The fact-checking racket is unraveling.
Over the past several years, social media companies contracted with third-party organizations and dubbed them "fact-checkers" who would scan content for "misinformation."
"Getting a pass meant the post or story was amplified but getting dinged for inaccuracy meant that the post would be throttled or deleted," Jeffrey A. Tucker noted in a July 14 analysis for The Epoch Times.
The "fact-checkers," Tucker added, "start with the presumption that they know the truth and you do not, and then schoolmarm you to the point that you admit them to be correct."
The feds want to censor content that disputes their narrative, but run into a little thing called the First Amendment. So the feds turn to the Big Tech and social media platforms "to do the dirty work," Tucker wrote. "To make this hand-in-glove racket less obvious, the companies would outsource to a fact-checking organization, making the lines of control even more blurry."
But new revelations on how far off fact-checkers were on Covid reporting has shone a spotlight on what a racket fact-checking really is.
The fact-checkers, Tucker notes, "were not some independent, science-based entities at all but rather hit squads with a hard political agenda. What was actually happening here was a form of censorship laundering."
Related: ‘Misinformation’ experts intimately tied to ruling elites target WorldTribune.com, June 18, 2023
While independent media, including WorldTribune.com, called out the bias of fact-checkers for years, it took the Twitter Files, the Freedom of Information Act, and Republicans regaining the majority in the House to finally burst the fact-checkers' bubble.
"These (fact-checking) entities were funded either directly or indirectly by government or by other dark-money sources as quid pro quos for other relationships they had cultivated with interested parties," Tucker noted.
For more than three years, fact-checkers on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms determined it was a "conspiracy theory" to report that scientists in Wuhan, China conducted gain-of-function research and that Covid was a result of that research and a likely leak. Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed this for a very long time, and fact-checkers frequently cited him to say the reports were false.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released an unredacted email dated Feb. 1, 2020, in which Fauci says that the Wuhan lab was engaged in gain-of-function research and that Covid might be the result.
"At this point, it’s reasonable to assume that nearly every official source on the virus was wrong or lying for years now," Tucker wrote. "You probably know this. In any case, my intuition here is that we are only at the beginning of discovery of the fullness of the duplicity. The stakes are very high: American liberty suffered a grave blow during the COVID response. If the reason wasn’t the virus, what was it then?"
"Sometime within the last several months," Tucker added, "the whole racket seems to have unraveled. I rarely see the fact-checks cited at all. Or maybe they are cited ironically: what is declared false came to be seen as a badge of honor, a confirmation of core truth. That might seem crazy but these are the times in which we live. Nothing is as it seems."
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