Independant "Fact-Checkers"
I'm going to preface this blog post by stating this is opinion.
In the recent years, there has been an increase in the prevalence of "fact-checkers," such as Politifact, Snopes, and others. While one may think that this increase would be a good thing, I personally do not believe it is. Have we gotten to an age where people lack enough common sense to check facts themselves? It surely seems that way.
This doesn't even mention another issue with these so called "fact-checking" websites, cherry picking of facts. While they claim to be neutral and unbiased, I personally no one can be fully unbiased. Politifact itself has a left-leaning bias, in fact, an article in US News titled "Whose Fact Checking Fact Checkers," written by Peter Ross, showed the several fact checkers checked more Republicans than Democrats.I don't care whichever way things skew, any skew is bad when you are trying to be a neutral fact-checker.
Then things get really ridiculous when you get to Snopes. In 2019, Snopes and the satire website The Babylon Bee got into a bit of a feud after Snopes labeled an article satire. The fact that a satirical article was believable enough to fool enough people to warrant a Snopes article is, in my opinion, a sad signs of the current times.
In the end, I'm going to have to whole-heartedly agree with Peter Ross, who will fact check the fact checkers?
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