Facebook Fact-Checkers Off to Bad Start
The mainstream media has been making a big deal out of the so-called ‘fake news’ phenomenon lately. The sudden urgency that has been shown to address this issue reveals the underlying motives at work.
People have been fed false narratives and slanted journalism ever since the first newspaper was published. It’s simply part of the human condition that some people will deceive others for profit if they can get away with it.
And boy have they been getting away with it. In the United States, the mainstream news media has been controlled by just 6 major conglomerates for a long time. For the typical American, everything they see, hear, and read has been filtered through one of these few “approved” sources. The question is: approved by whom?
Everything has changed regarding how people are getting their news today, with social media and internet sites playing the dominant role. In this new decentralized model, control of public opinion has been rapidly slipping away from the rich and powerful.
Trump’s electoral victory was a real wake up call for the legacy media. They threw everything they had at him, in an attempt to deliver the election to Hillary. When they realized that they were having very little affect on poll numbers, they doubled down and starting printing lies, distortions, and half-truths.
Imagine how disappointed they were when Trump won the hearts and minds of the American electorate, despite their attempts at slandering him.
In searching for someone or something to blame for Hillary’s loss, the mainstream media found a scapegoat in the conservative news sites that fought back against the MSM lies during the campaign season. They would use their power over the airwaves to tell the world that news is fake unless it comes from them.
So the phenomenon of “fake news” was born, and it quickly went viral. Bitter Democrats were eager to spread the idea that fake news had cost them the election, because it relieved them from their own responsibility in the loss.
Fake News Hysteria
Facebook and Twitter have become some of the largest sources of news for a huge number of Americans. As a result, they have become the new focal point in the establishment’s efforts to silence or control the voice of the people. Using these social media titans as a choke point, the legacy media hopes to censor all ideas that oppose their own.
Pressure has been building for Twitter and Facebook to develop systems for immediately removing “hate speech” from their platforms. Hate speech is loosely defined as anything that makes a leftist feel uncomfortable.
Now the demands have expanded into policing the news feed on the site.
Facebook executives have dutifully buckled to the pressure, and are working diligently with the mainstream propaganda industry to develop new tools of censorship.
One of the major changes announced in recent weeks is the development of a team of “fact checkers” who will pore through the news stories of the day and decide which of them will be included in Facebook’s news feed.
In combination with proprietary computer algorithms, these human analysts will be tasked with the responsibility of keeping “fake news” off of Facebook. Naturally, this idea raises alarm bells with anyone who is not a committed liberal – especially in light of Facebook’s past treatment of conservatives.
If Facebook is becoming the world’s number one distributor of daily news (a scary thought by itself), then it is absolutely reasonable for the public to demand transparency, and to know who will be censoring their news and what their qualifications are.
Enter Snopes.com. The popular website is one of a handful chosen by Facebook to police their news feed. They have been appointed as chief fact-checkers for the social media site.
Snopes initially focused on debunking the outrageous chain emails that were popular in the early days of the internet. They always insisted that they were non-partisan and totally unbiased. As time went on, the chain email craze died out, and so they went searching for new dragons to slay. The site increasingly started tackling political subjects, which raised their profile and their revenue. But it also quickly revealed that the site operators had a subtle liberal bias.
Some of their recent hires have put major dents in their credibility, but a scandalous story that broke this week could finish them off completely.
Until recently the site was operated by a husband and wife team, who basically just sat around and looked things up on the internet in order to “debunk” viral stories. Eventually the money started rolling in – millions of dollars. That’s when the problems started.
It appears that Facebook is prepared to give control over its news censorship to a company that is mired in controversy and internal strife.
The couple who started the site have been going through an acrimonious divorce, and court filings have revealed some eyebrow-raising facts.
Snopes Founders Before Their Divorce
We learn that David Mikkelson began spending cash extravagantly after the divorce was filed, traveling frequently, and spending time with prostitutes.
Ex-wife Barbara is claiming that he embezzled $98,000 of company funds and spent it on hookers.
What’s more, Mikkelson decided to marry one of the prostitutes he met, and she apparently still works as a prostitute and minor porn starlet. Not only that, but he gave her a job. His new wife Elyssa Young still maintains a website to promote her escorting business while serving on the Snopes team.
Mikkelson With New Wife
That’s not the only questionable judgement that the site founder has displayed. He also hired Kimberly LaCapria to be the main fact-checker for the site, who has written for left-wing publications in the past. There goes the claim that they are politically impartial. In her former job at Inquistr, she described herself as openly left-leaning. She called Tea Party members “teahadists” and defended Lena Dunham. She also said Bill Clinton was one of our greatest presidents.
LaCapria also runs a blog called Vice Vixen. The blog is filled with the kind of snarky and morally questionable content you would expect from a far-left college liberal.
She described her blog as a lifestyle website “with a specific focus on naughtiness, sin, carnal pursuits, and general hedonism and bonne vivante-ery.”
Wow, that really sounds like the kind of mature, wise person who should be put in charge of validating our news sources on the internet.
Kim LaCapria: The New Face of Internet Censorship?
On another website, she described her activities on her day off, saying she “played scrabble, smoked pot, and posted to Snopes.” She added, “That’s what I did on my day on, too.”
After investigating this shoddy mom and pop operation, it appears there are no real standards for the fact-checkers that work for them. When asked about his requirements for employees, Mikkelson said it “would be difficult to encompass in any single blanket set of standards.”
“Accordingly, our editorial staff is drawn from diverse backgrounds; some of them have degrees and/or professional experience in journalism, and some of them don’t,” he added.
So there you have it, Facebook is about to hand control of the news you are allowed to see off to an operation that has demonstrated extremely poor judgment (unless you think marrying a 47-year-old prostitute is wise) and low standards (posting while high on drugs). Hey, as long as they are liberal, that’s all that counts.
The post Official Internet Censoring Agency EXPOSED: A Story Of Hookers, Porn, Drugs, And News Takeover appeared first on Conservative Daily Post.
