If you’re a user of Facebook who happens to also be conservative, you may have noticed that you don’t see news stories from conservative outlets in your feed as much as you might expect, considering how popular and prolific outlets like The Daily Wire and Townhall are.
Weird, right? What’s the deal with that?
Well, for what it’s worth, you haven’t been imagining things. According to former Facebook engineer Ian Haworth this is a thing with Facebook, as evidenced by Facebook’s treatment of the Washington Free Beacon’s story on the Biden administration’s taxpayer-funded “safe smoking kits,” which included, among other things, crack pipes:
The biggest mistake critics of Big Tech make is assuming that they are pulling the strings when it comes to “fact-checking.” In reality, this is all about avoiding responsibility and political blowback.
I explain how in the @FreeBeacon. https://t.co/cp03befo8c
— Ian Haworth (@ighaworth) July 7, 2022
It took a matter of hours for Facebook to suppress a Free Beacon report on the Biden admin funding crack pipe distribution.
Former Facebook engineer @ighaworth detailed how: (thread)https://t.co/6rBSEzrRbz
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) July 7, 2022
Lead Stories—a prominent member of Facebook's third-party fact-checking program—concluded the Free Beacon report was "not true."
They based the fact-check on a declaration from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, which he made made days after the report elicited considerable blowback.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) July 7, 2022
Lead Stories editor in chief Alan Duke said he had no responsibility to contact the Free Beacon before making a determination.
“Your article may be ‘highly trafficked’ but it is also highly false,” Duke told the Beacon.
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) July 7, 2022
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“Highly false.” That’s just a fancy way of saying “an inconvenient wrench in our preferred liberal narrative.”
The crack pipe report was proven to be true when Free Beacon reporter @PatrickHauf visited so-called harm reduction centers.
Every single one included crack pipes in their safe-smoking kits:https://t.co/qEXovwOOGO
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) July 7, 2022
Silicon Valley uses fact-checking organizations to shield itself from responsibility and wash its hands of political pressures to focus on financial objectives. Meanwhile, organizations like Lead Stories can pursue their financial and ideological hobby horses. Indeed, Lead Stories says the “bulk of our revenue originated from our work done as part of Facebook’s Third-Party Fact Checking Partnership” in 2021, through its self-described focus on “trending stories,” adding that “Facebook pays us to perform this service for them but they have no say or influence over what we fact-check or what our conclusions are, nor do they want to.”
Fact-checking organizations enjoy independence regarding “what [they] fact-check or what [their] conclusions are,” but that independence is dangerous when we consider their partisanship and the enormous power Silicon Valley has handed them.
The protective cycle of evasion makes recourse impossible. When the fact-checker doesn’t care, and the Big Tech platform doesn’t want to know, there is nowhere else to turn. The fact-checkers know this, allowing them to profit from the fact-checking system while using their relationships with Big Tech to exert control over the political narrative. But it is also worth noting how futile their efforts are: The Free Beacon report on crack pipes spread everywhere despite the best efforts of the Facebook hall monitors.
It’s small comfort to know that Facebook’s team of fact-checkers was unable to completely crush the Free Beacon’s story. If anything, that’s just a testament to the integrity of the Free Beacon’s reporting.
And to the lack of integrity of Facebook’s fact-checkers.
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