The ‘Fact-Checkers’ Of Today Are Becoming Fact-Creators

Written by The Spectator on October 19, 2022. Posted in Current News

Instead of helping people keep an eye on fake news, they protect corporate entities from ‘social damage’.

‘Fact-checkers’ insist that damaging information or genuine lies told by CEOs and politicians ‘lack context’ or were ‘said in error’ and are therefore ‘false’.

It is an almost daily occurrence. A huge story breaks online.

Some CEO, company, or politician was caught in a lie and now the truth is splattered all over the internet like a crime scene.

This trends for a while, with the fallout gaining momentum and threatening the bank balances of powerful individuals. People wonder, how can so-and-so ever recover from a catastrophe this damaging? Who will ever trust them again?

Then in come the ‘fixers’. The ‘fact-checkers’ who use their big, digital eraser to edit the facts.

The public are told that they didn’t hear or see what they definitely heard and that their understanding of the truth lacks ‘context’ or is ‘misinformed’ in some way. It’s all about softening the story so that it can be buried, and the media – cowards that they are – allow it to happen.

There were two particularly egregious examples last week.

The first was online payment gateway PayPal. After nearly a week of public backlash caused by cancelling accounts belonging to journalists, the company reversed course and said they had made a mistake. Then, in what can only be described as ‘closing a loophole’, PayPal sent an update to all customers reaffirming their ability to shut accounts for ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ to be determined by PayPal.

In addition, they informed customers that they would be fined $2,500 for each infringement to cover ‘damages’.

The threat was left up for nearly a week before it became a topic of global outrage. High-profile personalities told their fans to close their PayPal accounts – which they did. It was catastrophic for PayPal. They started bleeding customers and hastily reversed their policy, saying that the message went out ‘in error’ which is corporate speak for ‘yikes, okay’.

Essentially, PayPal wanted to be able to kill accounts belonging to people whose political stance they didn’t agree with, justifying it via the updated terms. Their solution didn’t work, and the policy was reversed.

No one believes that a terms of service update of that magnitude could go out as a ‘mistake’ or that it wasn’t corrected immediately, if it was indeed an error.

Where did the $2,500 figure come from? Who added it? Was it discussed? These things don’t copy themselves into legal documents by accident. PayPal has not answered any of these questions.

Changing their policy was not enough to stop the mass walk-out, so in came the ‘fact-checkers’ to salvage PayPal’s reputation.

They claimed, in one way or another, that the accusation was false because it was a ‘mistake’ that was ‘quickly corrected’. In doing so, the fact-checkers openly lied. The claim was objectively true, it was an official release, and it was only corrected after public pressure.

You can read the Orwellian-speak for yourself.

‘Posts mislead on PayPal misinformation policy,’ said AFP Fact Check. ‘Social media posts claim PayPal is implementing a policy that will fine users who spread misinformation. This is misleading; the online payments platform said an update to its terms of service was released in error, that it was quickly corrected, and that the company has no penalties for those who spread false claims.’

‘VERIFY viewers Bill and Ricardo asked us if PayPal is going to fine people for spreading misinformation. No. Here’s where that claim came from…’ from verifythis.com

‘Fact Check-Confusion on social media as PayPal says policy to fine customers $2,500 in damages for ‘misinformation’ was issued in error,’ said Reuters.

‘No, PayPal Isn’t Planning To Fine Users $2.5K for Posting Misinfo,’ said Snopes.

A similar thing happened later in the week when, during a European Union Parliamentary inquiry, Robert Roos asked Pfizer executive Janine Small if Pfizer had investigated their vaccine for preventing transmission before it was made available to the public. Her reply was the now infamous, ‘no’ and ‘we had to move at the speed of science’ including ‘doing everything at risk’.

This matters, because there are countless tweets, interviews, and public releases from Pfizer and associated entities all claiming that – to some extent or other – their vaccine significantly prevented transmission. It was a publicly stated fact that was used as the basis for widely criticised mandatory vaccination requirements, vaccine passports, and isolation orders for the unvaccinated.

Pfizer’s transmission claims caused the largest global abuse of human rights in living memory, so yes – it matters. The revelation that transmission remained a question mark is a public disaster for Pfizer and may lead to legal challenges.

Don’t worry, the Twitter ‘fact-checkers’ are here. Within 24-hours the social media platform had a sticky-trend (something they pin to the sidebar) stating:

‘Recent claims about Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine trial and impact on transmission are misleading, fact-checkers report.’

It was followed by:

‘According to the Associated Press, Pfizer never claimed the clinical trial of their Covid-19 vaccine evaluated its effect on transmission.

Reuters also reported that in clinical trials, vaccines were found to give recipients a high level of protection against severe disease – but effect on transmission, due to trial sizes, could not be immediately determined.’

That’s strange.

Pfizer’s official Twitter account posted, ‘The ability to vaccinate at speed to gain herd immunity and stop transmission is our highest priority. There is a lot of work ahead, and our focus is on supporting points of vaccination, as that’s key to increasing the volume of people getting vaccinated every day.’

Both herd immunity and stopping transmission have turned out to be false for Covid.

You can watch the Pfizer CEO speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos stating, ‘You vaccinate not only yourself, you vaccinate also to protect society, in particular to protect those that you love the most.’ Such a statement is predicated on preventing transmission.

In various tweets, Albert Bourla has said:

‘Although data shows that severe Covid is rare in children, widespread vaccination is a critical tool to help stop transmission.

That’s why I’m excited we have begun dosing participants aged 5-11 in a global Phase 2/3 study of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.’

Excited to share that updated analysis from our Phase 3 study with BioNTech also showed that our Covid-19 vaccine was 100 percent effective in preventing #Covid cases in South Africa. 100 percent!’

Not only was it stated in dozens of interviews, but the President of the United States said it, our chief health officer said it, the World Health Organisation and CDC said it. Where did these institutions and officials get their claim on preventing transmission, if not from the ‘experts’ that they say were cited?

The grand sleight of hand used in nearly every release to imply transmission is the phrase, ‘reduces symptomatic infection and therefore transmission’ allowing them to make statements like ‘90 per cent effective’ and have that used as a transmission argument. Fact-checkers can moan all they like, but we lived through the last two years and we know what was said.

And if we are so interested in fact-checking why, when it became obvious in the earliest months of the vaccine roll-out, wasn’t the claim rescinded (rather than repeated) by Pfizer and others as Covid spread through fully-vaccinated communities?

There were no fact-checkers rushing to correct the public record when the claims of politicians, health authorities, and Big Pharma were proven false – in fact, it was the fact-checkers who saw to it that the people speaking the truth were banned, ridiculed, or told they were ‘missing context’.

What are fact-checkers anyway? They are meant to perform a simple task of dismissing outlandish falsities online. For example, when a photo emerged of what looked like a protest in France, fact-checkers rightly pointed out that it was actually from the World Cup victory in 2018. That’s what we call a genuine fact-check.

Do we need this service? No. But it’s not destructive either so long as there are no penalties attached. There’s no need to police this information. Once a photo is known to be false, thousands of people rush to inform the original poster of it, creating an environment of self-moderation.

The fact-checkers of today are becoming fact-creators. Instead of helping people keep an eye on fake news, they protect corporate entities from ‘social damage’.

Fact-checkers insist that damaging information or genuine lies told by CEOs and politicians ‘lack context’ or were ‘said in error’ and are therefore ‘false’.

Fact-checkers operating with authority, creating their own facts are far more dangerous than an unmoderated forum.

Today, they are nothing more than corporate ‘fixers’ – the shadowy, anonymous keyboard warriors sent in to clean up after the scandal.

See more here spectator.com.au

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