Fakebook - The social-media site empowers a journalism cartel.

[Ubiquitous]

The postelection “fake news” panic has borne fruit: “The Facebook
feed is about to get fact-checked, reports Advertising Age: “The
social network on Thursday said it will implement new measures to
combat the so-called fake news and lies spreading via its platform.”

The report is explicit about the political agenda underlying the
decision:

Facebook has been under intense scrutiny ever since Donald
Trump’s victory in the presidential election, an upset that
some say was at least partly fueled by a mess of
misinformation on social media services including Facebook,
Reddit and Twitter. . . .

Facebook is deputizing reputable, third-party fact-checking
sites to label posts as “disputed,” a warning that will
appear prominently in the Facebook feed and pop up when
someone tries to share the post. The fact-check
organizations include Snopes, FactCheck.org and Politifact,
which are part of Poynter’s International Fact Checking
Network.


According to Harvard’s Nieman Lab, ABC News and the Associated Press
are also part of the effort.

Not everyone would agree with the characterization of these “fact-
checking sites” as “reputable.” In particular, PolitiFact—a project
of the Tampa Bay Times, with state affiliates associated with other
newspapers—has a checkered history. Its work is frequently shoddy
and partisan.

In 2013, as this column noted, the site named as its “Lie of the
Year” President Obama’s promise “If you like your plan, you can keep
your plan.” It’s hard to dispute that, but PolitiFact’s earlier
write-ups had. In 2009 and again in 2012, it rated the claim “half
true,” and before the 2008 election flatly “true.”

To be sure, in 2008 and 2009 the claim was not yet a lie, merely a
promise; and in 2012 it was not a demonstrable lie, or at least not
as clearly _demonstrable_ as it was when policyholders had in fact
started losing their plans. But it is difficult to understand how a
_categorical_ promise could be “half” true at any stage. (Maybe
ObamaCare should be renamed Schrödinger’s Care.) And a promise is
not a factual claim at all, so its truth or falsity is purely a
matter of opinion.

Others have noted that PolitiFact has often given different ratings
to what were substantively the same statements from different
sources, usually with Democrats getting the benefit of the doubt
when compared with Republicans. Example: In July 2015, Bernie
Sanders said that for 17- to 20-year-old blacks, the “real
unemployment rate” is 51%. PolitiFact rated that “mostly true.” In
June 2016, Donald Trump said black youth unemployment is 59%, a
figure PolitiFact called “eye-popping” and rated “mostly false.”

Both Sanders’s and Trump’s figures were at variance with the
official unemployment rate, which for blacks between 16 and 19 was
within a few points of 30% at the time of both write-ups. The
denominator in that rate is the number of persons in the workforce—
either employed or looking for work. Sanders and Trump based their
figures on a different measure, the employment-population ratio,
which includes persons who are not in the workforce.

Of Sanders, they observed that “his terminology was off, but the
numbers he used check out, and his general point was correct—that in
an apples-to-apples comparison, African-American youth have
significantly worse prospects in the job market than either
Hispanics or whites do.” As for Trump:

It appears likely [the figure] comes from a computation of
all 16- to 24-year-old blacks who aren’t working and may
not even want a job, including high school and college
students.

Clearly, black youths have a harder time finding work than
whites. But Trump exaggerates the issue through his
misleading use of statistics.

Or consider the disparate treatment PolitiFact gave to the _exact
same claim_ from a Republican presidential candidate and a
Democratic one. “Ron Paul says federal income tax rate was 0 percent
until 1913” (2012); “Jim Webb says U.S. didn’t have income taxes
until 1913” (2015). Somehow the former was only “half true,” while
the latter was “mostly true.” (In fact, Congress enacted an income
tax in 1862, which lasted until 1872; and again in 1894, which the
Supreme Court held unconstitutional before it could take effect. The
16th Amendment was ratified in 1913.)

National Review’s Kevin Williamson offers another example, in which
he was the target of a PolitiFact “fact check” the substance of
which is too complicated to recapitulate here. He accuses the site
of dishonesty even in describing its own reporting methods:

Politifact doubly embarrassed itself on the issue, first
with the risibly sloppy and shockingly (if you don’t know
very many reporters) lazy reporting habits of Louis
Jacobson, who wrote that neither Jonah [Goldberg] nor I had
“returned inquiries,” by which he means to say responded to
them. He tried to contact Jonah by sending a single email to
a rarely used public account, and me he tried to contact—if
you can call it that—by tweeting that he was fact-checking
something. I do not follow him on Twitter, having been
contentedly unaware of his existence, and I do not follow
Politifact, for that matter. I am not sure that what
Jacobson did constituted an “inquiry” at all, but I am sure
that it does not constitute “inquiries.” When I pointed this
out . . . Jacobson responded in an odd way: by sending the
same email again to Jonah the next morning, long after the
piece had been published.

Snopes, a site that has been debunking urban legends for decades,
does better work in general than PolitiFact; your humble columnist
relies on it when a friend or reader passes along one of those
annoying viral emails. But it too has shown signs of political bias.
A post last updated in 2004 (though oddly bearing a header dated
2007) sums up its evaluation of claims made by John Kerry’s
antagonists in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in this way:

The piece quoted above, in which a variety of veterans
offer their views of John Kerry, isn’t really something
that can evaluated as “true” or “false.” It’s true that
the men named do exist, that they served in Vietnam, and
that they made the statements attributed to them, but the
substance of most of these quotes is an expression of
opinion, not something objectively classifiable as right
or wrong.

That seems exactly right. But another post, from 2007, classifies as
“false” the opinion that “John Kerry’s Vietnam War service medals (a
Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts) were earned
under ‘fishy’ circumstances.”

We’re less familiar with FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg
Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Our
impression is that it is less aggressive (and therefore less
aggressively biased) than PolitiFact, which perhaps is why it has a
lower profile.

The other members of the Facebook “fact check” team, ABC and the AP,
are part of the mainstream media. Facebook has empowered them to
pass judgment on the work of less powerful outfits. Many of those
judgments may be correct. But mainstream news organizations not
infrequently publish fake news too—think of CBS’s fraudulent Bush
National Guard memos, Rolling Stone’s fictitious gang rape at the
University of Virginia, and any number of hate-crime hoaxes such as
this one, from just last week.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tamerragriffin/drunk-men-yelling-donald-
trump-attempt-to-remove-womans-hija?utm_term=.hqP1Y476R#.creMpv806

Will the new Facebook policy really combat fake news? Or will it
merely create a cartel to monopolize it?


--
Crooked Hillary demands a vote recount--except in states she barely
won. Apparently, those were accurately tabulated.