesome information.

By the way, conservatives are sadly familiar with this style of aggressively politicized fact-checking: If a Republican says "crime has soared under Biden's presidency and under Democrat governors and mayors" -- something which is factually true -- they'll rate that as "partly false" or "misleading" (or "missing context").

They'll say that there are many reasons why crime might rise, and so it's misleading to suggest or imply that it's due to Biden's or Democrat governors' or mayors' policies.

That's what they always do -- the fact is correct. But they don't like the implication, so they argue against that and claim the statement is "partly false" or "misleading."

Meanwhile, if a Democrat says that "covid death rates were higher in DeSantis' Florida than in Newsom's California," they'll say, TRUE, period-- failing to point out the additional context that the death rates were only slightly higher in Florida, and failing to note the huge context that Florida, having a substantially older population than California's, is of course much more susceptible to any disease that has a high mortality rate among the elderly.

That's how they do it. They argue that "missing context" makes Republican claims false (or "partly false" or "misleading") but when a Democrat claim is also missing context, they just say "TRUE." Done. Slaps hands, hits "Post."

Matt Taibbi is a leftwing guy so... you know, he's a n00b.

Until about five years ago, he thought the media was mostly telling the truth.

He's just learning about this stuff. Give him time.

Taibbi: When did you first hear about a potential problem with the "fact check"?

Thacker: I was ignoring it at first. I thought, "How are they going to fact check this?" I've dealt with this before. The smartest people in terms of finding error are the fucking lawyers working for the drug companies. There's an army of those people who will go through and find anything that's out of order and throw it up in the air. And they couldn't find anything here. So what issue could there possibly be?

Then I went to the "fact check," and it was just insane. It looked like it'd been written by high school students. It describes the British Medical Journal as a "blog." I was joking with my editors about how they work. They pick some proposition out of the blue and then they debunk it, and it's like, "Aha, win!" Bullshit. It's like, "Did the BMJ prove that the vaccine kills Martians? No! Fact check: wrong." And you're thinking, "Wait, what?"

Here's what they do. They're not fact checking facts. What they're doing is checking narratives. They can't say that your facts are wrong, so it's like, "Aha, there's no context." Or, "It's misleading." But that's not a fact check. You just don't like the story.

Taibbi: How new is this phenomenon? If there was one, when did the change happen?

Thacker: Here's what always happened in America previously. You got a big, broad look. In science and in the media, we would always have a main narrative or a main theory. And then around that, within science, there would be other minor theories, other alternative viewpoints. The New York Times would have something. On the left, the New Republic had a view, and on the right you'd get the National Review. They're reexamining it, but they don't change the facts.

Well, we don't have main and minor anymore. What we have is truth, and conspiracy. Or vax, and anti-vax. There are only two possibilities you can go through. Do you know where you find that kind of black-white thinking? In people who have major personality disorders. And psychopaths. Psychopaths and people with narcissistic personality disorder engage in black-white thinking. America right now is in this weird situation in which it's a country that to the outside looks psychopathic or disordered.

Taibbi: Have you seen this phenomenon in other big news stories?

Thacker: What's happened with this pandemic is the same shit that happened with the 2008 meltdown. People were like, "Well, how the fuck did this happen? We didn't see it coming." And then you find out later: maybe it's because all these fucking reporters are in bed with these guys in Wall Street and see them as the masters of the universe, and don't cover them very effectively, because they think they're fucking awesome.

Below, a video showing the entire media and Deep State claiming any talk about a lab leak was a "conspiracy theory."

This takes on a new importance, because now that the media and their Deep State confederates are forced to admit that the virus may have come (actually: did come) from the Wuhan lab, they're telling a new lie, and that lie is: We never ruled out a lab leak. We never said it was a "conspiracy theory." You must have misheard us. Your stupid, uneducated ears must be lying to you.

So they're claiming Republican charges about them smearing those suggesting the lab leak as pushing a conspiracy theory are actually... spreading a new conspiracy theory!

It's a lie, it's yet another stupid, easily disproved lie, like their ten thousand previous stupid, easily disproved lies.

They just keep telling them because they think, wrongly -- insanely -- that they still control the flow of information and that if they don't admit they're lying, no one will know the truth.

By the way, Noted Longtime Republican Mehmet Oz was pushing the claim that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory there, at 1:08.

They Check Narratives. And They Slap "False" Labels On Stories Which Are True But Which They Don't Like.&bodytext= Matt Taibbi's excellent Substack site has a good article up, exposing the fact -- the proven, admitted fact -- that FaceBook's "fact" checkers don't check facts. They check narratives. They suppressed -- limited, throttled, blocked users from sharing --...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 05:40 PM

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