Being one of Facebook’s anointed “fact checkers,” with the ability to suppress the reach of publications at will, leftist fact checker PolitiFact has now resorted to posting links to articles from rival publications in Facebook comments underneath Breitbart News posts.
A recent Breitbart News post on Facebook linked to editor-at-large Joel Pollak’s November 9 article about voters re-electing a dead Democrat state representative in Pennsylvania.
The PolitiFact comment pointed out that the state representative, Anthony “Tony” DeLuca, had died on October 9, just under a month before election day, which was too soon for any replacement to be found.
This was not disputed by Breitbart’s article, which emphasized the fact that Democrats, knowing their state representative was dead, still reelected him.
Facebook’s fact checkers have an established track record of political bias, and PolitiFact pedantically going out of its way to counter-signal Breitbart News, the leading source of news for conservatives online, will only reinforce that image.
Fact checkers were particularly aggressive during the coronavirus pandemic, leading to cases of unfair suppression. In 2021, the Facebook fact checker Science Feedback — already notorious for attempting to suppress anything that questioned the progressive narrative on man-made global warming — was forced to withdraw a fact check about the efficacy of masks.
The most prominent fact checkers have also been reluctant to unravel questionable claims from the Democrats, including the Biden administration’s claim that the U.S. did not enter a recession this summer.
PolitiFact, again, distinguished itself for its bias by “fact checking” any publication that questioned the administration’s insistence that there was no recession this summer. In response, House Republicans wrote a letter to the Poynter Institute, which operates PolitiFact, complaining.
Even Facebook has been forced to admit, in court, that fact-checks are nothing more than dressed-up opinions.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.