WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The United States State Department works with liberal media groups to give power to favored journalists as “fact-checkers” around the world, according to documents obtained by America First Legal.
The conservative legal group released a new set of documents it obtained on government “disinformation” efforts and also detailed the key findings in a lengthy Twitter thread.
The group reported that a handful of journalists are given power to determine what is a “fact” or not.
The documents were obtained as part of America First Legal’s litigation against the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) which aims to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”
The initiatives are tied in closely to the liberal Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) which “was launched in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”
The IFCN “was initially funded by the Department of State-funded National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations,” according to America First Legal.
The IFCN has the power to reduce the distribution of content on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The ICFN also partners with Google and YouTube, which is owned by Google. The group has targeted LifeSiteNews for censorship.
“To fight the spread of misinformation and provide people with more reliable information, Meta partners with independent third-party fact-checkers that are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN),” Meta explains on its website.
“Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, we significantly reduce the content’s distribution so that fewer people see it,” Facebook explained in a June 1, 2021 post. “We notify people who previously shared the content or try to share it that the information is false, and apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim with original reporting.”
7/ As AFL has previously shown, @Poynter runs PolitiFact and @factchecknet, which was initially funded by the Department of State-funded National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society…
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) June 14, 2023
America First Legal said this small group of journalists picked by the State Department, numbering only 11, gets to “decide what you can see online.”
“The global cabal of ‘fact-checkers’ do not appear to be the benevolent truth-seekers they say,” the group tweeted. “They appear to be highly ideological activists, affiliated through the Poynter network, backed by the same money to say the same thing.”
The favored journalists include Angie Holan, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, which is within the Poynter network of entities.
The wire service Associated Press also is caught up in the State Department-funded efforts, according to previously obtained emails.
READ: RFK Jr., Elon Musk break down censorship, AI and antidepressants in expansive discussion
‘Fact-checkers’ can be biased, get things wrong
Facebook contends that its “fact-checking partners all go through a rigorous certification process” with the IFCN and that the fact-checkers must be nonpartisan and fair. But history shows that fact-checkers often use their power to push a specific agenda. For example, two Facebook “fact-checkers” are practicing abortionists who were allowed to rate an accurate claim by LiveAction as “false,” which then hurt the group’s distribution of content in 2019.
Facebook also infamously had to walk back its censorship of websites that promoted the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in China. The Big Tech platform initially censored posts that posited the theory before walking it back and implicitly acknowledging that it was a plausible idea.
Big Tech platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, have also punished LifeSiteNews repeatedly for sharing information on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 shots.
Facebook removed LifeSiteNews after direct requests from pro-abortion, pro-homosexual advocacy groups, as NARAL Pro-Choice America boasted in a 2021 news release. LifeSiteNews has since regained access to the platform, but it is very limited it what it can post without being shadow banned. The amount of readership LifeSite receives via Facebook is still only a tiny fraction of what it was and what it should be. Facebook was once LifeSiteNews’ largest source of readership but, thanks to shadow banning and censorship, most of that Facebook-driven readership has been eliminated