When the history of “fact checking the internet” is written, assuming it is written honestly, the story will be inextricably linked to incoming US President Donald Trump. His first election victory, in 2016, gave birth to the concept. As Mark Zuckerberg all but openly acknowledged yesterday, his second election victory is what killed it.
To understand why the “fact check” became such a ubiquitous part of the media landscape in recent years, we must first understand the trauma that liberal and progressive persons in the western world experienced in 2016. That was the year when two momentous horrors were inflicted upon them: First, the United Kingdom voted to depart the European Union. Then, the United States voted to bring an overdue end to the career of Hilary Rodham Clinton. Since progressives and liberals had entered 2016 at the very apex of their cultural power, neither result was one that they were willing to explain in any terms other than that the voters had been deceived, tricked, confounded, and mislead.
In Ireland, in particular, shivers went down spines. Those of you who remember the discourse in 2017 – that heady time before the Repeal referendum – might recall the jitters experienced by Irish progressives that similar “misinformation” as that which had elected Trump and divorced London from Brussels might conceivably derail the black jumper train. Even as late as 2019, when this website launched, the main attack on us was that we had briefly retained the services of a company called Aggregate IQ, which had done some work for both the Brexit and Trump campaigns. Simply being associated with those campaigns was enough to render one guilty in the liberal mind of “misinformation”, since “misinformation” was, even then, the only reasonable way in which to explain liberal and progressive electoral defeats.
The essential end of “fact checking” came yesterday, with the announcement by Zuckerberg that his suite of social media platforms would cease to use it. The world has changed, and it appears that a sufficient number of progressives have finally realised that their losing of elections and cultural power is simply because their opponents are saying things that are more interesting and relevant to voters than what they say themselves.
In a way, this is all part tragedy, because there really should be room for “fact checking”, done fairly and accurately. For example, no matter how many times Enoch Burke says it, it is simply not true that he has been in and out of prison like a yo-yo for “challenging transgenderism”. He has been in and out of prison for refusing to comply with an order of the courts that he should stay away from a particular building while his case is resolved. That, naturally, has been fact-checked in Ireland dozens of times.
What has not been “fact-checked” even once, however, is the underlying dispute about transgenderism. The very same journalists who will piously tell you that Enoch Burke is not in prison for challenging transgenderism will – to a man and a woman – go entirely silent when asked to clarify whether a human male can become, overnight, a human female. The factual answer to that question is that they cannot. This is a statement of fact, but not one that was ever going to appear in a fact-checking article in any mainstream media outlet, anywhere in the west.
The reason for this is that fact-checking was never about establishing truth, but about establishing narrative. The point of it was not to establish truth from fiction, but to establish the narrative that certain people and certain ideologies could not be trusted. Thus, our friends at the Journal have “fact checked” random twitter accounts hundreds of times more often than they have fact-checked the people actually running the country. If you are a respectable liberal journalist, you “fact-check” people like Philip Dwyer, not people like Micheál Martin.
The fundamental problem with all of this, of course, is how obvious it is. In the case of our friends at the Journal, who until yesterday were the chief “fact checkers” for Zuckerberg’s companies in Ireland, their blatant and obvious partisanship was so impossible to miss that it was a standing joke even amongst otherwise sympathetic journalists working for rival – but sympatico – outlets. It was also obvious to most people with a brain, meaning that the whole thing ultimately became counter-productive: To be “fact checked” by the Journal was simply to be identified as a person or entity with opinions dangerous to progressivism. This happened to us, here at Gript, a year or two ago. I made a video about it at the time:
It does feel fitting that the event which gave birth to widespread fact-checking – the first electoral victory of Donald Trump – is echoed by the event that heralds its death, that being the second electoral victory of Donald Trump. Those two events span eight years, and it has been eight years in which progressivism in the western world has gone from a position of unchallenged dominance to a position where it is firmly on the defensive. In some ways fact-checking (as practiced) is a good allegory for how we got here, as the kids say. It embodied the very worst instincts of progressivism: High handed, authoritarian, patronising, daddy-knows best lecturing doled out by an arrogant class of self-identified “experts”. That’s essentially the whole progressive political project, but the nature of it was never less obscured than it was by what was “fact checked” and what was not.
In recent years, a whole new class of “expert” has emerged – the “misinformation and disinformation” expert. This is not a qualification, but an ideological marker. The job is tied inherently to “fact checking” and the notion that defeats for the left could and can only be explained by perfidity on the part of the left’s opponents.
Trudeau has gone in Canada. Starmer is under pressure in Britain. The German government is clinging on by a thread with elections due shortly. The Greens have gone in Ireland. Joe Biden is retiring to spend more time with his senescence. RTE’s viewership figures over Christmas were rubbish. And now Facebook has abandoned fact-checking.
The cultural and political currents of the western world are shifting rapidly, and all in one direction. The arrogance of the mindset behind “fact checking” explains a lot of that shift.