Facebook Condemned for Empowering Right-Wing Magazine

Published on 

Friday, September 14, 2018

by

Common Dreams

Facebook Condemned for Empowering Right-Wing Magazine to "Drive Liberal News Outlets Into the Ground"

What do you achieve when you let the Weekly Standard operate as a fact-checker for one of the internet's most powerful platforms? "You achieve bullshit."

by

Jake Johnson, staff writer

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at Facebook's F8 Developer Conference on April 18, 2017 at McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. The conference will explore Facebook's new technology initiatives and products. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

When Facebook selected the right-wing, Iraq War-boosting magazine The Weekly Standard as an official fact-checking partner last year as part of its effort to combat "misinformation," progressives warned that the conservative publication would use its power to suppress accurate articles published by center-left and left-wing outlets.

"This is what happens when you let non-reality-based organizations into the fact-checking community to achieve 'balance.' You achieve bullshit." 
—Dan Froomkin, White House Watch

That's precisely what happened.

After ThinkProgress published an article by Ian Millhiser last week arguing that Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh's comments during his Senate confirmation hearings combined with a speech he gave in 2017 eliminates "any doubt" that the judge opposes the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, the Weekly Standard deemed the article "false"—a designation that, given Facebook's rules and the platform's enormous power, cuts off 80 percent of the piece's future traffic and penalizes other pages that dare to post the article.

Expressing opposition to Facebook's decision to hand the factually-challenged Weekly Standard the power to decide what is and isn't fact-based news, The Interceptrepublished Millhiser's piece on Friday with a statement from The Intercept's editor-in-chief Betsy Reed, who condemned the social media giant's decision to tank "a fairly straightforward legal analysis" at the behest of a right-wing magazine.

"That legal analysis, the article noted, matched comments Kavanaugh had made in a speech in 2017," Reed writes. "Facebook, meanwhile, had empowered the right-wing outlet the Weekly Standard to 'fact check' articles. The Weekly Standard, invested in Kavanaugh’s confirmation, deemed the ThinkProgress article 'false.' The story was effectively nuked from Facebook, with other outlets threatened with traffic and monetary consequences if they shared it."

"The story is republished below with permission from ThinkProgress," Reed concluded, "though not from Facebook or the Weekly Standard."

Further Reading: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/09/14/facebook-condemned-empowering-right-wing-magazine-drive-liberal-news-outlets-ground