In the past five years, a cadre of fact-checkers has marched through the institutions of journalism and installed itself in the U.S. media as a privatized, quasi-governmental regulatory agency. What’s wrong with facts, you say? Fueled by a panic over misinformation, the fact-checking industry is shifting the media’s primary obligation away from pursuing the truth and toward upholding vague notions of public safety, which it gets to define. In the course of this transformation, journalists are being turned into rent-a-cops whose job is to enforce an official consensus that is treated as a civic good by those who benefit from—and pay for—its protection.
At Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—content flagged as
false or misleading gets downgraded in the platform’s algorithms so
fewer people will see it. Google and Twitter have similar rules to bury
posts. In reality, America’s new public-private “Ministry of Truth”
mainly serves the interests of the tech platforms and Democratic Party
operatives who underwrite and support the fact-checking enterprise.
This, in turn, convinces large numbers of normal Americans that the
officially sanctioned news product they receive is an ass-covering con
job—an attitude that marks many millions of people as potentially
dangerous vectors of misinformation, which justifies more censorship,
further ratcheting up the public’s cynicism toward the press and the
institutional powers it now openly serves. On and on it goes, the
distrust and repression feeding off each other, the pressure building up
until the system breaks down or explodes............To Read More....
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