Front Page: How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model.
Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by “qualified, accountable human beings” from teams of “40 to 60 journalists.” Once upon a time, journalism meant original writing. Now it means deciding which original writing to censor.
“Can trust be monetized?” The Street’s article on News Guard asks. But it isn’t really trust that’s being monetized. It’s censorship. It’s doing the dirty work that Google and Facebook don’t want to do.
The Dems and their media allies have been pressuring Google and Facebook to do something about the “fake news” that they blame for Trump’s win. The big sites outsourced the censorship to media fact checkers. The message was, “Don’t blame us, now you’re in charge.”
Facebook made a deal with ABC News and the AP, along with Politifact, FactCheck and Snopes, to outsource the censoring for $100K. When two of these left-wing groups declare that an article is fake, Facebook marks it up and viewership drops by 80%.
Facebook is reportedly considering adding the Weekly Standard to its panel of fact checkers. Even if that were to happen, it would be the difference between putting the New York Times without David Brooks or the Times with David Brooks in charge of deciding what you can read on Facebook. Adding a token conservative who is acceptable to the left doesn’t change the inherent bias of the system.
Not only does the roster of fact checkers lean to the left, but so do its notions of what’s true and false. For example, Snopes and Politifact both insist that General Pershing’s forces never buried the bodies of Muslim terrorists with pigs. But General Pershing specifically stated in his autobiography, “These Juramentado attacks were materially reduced in number by a practice that the Mohamedans held in abhorrence. The bodies were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig.”
Both the New York Times and the Scientific American reported on it at the time. Despite that Snopes rated this widely accepted historical fact as “False” and Politifact marked it as “Pants on Fire”.
Snopes also recently marked a story that Christ Church in Virginia is removing a George Washington plaque as false even though the church publicly announced that it was doing so. MORE HERE
This is the fox guarding the henhouse, what could possibly go wrong. We don’t need no stinking censors telling us what we can read or not read on the internet or what websites we can access according to what we believe. I
If the left got it’s way, nothing that’s not state approved would ever be allowed and we’d descend into big brother type of control of all information and it won’t be good.
Everything – – I repeat EVERYTHING the left does backfires on them because they live in an upside-down world. The unintended consequence of this is that people who are “woke” will simply reverse what they say and go to the sites they (the liars) say are fake news. Of course the dems and their media allies will not be able to figure this out because they are blind to their own faults and to basic cause and effect.
Sounds like Peter Daou’s Verrit. More places for 27year-olds who know nothing to extend their ignorance.
“Snopes also recently marked a story that Christ Church in Virginia is removing a George Washington plaque as false even though the church publicly announced that it was doing so…”
Without looking, I am guessing that they rated it false because the plaque was being moved to another location in the church, and not being removed from the church. 27year-olds love to play “gotcha” and split hairs. It drives their moms crazy.
“Also interesting is, remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
Yeah, f–k you, Chris Cuomo.
It’s spelled Politi’fact’.
They lost me at “journalists”.