Popular Information has yet another scoop on Facebook's continued preferential treatment of conservative disinformation-mongers, and once again it touches The Daily Wire, the far-right and often misleading site that reliably tops Facebook's lists of top articles due in large part to Facebook willingly overlooking the site's network of dodgy and rule-breaking promotional pages.
And once again, Facebook appears to have stepped in to undo a fact check that correctly identified false information in a conservative story—this time after Republican Rep. Mike Johnson contacted the company to complain.
If the situation feels familiar, it is. A conservative piece yet again dismissing concerns over climate change was labeled "partly false" by a group of third-party fact checking "partners" due to repetition of already-debunked claims. That led to the article being shared with an attached warning, upon which the conservative author complained to Facebook.
Which quickly escalated, reports Popular Information, to top-level conservative Facebook executives like Joel Kaplan and Nick Clegg—after which the "partly false" warning was removed from the conservative article.
Popular Information reports that they obtained internal Facebook documents related to the reversal. Republican operative Joel Kaplan weighed in to say that "stakeholders" found the fact check "biased" and noted "incoming" from (climate denier) Rep. Mike Johnson's office complaining about it. The fact checkers defended the rating based on, you know, the part about it making false claims. And Facebook's own communications team was wary of going against the fact checkers because Facebook was already getting heat for its special treatment of the conservative site.
Soon afterwards, the fact check was removed without explanation. The piece's errors remained uncorrected.
Apparently Facebook's Republican executives were not overly concerned that once again fudging its own fact checking to better boost conservative positions would make the site even less credible. The platform continues to dismiss calls to rein in its own position as a mega-purveyor of organized disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. Whether this is because the vast majority of that disinformation skews towards the personal ideologies of Kaplan and other hired executives or is simply an effort to wring maximal money out of the business, regardless of damage done, is unknown.
