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A major investigation by Sky News Australia has revealed Meta-owned Facebook was “bankrolling a fact-checking operation” that “censored political content” ahead of a key Australian referendum. It asserts the tech giant’s Irish subsidiary is involved in a “secret commercial contract” paying a fact checking unit up to $740,000.
Sky’s reporters say that Facebook is not compliant with its own rules – facilitating payments to fact checkers when Mark Zuckerberg has previously testified that the checking was carried out by third parties and fully independent – adding that Meta did not seek to influence elections.
However, Meta now stands accused of “unduly policing” one side of the debate in the Australian referendum – and its a charge that sounds all too familiar to Irish activists.
Elon Musk has weighed in on the revelations, saying Facebook is “manipulating the public almost everywhere on Earth” and claiming that this may be a reason Zuckerberg “won’t open source their algorithm”.
FACT CHECKING OR CENSORSHIP?
Critics of the fact checking outfits favoured by huge tech companies like Meta – and by establishment bodies who seem keen to diminish debate – have long argued that the role of said fact-checkers seemed at times to be more about supporting powerful narratives than correcting untruths.
One obvious example was the decision by both Twitter and Facebook to actively censor the New York Post’s “bombshell” report about Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 presidential election in the United States – a decision acknowledged to be in error when it was, of course, too late.
The extent of the interference by a pre-Musk Twitter in that election was revealed when, according to the Daily Wire, documents later released showed that:
Twitter was working in conjunction with then-Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s team, removing tweets that team Biden wanted deleted.
While both parties had access to these tools, journalist Matt Taibbi noted: “This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.”
Supposedly independent fact checking, it seems, can become harnessed by powerful players to support a particular political position or narrative.
And fact checkers can significantly overreach in a way that is quite astonishing, and indicates that some of those employed in supposedly assessing the validity of a statement made on social media either vastly over-estimate their own abilities or, more likely, know that they have the power to decide what is true based on their own interpretation rather than the actual facts.
In 2021, for example, the editors of the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ), took the extraordinary measure of writing an open letter to Zuckerberg in 2021 asking him to correct a ‘fact check’ that they described as “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.”
They noted that a paper published by the BMJ on poor clinical trial research practices at Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, was subjected to a ‘fact check” carried out by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories – who, in an astonishing decision, decided that a paper published in one of the world’s leading medical journals was “missing context”, with the effect that the research was being censored.
The medical experts from the BMJ blasted the Lead Stories assessment, saying the “fact check” performed by Lead Stories was “inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.”
The open letter took the almost unprecedented step of urging parent company Meta to “reconsider its investment in and approach to fact checking overall following other examples of incompetence”.
(A full account of the BMJ’s tussle with Facebook’s fact checkers is worth reading here. It’s title sums up where we are at in the new and bizarre world of supposed truth-establishing: ‘Facebook versus the BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong’.)
It’s worth noting that a claim of ‘missing context’ seems to be a technique to have a story’s reach diminished when a fact-checker cannot realistically find a story to bne untrue.
The Sky News Australia investigation has now brought the spotlight back to what the platform describes as the “secretive but extremely lucrative” world of fact checking.
It also raises the obvious question: who is checking the fact checkers – quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – and how can the average reader have any faith in said checkers of facts when they frequently seem to act out their own biases?
THEJOURNAL.IE
A previous investigation by Sky News Australia into bias shown by Facebook’s ‘fact-checkers’ showed that one of the leading academics assessing who can become a fact-checker for the online platform, Prof Margot Susca, was a outspoken liberal activist. She signed-off on the Irish platform, TheJournal.ie, becoming a supposedly unbiased checker of facts for the platform.
Yet, as has been repeatedly shown on this platform, the Journal’s ‘fact checks’ can be ‘completely wrong’, dishonest, and/or absurdly biased – in one recent example resulting in the platform tying themselves up in knots to find against Gript’s factual reporting on a biological male’s advantage against women in a cycling race.
But this kind of nonsense has been going on for some time.
During the 2018 abortion referendum in Ireland, The Journal rewrote and altered its own previously published fact-check in relation to Down Syndrome and abortion – and it did not fully signpost the rewrite in its amended fact-check – something that goes against best practice.
“Its an indisputable fact, confirmed by the National Cytogenic Down Syndrome Register, that 90% of babies diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted in Britain. This fact has been widely reported by leading media organisations,” the Life Institute said in a review.
“But The Journal, who had previously rated our material stating this fact as ‘Mostly True’, changed their own fact-check during the referendum, to rate the same claim as ‘False’ – although nothing in the facts under examination had changed.”
Of course, the Journal knows full well that when it decides to label something as ‘false’ or ‘misleading’ that damages the standing of news platforms (such as Gript) with Meta, and this can then lead to a curtailment of their reach.
It’s worth noting that this gives The Journal the power to damage its competitors by carrying out misleading and sometimes nonsensical fact checks. Sounds a lot like nobbling the opposition, doesn’t it, all done with the help of the mega-wealthy tech giants?
SKY NEWS INVESTIGATION
And so to this new investigation by Sky News Australia and the involvement of the Irish subsidiary of Facebook’s parent, Meta.
Jack Houghton, Digital Editor, writes that:
A Sky News Australia investigation has uncovered a disturbing foreign-financed attempt to block political debate and news coverage around the Voice [a referendum seeking to alter the constitution], which exposes the global fact checking system used by tech giant Meta as non-compliant with its own rules of impartiality and transparency.
In one case, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has been allowed by Facebook parent company Meta to block and deplatform Australian journalism, despite the platform knowing it was a breach of the rules Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg established to distance himself from fact checking responsibilities.
Meta maintains its fact-checking operation is at arm’s length and independent, but Sky News can reveal the tech giant signed a secret commercial contract directly with RMIT which allows the fact checking unit to be paid up to $740,000 a year from an Irish Meta subsidiary.
The investigation found that:
The university used the powers Facebook has given it to throttle Sky News Australia’s Facebook page with false fact checks multiple times this year, breaching the Meta-endorsed IFCN Code of Principles and preventing millions of Australians from reading or watching Sky News Australia’s journalism.
Fact checkers employed by RMIT have led to numerous code breaches, including one fact checker using her social media account to label Opposition Leader Peter Dutton a fear-mongering racist for his views on the Voice.
That same fact checker has published multiple Voice fact checks which were paid for by Meta and resulted in Australian journalism being censored on the platform.
An audit of RMIT Voice fact checks showed the 17 Voice checks between May 3 and June 23 this year were all targeting anti-Voice opinions or views.
Revelations contained in this investigation raise questions about Meta’s global fact checking operation which appears to have been hijacked by activists.
Sky News then gives a lengthy list of examples of partisan fact checkers overreaching and acting to throttle debate on a national referendum. At this point, the revelations are shocking but unsurprising.
We’ve almost come to expect that most of the social media giants (with the exception of X) are acing as censors for the establishment.
(You’ll note that the censorship is almost ALWAYS in support of the establishment line. its curious that these armies of fact checkers are mostly obsessed with Dave from Idaho sharing something daft, and decidedly uninterested in the assertion that it was ‘racist’ to say Covid might have originated in a Chinese lab.)
In his summation of the investigation, Houghten says “Australians have a right to debate issues around the Voice without feeling coerced – especially by large and well-funded bodies seeking to control the national debate.”
He notes: “We have already seen the damaging effect overzealous censorship on social media can have,” referencing past decisions such as the appalling behaviour of tech giants towards the New York Post for reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“News organisations should not be policed by activists who have wormed their way into powerful institutions to act as censorious arbiters of truth,” he writes.
And most concerning is the flagrant disregard the world’s fact-checking ecosystem has for following its own rules.
It is all very well to proudly celebrate your charter, code of conduct and strict ethical mantras to appear credible, but if those documents are simply ignored, it all becomes meaningless.
These are rules democratic governments around the world have been told exist to keep the industry honest.
Instead of acting impartially and with transparency, fact checking operations have become unashamedly partisan.
Meta has much explaining to do.
He’s absolutely right. But instead of calling on Meta to step back from censorship, most governments are calling on them to increase surveillance on their platforms and to take steps to increase censorship of opinions or statements that the establishment considers ‘misinformation’.
Then international bodies such as the EU are also urging the all-too-willing Irish government to embrace dubious legislation like the Digital Services Act in order to censor alleged ‘misinformation’ online.
"Can't answer a simple question, when you're literally regulating truth itself": In a slightly heated exchange, @Ben_Scallan questions Ireland's Media Minister Catherine Martin about the EU's Digital Services Act, which aims to censor alleged "misinformation" online.#gript pic.twitter.com/KYmuIDTHgj
— gript (@griptmedia) August 25, 2023
But the problem here, as ever, is who gets to decide what ‘misinformation’ is? The Journal and their ilk who want to slap media commentators down for saying a woman doesn’t have a penis, or Facebook’s backroom censors who are censoring one side of a nation referendum?
The truth is that neither tech giants, nor the government, nor supposedly independent bodies loaded with their own biases, should be allowed to throttle debate or strangle free speech.
And they should be challenged on their assertion that they, and perhaps only they, get to decide what facts are, and what the truth is.
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