By Dave Andrusko
As it happens I was at my kitchen table about to dissect another slanted, tiresome Washington Post “fact check” about something President Trump said about “extreme late-term abortions” when my son forwarded me a post that could not have been better timed.
Most of our readers know that Facebook has decided it will determine what are false and/or misleading statements and will take essentially one of two very worrisome courses of action.
One is to remove unapproved content (e.g., “anything that would go against World Health Organization [WHO] recommendations” on the COVID-19 pandemic, as the Facebook CEO told CNN’s wildly biased Brian Stelter). The second is the use of “factchecking panels.”
As part of Facebook’s ceaseless attempts to ferret out “misinformation,” we’re told, “When users are searching on YouTube around a specific claim, we want to give an opportunity for those fact checks to show up right then and there, when our users are looking for information — especially around fast-moving, quickly changing topics like COVID-19,” said Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer.
What will they do? “Our fact check information panels provide fresh context in these situations by highlighting relevant, third-party fact-checked articles above search results for relevant queries, so that our viewers can make their own informed decision about claims made in the news,” YouTube announced.
Twitter is jumping into the censorship business with both feet. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also talked about “misleading information” in an April 22 livestream with Showtime hosts Desus Nice and The Kid Mero.
Dorsey said that instead of removing the tweets of world leaders, Twitter will instead introduce an “interstitial.”
“Anything that we can do to interstitial a lot of this and provide context that is credible and might show a disagreement or a debate around the topic, I think, would be helpful,” Dorsey said.
“The team is working on a great experiment to do just that, that we hope to launch as quickly as possible to give people a broader context for a particular tweet…I think we’ll disarm a bunch of it.”
World leaders…tweets… gosh whom could Dorsey have in mind?
What does all this have to do with the Washington Post FactChecker’s hatchet job on Donald Trump? Fact-checkers who are already in the Facebook program include PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post’s fact-checker.
These outlets are relentlessly pro-abortion and hostile beyond measure to anyone or any outlet that does not toe the approved line. Think about it.
They want to eliminate wrongthinking as soon as it appears {Facebook}; place an overlay on content it finds incorrect with a link to a fact-check {also Facebook}; or editorialize to make sure the public is the beneficiary of the “truth” by inserting an “interstitial” between the world leader and his or her audience {Twitter}.
We’ll talk about “Trump’s comments on Democrats and ‘late-term abortion’” in a separate post.
The preceding requires our closest scrutiny, especially as we move forward toward November 3.