What if you were in the middle of a phone conversation and the line suddenly went dead because you mentioned a topic like vaccine injury that the service provider considered to be misinformation?  You would probably have two immediate questions: “How does a business know what’s true better than I know myself (especially if I do my own research)?” and “What’s to keep the service from self-dealing — using its influence to push its own agenda?”

As fake news has become a national concern in the U.S., internet watchdogs are emerging to weed out and flag incorrect, falsified and nonsourced stories. Most have websites that people can visit, and one has a plugin that can be downloaded from Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Microsoft’s desktop and mobile Edge.

Certainly, websites with odd names and strange domains that end in “.com.co” and websites that carry non-bylined, nonsourced stories that are found nowhere else on the internet should raise your suspicion meter. But internet watchdogs may not be ethical or virtuous either.

The “protection” these organizations offer sounds like a great idea since everyone wants the news and information sites they visit to be trustworthy. The problem is, who is checking the checkers? Who finances them? Do they have an agenda? Are some watchdogs calling news “fake” just because it threatens their backers’ products, as we have seen with pro-GMO and pro-chemical voices? Sadly, the answer is often yes.

In fact, the conflicts of interest with many internet watchdogs are so blatant it brings to mind the joke about how a sleazy lawyer tells his client “go to hell” — he says “trust me.”

The Rise and Fall of Snopes 

One of the calling cards of a fake news site according to Forbes writer Kalev Leetaru¹ is that it appears as a “’wilderness of mirrors’ — creating a chaotic information environment that so perfectly blends truth, half-truth and fiction that even the best can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not.” 

So, when Britain’s Daily Mail ran a scathing exposé on the fact-checking site Snopes in 2016,² the exposé itself looked like fake news. It included claims that Snopes was founded by a husband-and-wife team, Barbara and David Mikkelson, who fabricated a nonexistent society. After their divorce, said the Mail, the husband embezzled $98,000 to use for prostitutes and hired his new wife, Elyssa Young, a former escort and porn actress as website administrator.

But, writes Leetaru, after reaching out to David Mikkelson for his comments, he discovered the Daily Mail exposé was not fake news after all.³

“It was with incredible surprise therefore that I received David’s one-sentence response which read in its entirety ‘I’d be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects in general because I’m precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement from discussing details of my divorce.’

This absolutely astounded me. Here was the one of the world’s most respected fact-checking organizations, soon to be an ultimate arbitrator of ‘truth’ on Facebook, saying that it cannot respond to a fact-checking request because of a secrecy agreement. 

In short, when someone attempted to fact-check the fact-checker, the response was the equivalent of ‘it’s secret.’

It is impossible to understate how antithetical this is to the fact-checking world, in which absolute openness and transparency are necessary prerequisites for trust. How can fact-checking organization like Snopes expect the public to place trust in them if when they themselves are called into question, their response is that they can’t respond.”

Do the Internet Watchdogs Have Political Leanings?

It is bad enough that Snopes had many secrets and nontransparencies, but it also had political leanings. Young, Mikkelson’s new-wife-turned-Snopes-administrator, had run for Congress in Hawaii as a Libertarian in 2004 on a “Dump Bush” platform.

Over recent years we have heard a lot of compelling evidence that mainstream news aggregators suppress conservative news and views. “Like handicapping a horse, Google appears to weigh down conservative news sites,” says Alan Gray, publisher of NewsBlaze, an alternative business and world news newspaper. “More liberal sites take all the first page positions and conservative news is pushed back to Page 2, 3 or nowhere at all. This makes conservative news financially unviable.”

Progressive and alternative websites that challenge the status quo are, of course, also sidelined and unable to achieve financial viability. “Before the war against alternative media, OpEdNews.com came out at the top of Google search results for progressive news,” says publisher Rob Kall. 

“After Google changed its algorithm, we along with most alternative, non-mainstream news sites, were buried pages deep. This has had a huge effect on our traffic.” Clearly biased news selection can be as dangerous as fake news. This is how Leetaru puts it:⁴

“Think about it this way — what if there was a fact-checking organization whose fact-checkers were all drawn from the ranks of Breitbart and Infowars? Most liberals would likely dismiss such an organization as partisan and biased. Similarly, an organization whose fact-checkers were all drawn from Occupy Democrats and Huffington Post might be dismissed by conservatives as partisan and biased …

In fact, this is one of the reasons that fact-checking organizations must be transparent and open. 

If an organization like Snopes feels it is OK to hire partisan employees who have run for public office on behalf of a particular political party and employ them as fact-checkers where they have a high likelihood of being asked to weigh in on material aligned with or contrary to their views, how can they reasonably be expected to act as neutral arbitrators of the truth?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3nB4fGljTY