Snopes.com, which will be one of Facebook's U.S.-based "fact checkers," employs almost exclusively liberals, according to a report.
From the Daily Caller:
Almost all of the writers churning out fact checks for Snopes have a liberal background, and many of them have expressed contempt for Republican voters. The Daily Caller could not identify a single Snopes fact-checker who comes from a conservative background. Snopes did not respond to a list of questions from TheDC regarding the site’s ideological leaning.
At least two of the site’s fact-checkers joined Snopes after writing for Raw Story, a far-left publication that describes itself as a “progressive news site that focuses on stories often ignored in the mainstream media.” Several others have demonstrated liberal partisanship.
In the Daily Caller's report, they outline at least six people on Snopes' masthead that have alleged extreme liberal and progressive leanings — hardly a qualifier for an objective fact checker. Most of them also have a history of working at extremely liberal, anti-conservative news outlets.
Facebook announced last week that they were partnering with a handful of media organizations to begin fact checking news stories posted on Facebook. Several of the organizations include: Snopes, the Associated Press, ABC News, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org — hardly unbiased organizations.
Together with Facebook, they will flag news stories that are fake or wildly sensationalized in order to stop the spread of misinformation, which became rampant during the 2016 election cycle.
More from The Verge:
For its part, Facebook will use a variety of signals to identify stories that are likely to be false. These signals include stories that people post but later delete, and stories that include lots of comments about them being fake. Facebook says it will use these and other signals to populate a dashboard of dubious stories. Its fact-checking partners will get access to the dashboard. After they investigate the article’s claims, they can mark it as disputed and link to their own article debunking it.
If at least two fact-checking organizations mark a story as disputed, users will begin seeing a banner under the article if it appears in their News Feed. The banner reads: “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact Checkers.” Links to articles debunking the posted item will appear below it. Facebook will also penalize the disputed article so it shows up lower in the News Feed, Facebook says.
"I understand how sensitive this is and I have instructed our team to proceed carefully and focus on fighting spam, not flagging opinions,” Facebook founder and chairman Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “This is an early test, and I’m going to keep a close eye on it to make sure we’re fighting actual spam and hoaxes, and not limiting people’s freedom of expression."
