Google wants to combat fake news, and it is accomplishing this endeavor by using fact checkers. The search engine juggernaut is expanding its fact-checking initiative to all searches worldwide. Google is now hoping that its users will take advantage of this tool to become better informed.
Moving forward, when you type in searches you will be told if the claim is true or false and who fact-checked this claim. The tech titan will use “authoritative sources” for fact-checking. But who are these so-called authoritative sources? PolitiFact, Salon, Snopes and The Washington Post. These are all liberal news websites with considerable biases, agendas, and slants.
The new toolbar was launched over the weekend, and the Internet is already buzzing. When you look up “Clinton sold uranium to Russia” or “Clinton has Parkinson’s disease” on Google, you are informed the claim that was made by the Internet was false and that the fact check was completed by Snopes.com.
The word’s biggest search engine had implemented a similar fact-checking feature before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Since it did not work, Google decided to change it.
Facebook has incorporated a similar feature. The social network rolled out a third-party fact-checking tool last month that warns users about fake news and “disputed content.” Facebook ostensibly wants to bury fake news and hoaxes in its News Feed. Last week, BBC News reported that the website also launched a three-day campaign in fourteen nations that teaches users “how to spot fake news” and is “designed to help people become more discerning readers.”
Like Google, Facebook tapped the fact-checking services of leftist sources like Snopes.
Is a website like Snopes or Salon a reliable fact-checking source? The Daily Caller looked at Snopes’s main political fact-checker, Kim Lacapria, who is “openly left-leaning.” Referring to the Tea Party as “teahadists” and former President Bill Clinton as “one of our greatest” presidents, Lacapria’s fact check articles have been questionable. Here is what the website wrote:
Lacapria — in another “fact check” article — argued Hillary Clinton hadn’t included Benghazi at all in her infamous “we didn’t lose a single person in Libya” gaffe. Lacapria claimed Clinton only meant to refer to the 2011 invasion of Libya (but not the 2012 Benghazi attack) but offered little fact-based evidence to support her claim.
After the Orlando terror attack, Lacapria claimed that just because Omar Mateen was a registered Democrat with an active voter registration status didn’t mean he was actually a Democrat. Her “fact check” argued that he might “have chosen a random political affiliation when he initially registered.”
Lacapria even tried to contradict the former Facebook workers who admitted that Facebook regularly censors conservative news, dismissing the news as “rumors.”
The Washington Post, a previous standard-bearer of investigative journalism, has increasingly shifted towards the left since being acquired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Last month, Glenn Kessler, the newspaper’s fact checker, gave President Donald Trump three out of four Pinocchios and called him a liar because he said:
It has gotten so bad that nearly 20 million Americans have chosen to pay the penalty or received an exemption rather than buy insurance. That’s something that nobody has ever heard of or thought could happen, and they’re actually doing that rather than being forced to buy insurance.
The president’s claim turned out to be true – last year, 6.5 million Americans paid the Obamacare penalty and 12.7 million Americans received an exemption. This would not be so bad if Kessler did not get caught giving Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) the same three Pinocchios for flat out lying. Here is what Sen. McCaskill tweeted:
I’ve been on the Armed Services Com for 10 years. No call or meeting w/Russian ambassador. Ever. Ambassadors call members of Foreign Rel Com.
The senator’s tweets between 2013 and 2015 suggest that she did have a “meeting” and a “call” with the Russian ambassador. When you type in the claim on Google, it was labeled as false by PolitiFact.
According to the newspaper’s fact checker, a Republican telling the truth garners the same amount of Pinocchios as a Democrat telling a lie.
The Daily Wire compiled a list of eleven lies published by The Washington Post fact checker.
All of this is leading down a slippery slope: censoring conservative or libertarian opinion. Since the beginning of 2017, there have been many reports across the web of outlets blocking or burying news and views that contradict leftist perspective. In fact, Liberty Nation wrote on that very topic back in February.
But if you type in “Facebook blocking conservative views” on Google then you will be told the claim has been “unproven,” according to Snopes.
