Facebook in planning to launch a mechanism with which they can brand news feed entries as “fake news.” The information behemoth plans to bring in third party “fact-checkers” and enlist the help of Facebook users to flag content for scrutiny. Some of the third party “fact-checking” entities include Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and ABC News. These anointed entities will determine if the offending post and/or source are “fake news.” Those posts and sources will then be branded with the “scarlet letter.”
Some critical issues arise with this effort and all of them are disingenuous and dangerous. The first issue has to do with the selection of the “deciders.” In the end, the authority to brand a source as a “fake news” source is the authority to destroy credibility.
As with anything that requires a determination, the threshold for what will be deemed “fake news” will rest with the “deciders.” The same quandary exists with “hate speech” laws. Those deciding the fate of the information – and the information sources – will be intellectually hobbled by their biases, i.e. one man’s “hate speech” or “fake news” is another man’s truth. Because we live in an era when journalism schools (and the mainstream media itself) have accepted as standard operating procedure the inserting of opinion into news, truth is now, sadly, subjective. This is significant.
This reality means that the bias of the “fact-checkers” is relevant. Each of the entities tapped by Facebook to act as “fact-checkers” has been accused of – and, in many cases, rightfully so – skewing some of their more critical determinations to a more liberal bent. This presents a fundamental credibility issue, not to mention – where “fake news” fact-checking is concerned, a fundamental danger to free speech. Additionally, installing “deciders” who are even wrongly deemed bias advances the societal fear of censorship and the ability to delegitimize.
Then there is the issue of the coordinated political effort to attain power. As we witnessed during the 2016 presidential race, some political campaigns place more worth on winning than they do in adhering to the truth. The Clinton campaign and her Progressive supporters employed the “slash-and-burn” tactic of the politics of personal destruction in their failed bid to maintain control over the White House. Secretary Clinton, herself, routinely cherry-picked statements from President-Elect Trump’s speeches to inaccurately and disingenuously paint him as a xenophobe, racist, misogynist, and Islamophobe, among other things. Her claims and rhetoric were anything but honest.