Corporate Press LOSES IT After Meta NUKES Their Ability To Censor Conservatives & HELP Democrats BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
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| In December of 2016, Facebook launched its third-party fact-checking service almost immediately after Donald Trump had been elected due to pressure from the mainstream media saying that there was too much misinformation. | ||
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A criticism that Facebook played a role in disseminating some of this false information or fake news. | |
| We're looking at things like working with third parties, helping to label false news. | ||
| Misinformation is something we take seriously, really seriously. | ||
| Everyday Americans had their posts visibility limited, and many lost their accounts entirely. | ||
| The government was putting increasing pressure on social media companies to fact-check and de-platform right-wing voices. | ||
| The right were finding their voices stifled in the new town. | ||
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| But let's get back to the news. | ||
| Trump about to re-enter office. | ||
| Mark Zuckerberg took to social media to say we are ending the third-party fact-checking program. | ||
| We've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship. | ||
| The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. | ||
| So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. | ||
| More specifically, here's what we're going to do. | ||
| First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote non-stop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. | ||
| We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. | ||
| But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. They will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are a part of mainstream discourse and focusing on enforcement of illegal and high severity violations. | ||
| They're also going to take a more personalized approach to political content so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can. | ||
| A big component of the controversy was that Mark Zuckerberg said we are going to downrank civic content. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If you like sharing political memes or information pertaining to the goings-on of the world, they actually restricted your ability to share this information. | ||
| Kind of makes no sense. | ||
| Meta's decision affects contracts it has with 10 fact-checking partners in the US. Its website shows it has similar business arrangements with fact-check organizations in about 119 countries, extensively in Europe, And in one of the most hilarious headlines, | ||
| the New York Times wrote that I love it because it's like the, we've investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong. | ||
| In this post from Aaron Schrockman, who is leading the Poynter Institute, which basically decided who was going to be in this program. | ||
| He says, PolitiFact will have more to say on this, but these are my thoughts. | ||
| The decision has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. | ||
| PolitiFact is an original partner and has been working on this project for eight plus years. | ||
| The statement reads, the decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook's content moderation program in the U.S. has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. | ||
| Mark Zuckerberg's decision could not be less subtle. | ||
| PolitiFact is one of the five original partners who worked with Facebook to launch a fact checking program in the U.S. in December 2016. | ||
| And our journalists have worked on the project for more than eight years, publishing thousands of fact checks in that time. | ||
| in that time. | ||
| Let me be clear. | ||
| The decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not fact checkers. | ||
| They created the rules. | ||
| The role of PolitiFact and other US-based journalists has always been to provide additional speech and context to posts that journalists found to contain misinformation. | ||
| The role of Facebook and Meta has always been to decide what to do with that information. | ||
| Facebook and Meta solely created the penalties that publishers faced and the warning labels and overlays that users saw. | ||
| It was Facebook and Meta that created a system that allowed ordinary citizens to see their posts demoted, but exempted politicians and political leaders who said the very same things. | ||
| In case it needs to be said, PolitiFact and the US fact checking journalists played no role in the decision to remove Donald Trump from Facebook. | ||
| Today, if they chose, Facebook and Meta could remove the penalties publishers face from posting false claims and create a system that allows independent journalists to provide additional information and speech to users looking to understand the entire picture. | ||
| The great thing about free speech is that people are able to disagree about any piece of journalism we post. | ||
| You can see all of our work online at PolitiFact. | ||
| We don't use anonymous sources, and we provide a bibliography of sorts to all the information we consulted. | ||
| When we make an error... | ||
| There is a process to correct those mistakes. | ||
| And there is also a process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the correct information. | ||
| That's how the information cycle is supposed to work. | ||
| If Meta is upset, it created a tool to censor. | ||
| It should look in the mirror. | ||
| Signed, Aaron Sharcockman, PolitiFact Executive Director. | ||
| I think he meant to say Aaron Sharrockman, but maybe he has a typo. | ||
| Now herein lies the problem. | ||
| The journalists are saying, hey, we didn't downrank anybody or flag them or accuse them of anything. | ||
| All we did was say that these posts contained misinformation. | ||
| Facebook then decided what to do with it. | ||
| The problem? | ||
| For many publications like the Daily Wire, the Babylon Bee, and even Timcast, when they would flag our content as false, they would put a big old label on the front saying that we lied when we didn't. | ||
| Often the stories that we published were either satire, in the case of the Babylon Bee, or with the Daily Wire, Timcast, and many others, we were 100% correct. | ||
| The reality is, these third-party fact-checking organizations were massively biased. | ||
| Take a look at this list of 10 third-party fact-checking organizations that had contracts with Meta. | ||
| You've got AFP. Check your fact. | ||
| Factcheck.org. | ||
| Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters, Televisia, Univision, The Dispatch, and USA Today. | ||
| There was only one partner with Meta that could even be considered right-leaning. | ||
| Check Your Fact had ties to the Daily Caller. | ||
| So let's take a look at the Fact Check Bias chart. | ||
| One of the original partners, PolitiFact, had issues with left-leaning bias dating back to 2010. But | ||
| hey! | ||
| Let's not just assume third party analysis is correct. | ||
| Let's actually show you many times they got it wrong and dangerously wrong. | ||
| Here's some really big ones. | ||
| How about the Hunter Biden laptop story? | ||
| In 2020, Facebook and Twitter took action to halt the spread of an article by the New York Post based on leaked emails from a laptop belonging to Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden. | ||
| Initially, Facebook reduced the visibility of the news stories, adding a note saying, quote, If we have signals that a piece of content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending review by a third-party fact checker. | ||
| There was a lot of attention on Twitter during the election because of the Hunter Biden laptop story. | ||
| Yeah, we have that too. | ||
| Yeah, so you guys censored that as well? | ||
| So we took a different path than Twitter. | ||
| I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. | ||
| We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. | ||
| We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that, so just be vigilant. | ||
| The distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. | ||
| So you could still share it. | ||
| You could still consume it. | ||
| So when you say the distribution has decreased, how does that work? | ||
| Basically, the ranking in News Feed was a little bit less. | ||
| So fewer people saw it than would have otherwise. | ||
| So it definitely... | ||
| By what percentage? | ||
| I don't know off the top of my head, but it's meaningful. | ||
| I don't know if the answer would have been, don't do anything or don't have any process. | ||
| I think the process was pretty reasonable. | ||
| You know, we still let people share it. | ||
| But obviously you don't want situations like that. | ||
| Facebook later undid the bloc, which it said had stemmed from concerns around Russian disinformation. | ||
| The decision to suppress the story while waiting for it to be fact-checked caused major political damage to Zuckerberg. | ||
| Next, how about the COVID lab leak theory? | ||
| As coronavirus spread around the world, suggestions that the virus could have been man-made were suppressed by Facebook. | ||
| An opinion column in the New York Post with the headline, Don't Buy China's Story, the coronavirus may have leaked from a lab, was labeled as false information. | ||
| The decision infuriated the U.S. newspaper, which insisted the piece just discussed the theory rather than making a definitive claim one way or the other. | ||
| It was months later that further doubts emerged over the origins of coronavirus. | ||
| We do not definitively know where the virus came from. | ||
| A U.S. intelligence report in 2023 said its agencies had been unable to determine the precise origin of COVID-19. | ||
| China has insisted. | ||
| Claims the virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan are false, although some scientists have argued it's a possibility. | ||
| In 2021, Facebook lifted its ban on claims the virus could have been man-made. | ||
| Obviously, as it pertained to COVID, the whole thing. | ||
| Was suppressed in favor of a mainstream narrative that often conflicted. | ||
| Famously, Fauci said early on, you don't need to be wearing a mask. | ||
| But then later said, you're going to probably want to wear a mask. | ||
| And then, of course, mask mandates became the thing. | ||
| The confusion was largely due to these companies and the narrative machine telling you what you could or could not say. | ||
| To where famously, Bill Burr, the comedian, said, I just turn on the TV and they tell me to wear a mask. | ||
| I do. | ||
| If they tell me not to, I won't. | ||
| Nobody really knew what was going on. | ||
| Now, I don't think that's necessarily the fault of fact checkers, but we cannot live in a reality where you have massive tech platforms, leaving everybody just scrambling, completely unsure how to actually navigate this problem. | ||
| Perhaps it's a good reason to say... | ||
| Maybe we should just let the people decide. | ||
| And hey, obviously, the COVID stuff gets a little crazy. | ||
| A lot of misinformation, a lot of confusion, a narrative machine trying to tell us what to think when no one really knew. | ||
| But how about the obvious stuff? | ||
| Like this one. | ||
| Kamala has never been referred to as the borders are, they claimed. | ||
| How about Biden wandering away from world leaders at the G7 meeting? | ||
| And we can't forget the very fine people hoax. | ||
| Statements from Trump in 2017 that took until June of 2020. It would seem that fact-checking for political advantage was the name of the game. | ||
| Just take a look at when most of the fact-checking occurred and the types of ratings given. | ||
| Republicans were the party out of power, implying that PolitiFact should have found more lies by the party in control. | ||
| But does that necessarily follow? | ||
| These left-wing fact-checkers were paid big money to silence Americans. | ||
| Two fact-checkers, Lead Stories and FactCheck.org, disclosed their 2019 funding from Facebook. | ||
| Lead Stories was paid $359,000 in 2019 by Facebook, and FactCheck.org was paid about $229,600. | ||
| Lead Stories and FactCheck.org account for more than half of all of the Facebook content review by U.S. fact-checkers in January of 2020. Facebook's total investment in 2019 would be about $2 million. | ||
| Now, most of you have probably seen this. | ||
| Most of you have probably experienced it. | ||
| You're sitting here watching a YouTube video on a channel that routinely calls out lies from the corporate press. | ||
| But we often do rely on the corporate press for this news. | ||
| One of the biggest conundrums in the fact checking space is that outlets like the New York Times, ABC News and CBS are considered de facto true no matter what. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| How do these third-party fact-checkers determine if you said something true or false? | ||
| They simply cite a news source that they think is always correct. | ||
| Doesn't really make sense, does it? | ||
| But that's the game. | ||
| If the New York Times reports something, it is presumed true. | ||
| If Breitbart.com reports something and it wasn't cited by the New York Times, they'll say missing context, false information. | ||
| Although, to be fair, often, even if you do cite Politico, they'll still claim it was fake news. | ||
| Here's one of my favorite examples of how prominent corporate news outlets are lying to you. | ||
| In a story from 2017, Ukrainian effort to sabotage Trump backfires. | ||
| The story was written January 11th, 2017, and it opened by saying Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. | ||
| They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter only to back away after the election. | ||
| And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisors, a Politico investigation found. | ||
| That story is still publicly available today without fact check, without correction. | ||
| So we can just assume Politico was telling the truth, right? | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| In a subsequent article for Politico, They wrote how a Russian disinfo op got Trump impeached. | ||
| The Kremlin may have been laying the groundwork for blaming Ukraine for 2016 as early as 2015. The spokeswoman for Russia's foreign ministry told reporters on November 30th, | ||
| 2016, accusing the Ukrainian government of scheming to help elect Hillary Clinton. | ||
| President-elect Donald Trump by this time was busy staffing up his incoming administration, and some of his top advisors, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and incoming national security advisor Michael Flynn, were making overtures to Russia's ambassador in hopes of establishing a diplomatic back channel to Moscow. | ||
| Russian officials offered no evidence on that day or any other day that it was really Kiev, not Moscow, that meddled in the 2016 election. | ||
| Nor have U.S. intelligence agencies backed off on their collective finding that the Kremlin orchestrated a major effort to help Trump win office. | ||
| I don't care what your opinion is on Russian interference. | ||
| My question for you, or I should say the facts as presented, how can Politico simultaneously have two stories live right now on their website? | ||
| One saying that Politico found they did this, and another story saying actually it was Russian disinformation. | ||
| Pick one. | ||
| The reality is fact checkers simply decide which one they want to be true at what time. | ||
| So it's rather difficult, isn't it? | ||
| The truth is the corporate press has a narrative. | ||
| Individuals who work for these platforms, work for these outlets, know that there are editorial mandates and there are certain things that they can or cannot report. | ||
| Famously, Max Kaiser, who had a BBC show, posted he left because everything that he was going to talk about. | ||
| Had to be vetted by the government. | ||
| Well, of course, the BBC is state-sanctioned, right? | ||
| So how do you figure out what is actually true? | ||
| I think the reality is you can't. | ||
| Some people are going to believe insane things no matter what. | ||
| They're going to think the moon is made of cheese or that extradimensional beings are coming to Earth to influence our politicians. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it's true. | ||
| What can I say? | ||
| Certainly don't think the moon is made of cheese and I've got any evidence about extradimensional beings, but people are going to believe what they think makes the most sense. | ||
| Perhaps the best thing we can do is advocate for a robust, meritocratic, independent media so that those who actually do the work and can prove what they say rise to the top. | ||
| I firmly believe that if you're a news outlet and you lie all the time, people are gonna stop watching. | ||
| They're going to stop reading. | ||
| I do think some people will probably still watch fake news outlets and still read them, but most people will try to find something that makes more sense. | ||
| Hence, CNN, MSNBC, their ratings are gone. | ||
| Some of these big news platforms are laying off their staff in droves because they are untrustworthy. | ||
| And at the same time, I can shout out TimCast. | ||
| We've been growing quite well. | ||
| As more and more people come to watch our shows, check out what we have to say because we try our best, though we are often wrong, we try our best to crack through the fake news and actually inform you on what's happening. | ||
| Now, the corporate press is going to tell you that you're morally wrong half the time when you have an opinion. | ||
| Ignore it. | ||
| Feel the way you feel. | ||
| Think the way you think. | ||
| We certainly don't get everything right all the time, but the truth is the fact checkers were biased. | ||
| The machine was obviously biased, and it was for political advantages, largely, of the Democrats. | ||
| So we'll wrap it up there. | ||
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