Mark Hemmingway at The Weekly Standard has a great piece explaining why it’s a terrible idea for Facebook to enlist the services of PolitiFact to combat the problem of “fake news”. Facebook has been criticized by many on the Left who believe that misleading stories promoted on Facebook during the campaign resulted in Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump, despite a complete lack of evidence to support such a conclusion.
Now, Facebook is teaming up with a number of so-called news organizations to referee stories that appear on the social network, to flag those that they deem false. The groups being enlisted include Snopes, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and PolitiFact.
Hemmingway does an excellent job recounting numerous instances where PolitiFact’s “fact checking” fell woefully short and in fact, appeared to be politically motivated:
When President Obama repeatedly lied about Obamacare enabling people to keep their health insurance, PolitiFact rated it true six different times. The next year, after he was reelected and Obamacare was a rolling disaster, PolitiFact made “if you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance” the 2013 lie of the year. They hated being forced to admit such an egregious partisan error, so they bizarrely spent a lot of time chastising Glenn Beck instead of taking responsibility. On nearly all Obamacare-related matters, PolitiFact acted as the propaganda arm of the White House.