Meta changed his attitude after confirming the facts. announced What founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday is not just another example of a company tweaking its policies to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump, but a complete capitulation that threatens the censorship economy as a whole. is.
Fact-checking is more than just partisan orthodoxy disguised as a public service. It's very good business. Over the decades, what started as a cottage industry of people investigating rumors about Internet serial killers and werewolves has grown into a Democratic newspaper criticizing members of Congress and the president, and has since grown from ridiculous Facebook memes to legitimate stories. It has blossomed into a global, multi-million dollar industry that stifles everything, including political discourse. .
Zuckerberg didn't just quit the program. He denounced it as completely false.
How did this last change come about? In one word: Facebook. And the funny thing is, it wasn't because Facebook was particularly evil or censorious. Zuckerberg was less political than many of his colleagues. Rather, his back-and-forth, always-getting-in-trouble reactions to the rising political tensions of the past decade have shown a tendency to shape policy through reactions and a tendency to please too many diametrically opposed parties. This is an expression of his tendency to .
He himself knew that policing content would bring him under constant attack from the right, but at the same time he needed to satisfy the left, so outside news organizations and various other organizations fact-checked for him. established a fact-checking program to .
Mr. Zuckerberg put the responsibility on the Poynter Institute in policing who participates in the program and who rewards companies financially based on the number of fact checks they write. Facebook capped payments at $150,000 a month, or about $1.8 million a year. As an ironic side note, Meta broke this policy for the first time to censor the Hunter Biden laptop article (which is actually an important and completely true story).
Facebook paid a lot of money, especially in an industry struggling to monetize content, and the program was hugely popular. As of Monday, 145 approved organizations Nearly 70 countries and territories have joined the program, with a further 33 organizations “updating”.
Since the program's launch, fact-checking has expanded to include not only Republican politicians but also random jokes and memes. It also expanded to include fellow journalists whose views fell outside the liberal mainstream at the time. New financial benefits swelled staffing levels. Facebook, like the taxi medallion, stumbled on creating a false economy.
Not all of these organizations were liberal, but nearly all were. To create the illusion of balance, Poynter granted initial licenses to Check Your Facts, a subsidiary of the Daily Caller, and the now-defunct NeverTrump magazine's Weekly Standard.
However, this gig generated considerable revenue and cheating was punished. Nearly everything Poynter has published since Check Your Facts correctly accused corporate news organizations of falsely claiming that President Trump falsely claimed the coronavirus was a hoax during the 2020 campaign. The backlash was incredible, including investigating joke headlines and articles. Similarly, when the Weekly Standard's “Check Your Facts” alumni fact-checked the far-left group “Media Matters,” Columbia Journalism Review's review of the harms of conservative dissent on the show A paper broke out.
With Facebook paying so much money, publishers were keen not to shake things up. In an era of declining advertising revenues, it's much easier to fact-check Dracula sightings and Earth memes than it is to question biased reporting in corporate media. And these cheap and easy fact-checks didn't require any serious investigative work.
Still, conservative news outlets have achieved some victories, such as when they countered blatantly stupid reporting on what the Catholic faith teaches (a perennial weakness for secular news outlets).
The economy has not simply added funding to existing news outlets, such as France's Science Feedback, which is dedicated to attacking those who question the “scientific consensus” on topics such as man-made global warming. He also helped establish a news organization dedicated to promoting political dogma. . Reed Stories has been a particularly nasty partisan, joining Democratic newspapers like USA Today in attacking news outlets like The Federalist for their early coronavirus coverage, which was later completely (or very likely) true. It turns out that there is something.
This payment promoted a healthy global economy that helped Democrats and their allies around the world launder partisan opinions into newspapers, magazines, and television, presenting them as true and proven facts. And the participants became addicted to cash.
It's over now. Zuckerberg didn't just quit the program. He denounced it as completely false. in his messageHe ended fact-checking programs in favor of “community notes that look like We will refocus our content filters on content, allow political content to flow through our systems again, restart news sharing on our platform, and work with governments to fight censorship around the world. He even said he would move people responsible for “trust and safety and content moderation” from California to Texas, where there would be “less concerns about bias on the team.”
The result would be an absolute disaster for an organization built around “fact-checking” the global debate. The big retailers will survive, but the money-hungry groups will be summarily laid off, and many companies will face bankruptcy.
This isn't the first time Facebook has changed the landscape for content creators. After the 2016 election, when Democrats were lashing out at Hillary Clinton trying to figure out why she lost, they focused much of their anger on the media companies that had allowed Trump's content to flourish. Alarmed, Facebook responded by cracking down on the monetization of news content and banning conservative dissidents across the country. The result was not only the destruction of traffic on the American right. It decimated leftist companies like BuzzFeed. We've seen this story before.
But this time it's different. It targets specific sectors. It's a censored city built in the desert and entirely funded by Big Tech. This division is dedicated to Democratic Party policy overreach, creating mistrust, seriously harming businesses, and creating a kind of sharia to quash honest dissent at a time when honest dissent was desperately needed. It has functioned as a police force.
The cries of protest you hear are lamenting the loss of real tools from the authoritarian toolbox. There's a lot left, but once one is gone it's worth three toasts.
Federalist:Corporate takeover of 'fact-checking' was simply another patho Censorship by same party
Federalist: USA Today uses college students to censor media they hate
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In other news
Blaze News: The uncontrolled use of Ozempic means a sad and sagging future for the TL;DR generation.
You knew it was such a waste, right? As John Mac Ghlionn explains in Blaze News' lifestyle section 'Align':
In a world that increasingly demands instant gratification, Gen Z seems to be opting for chemical quick fixes instead of prioritizing health and fitness.
A new report has revealed that 37% of this generation plan to rely on GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic to lose weight in 2025, quit jogging and get the jab. The promise of easy weight loss is appealing, but the price is high. What is sold as a miracle cure is secretly laying the foundations for a public health disaster.
That's dire with a capital D.
When muscle mass decreases, the body collapses from the inside out. This is an especially harsh reality for the majority of people who are sedentary. Only 28% of Americans get enough exercise.
Although the clinical term “sarcopenia” may sound abstract, the consequences are not weakness, fractures, and, for many people, complete loss of freedom. Ozempic and his fat flame friends do more than just gain weight. These accelerate chronic muscle erosion, weakening the user's body and greatly increasing the likelihood of serious injury. Muscles are a type of armor. Without it, the body remains defenseless.
The metabolic effects of muscle loss are equally devastating. Muscles are central to insulin sensitivity and glucose regulation, both of which are essential for preventing diabetes and heart disease. When these systems become weakened, the body enters a vicious cycle of decreased strength, increased fat storage, and inflammation.
