The Myth Of ‘Fact-Checking’: How Facebook Created The World’s Largest Censorship Operation

The 2020 presidential election resulted in something I never thought I’d see — widespread, Soviet-style political censorship in American media. This censorship still dominates our discourse a year later, with no end in sight. There’s a lot to be said about how we got to this place, but it’s worth zeroing in on the two particular mechanisms for how this censorship is being enforced. The first is the rise of politicized media “fact-checkers,” and the second is Facebook. The fact these two entities have now joined forces means speaking freely online without an algorithm slapping a warning label on your opinion or psychoanalyzing your potential for extremism is becoming difficult. 

While I confess I didn’t see this censorship regime gaining power so quickly, as a reporter in D.C. for over 20 years, I did see plenty of warning signs. One, in particular, was hard to ignore: In the summer of 2018, I was sitting in a staff meeting at the now-defunct magazine, The Weekly Standard, when an editor at the publication started yelling at me. 

At the time of the argument, The Weekly Standard was four months away from being shuttered, and though no one in the meeting knew we were facing the axe, a profound sense of unease had descended on the place. A hardline opposition to Trump wasn’t universally shared by the magazine’s staff, but for the two years following his election, top editors at the magazine regularly lambasted Trump and indulged in some regrettably erroneous Russia collusion reporting. This approach was not appreciated by our regular subscribers who had overwhelmingly voted for the president. 

And the argument that led to me getting yelled at was another Exhibit in prosecuting the case for how things at The Weekly Standard had gone wrong: We had gone from being an outlet that regularly published hard-hitting media criticism to enabling the worst media innovation in decades – so-called “fact checking.” 

The staff meeting started, as usual, with some informal chatter about the big news of the day. In this case, Facebook had just announced it was banning conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his media outlet InfoWars from the platform for “glorifying violence” and “hate speech.” None of us were fans of Jones. InfoWars content ranged from harmless tabloidy supposition about aliens to genuinely upsetting conspiracies about the Sandy Hook shooting. However, there was some consensus in the meeting that Facebook banning entire publications from the