Fact Checking the Fact Checkers

What is fact checking?

According to the online definition, fact checking is the process of verifying factual information in order to promote the veracity and correctness of reporting.

Sounds good right?

If it’s just based on the definition of the phrase then fact checking is good and even a recommended practice except for one glaring problem: It’s being used to as a tool for censorship.

Are you confused?

You might be asking yourself: How could fact checking, the process of verifying factual information, be used for censorship?

Here’s the answer.

By itself, fact checking is a good practice but once politics was added to the equation then fact checking became a tool for censorship. Take social media like Twitter and Facebook for example.

During the 2021 US presidential election, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter used “fact checking” to question almost every single thing that Donald Trump tweets to his followers but didn’t do the same for his political rival, the now president Joe Biden. Facebook and Twitter pretty much tries to silence or censor the then president Trump using fact checks. And although they were called for it by the US senate, the social media giants didn’t stop.

Heck, the independent fact checkers in the aforementioned social media sites even tries to fact checks a person’s opinions of all things. If you noticed that these “fact checkers” are fact checking opinions then that should be a warning sign that they’re lying.

The same thing happened to some republican candidates running for the senate during that time.

Fact checking had become such an effective censorship and propaganda tool that even the mainstream media is making use of it. And guess who whom they’re fact checking? Yeah, it’s the orange man (even though he’s no longer president, the GOP, and pretty much anyone they don’t like or disagreed with them.

Independent fact checkers could easily twist the truth by adding their own bias and personal feelings on the topic they’re trying to fact check making the information unreliable.  By making use of the populace’s ignorance, they could perpetuate any lies and make up any “truth or facts” they wanted. And unless the readers do they’re due diligence they could easily fall victims to the manipulated “facts.”

As the saying goes, “a lie that is repeated a thousand times becomes truth.” In other words, if many people believed in a lie and repeat that lie again and again, that lie would become the truth.

Therefore, in order not to fall victim to these manipulators we must not easily believe what the fact checkers wrote, or in this case, fact checks the fact checkers.

But how do we go doing that?

The best method was of course; to do our own research on the topic we want to fact check. Certainly, this will take time and effort but if you want un-manipulated facts, then you must work for it yourself. Most of the information could easily be found on the internet archives if one actually bothered to look for it. Of course, not everything on the internet was reliable. Lies are always mixing with the truth. As such, every information and data should be filtered in order to get the reliable information that we wanted.

Another method was to go to bi-partisan and unbiased websites like https://tacomacc.libguides.com/. This method is not very reliable especially if the website in question is open-source that could be edited by just anyone. Meaning, the information on said website might already be compromised so be diligent when using these websites as sources.

How to check if the information was reliable or not.

Here are some advice/ tips from Huffington Post that could help the reader spot fake news. Although the tips was for spotting fake news some or all the tips could also be used to verify the trustworthiness and veracity of the information used for fact checking.

Sigh… If only Huffington Post practiced what they preached.

Anyways, that’s all from me for now. I hope you find this short article somewhat useful. Thanks for reading.