This seems like it would have been a good moment for introspection as to why that might be, but no. It must be a plot by Big Facts. Those sneaky pro-reality bastards.
Charles Cooke, editor of National Review Online, the premier conservative news outlet for decades, told Business Insider in an email that he "agreed with everything" [some conservative Twitterpundit] said.
And what did that conservative pundit say? "Fake News is a thing because "fact-checkers" are biased towards liberals/Democrats. [...] Fake News cropped up in response to people feeling like the media AND the fact-checkers weren't being fair."
I have to say, if one person says there are sex slaves in the basement of a pizza parlor and another person points out that the pizza parlor doesn't have a basement to begin with, that does not sound like one person is just being too "liberal." And that's where we're at right now: The notion that maybe there are sex slaves in the imaginary basements of pizza parlors, and that you're now "biased" if you think that the lack of imaginary basements ought to be considered a flaw in that theory.
What of the fakest news sites of them all? Conspiracy huckster Alex Jones says Facebook’s new plan is, of course, a CIA plot. Possibly in league with the lizard people, possibly not, I don't know. Maybe Jones and the National Review editor can get together and hash it out for us and Snopes both.
We'll see. Maybe this newest Facebook experiment will work, and maybe it won't. Maybe it will catch stories that it shouldn't have caught because some fact-checkers are themselves too loose with their own interpretations of statements they’re evaluating. But conservatives put us in this mess with their faux-outrage that Facebook was "censoring" them by not giving readers enough possibly faked news, so of course they're going to get their knickers in a twist over the mere notion of putting a few of those checks back in place.
Comments are closed on this story.