Fact-Checking - A Bag of Scalps?

In 1782 Benjamin Franklin was in France trying to drive support amongst European nations and British citizens for reparations for damage done by the Crown in the years leading up to and during the revolutionary war. Franklin realized the British government was hardly in the mood to consider such a request after years of hostility between the nations; an alternative strategy needed crafting. Franklin devised an information warfare approach to drive public opinion in the UK by turning public sentiment against the Crown or, using today's jargon, a fake news campaign. Franklin created an exceptionally provocative narrative. His idea??A Bag of Scalps.?

Franklin's information warfare publication was entitled a "Supplement" to the Boston Independent Chronicle, which he drafted and printed in?Passy, France. The fake article talked of discovering bags of human scalps having been found together with a letter addressed to the King as a token of "loyalty" from Native American tribes. Although the story did help drive British public opinion in favor of America, however it also had the consequence of amplifying hostility against Native Americans. Tragically the tale was later repurposed to foster hatred, distrust, segregation, and even slaughter of these indigenous people.

Samuel Butler, the 19th Century novelist one said, "The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust." If Butler were alive today, I suspect he would have the same opinion of online media and social media platforms.

In my last article, I discussed the need for transparency in public-facing technology. The conclusion was simple, without transparency in the process and interested parties, technology is perceived as untrustworthy. The same relationship applies to the industry of "fact-checking" and "misinformation" identification and remediation.

Recently I watched an interview with former CNN Radio host and Founder of Lead Stories, Alan Duke, a Fact Checker for Facebook and other Social Media Platforms.

During the?interview, Duke was asked by Raheem Kassam of the?National Pulse, "Where do you get off telling me what I can put in my headlines?" Duke replied, "If you want to put it on the Facebook platform, my company has been contracted by Facebook to make an assessment through which they could put a label on it." Duke continued, "You just have to click it ( the label), and it removes it, and you can see it."

Aside from the questions I have about whether Facebook has the?proprietary rights?to do this, where is the moral right to do so when the process they use is opaque? Are they not at that point publishers? Do they lose their protection under the Communications Decency Act Section 230?

Even more troubling, what is the relationship between Fact Checkers and Big Tech? For example, Duke's Leadstories.com lists the following in its "About Us" section of its website's primary funding sources. "Facebook, LLC, Google LLC ByteDance, LLC" (Parent of TikTok")

I next examined one of the most respected operators in the Fact-Checking space, the Poynter Institute, which operates politifact.com. Once again, their disclosure of?Major Funding Sources?include Facebook & Google and Politifact?lists?Facebook and TikTok as contributing more than 5 percent of revenues.

Even the seemingly independent fact checker, Snopes.com has ties to Facebook. In a 2018 disclosure, it states, "we received .... $406,000 from Facebook for participating in their fact-checking partnership effort."

The direct financial relationship between big tech and the fact checking industry appears to be little more than an attenuated system of proxy censorship cloaked in a facade of independence. When the largest funders of the major fact-checkers are big technology, can they continue to claim independence?

Seth F Kreimer wrote the following about internet censorship in the Penn Law Review. "This turn to proxy censors carries with it a series of dangers to the system of free expression, for intermediaries are likely to be substantially less robust in their defense of free speech than are speakers and listeners."

The Latin phrase?Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes, "Who watches the watchers," comes to mind.

In the Financial Times,?Jemima Kelly wrote, "free speech is about letting people be wrong as well as right. We must limit the checking to facts, which is tricky enough, and not opinions that the checkers don't happen to like."

Merely "labeling" content as inaccurate, disputed, or otherwise troublesome can be just as suppressive as outright censorship. It is akin to seeing a box in the road with a hazardous material warning label. You are interested in what is inside, but the label is enough to make you stop. This nuanced censorship was the subject of Darin Stewart's post in the Gartner Blog. "Labels and warnings based on value judgments rather than objective and demonstrable evidence can be and frequently are used as?de facto?censorship."

I believe fact-checking is simply an attempt to create the desired narrative on a massive global scale using the reach of Social Media. It is a dangerous attempt to substitute another's determination of facts for yours. Whether a private company or not, it is a bad practice; platforms are the public square of the 21st Century. If they are shielded from liability, as they are, then there is little reason to put their hands on the scale of fact-finding. If they are permitted to persist in this shadowy practice, Franklin's Bag of Scalps may seem insignificant compared to the potential for unrest, physical harm, and government stability posed by fact-checking.