Facebook draws liberal ire for hiring conservative ‘fact-checkers’ for once

A fact-checking spinoff of the conservative website Daily Caller has partnered up with Facebook to police fake news, and mainstream media are outraged.

© Reuters / Dado Ruvic

The social media behemoth has added Daily Caller’s CheckYourFact.com to its list of US media partners this week, sparking outrage among the mainstream (and politically rather differently aligned) media outlets, who argued that Daily Caller has published fake news, harbors “white supremacists” and was founded by Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

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Carlson co-founded the Daily Caller in 2010, but stepped down as editor-in-chief in November 2016, after getting a contract with Fox to host ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’

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One of the many measures the California-based corporation rolled out under pressure from Congress and the media, Facebook’s fact-checking program has had a rocky history. Snopes.com bowed out of the partnership in February, as its vice president Vinny Green endorsed the Orwellian-style NewsGuard app as the future of fact-checking.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has faced harsh criticisms from nearly every quarter about his methods of policing information on the social network, with some saying he hasn’t gone far enough and others accusing him of outright censorship.

There has been far less scrutiny of Facebook’s other partners-in-arms, such as the pro-NATO think tank The Atlantic Council, or the Southern Poverty Law Center, a self-proclaimed authority on “hate groups.”

The SPLC remains on a list of “external experts and organizations” that Facebook works with “to inform our hate speech policies,” even after paying a hefty settlement to a Muslim reformer they’d maligned, and recently purging its founder and top leadership, due to unspecified scandals.

Original: https://www.rt.com/news/456965-facebook-factchecking-daily-caller/