Fact Check: Video Claims Meta Dropping Fact-Checkers Due to Bias at Snopes

all right most people watching this are probably quite familiar with the term fact Checkers but just in case you're

not it's a term that implies arbitration of the truth often times with regards to politics at least in the United States

and it's a concept that is extremely Rife with controversy on one side you have a common belief that misinformation

is an existential threat to democracy and that those who spread it or otherwise say things that are incorrect

as per the agreed upon narrative at the time should be completely removed from social media and public discourse on the

other you have Advocates of free speech who believe that suppression of that right is a far worse offense than any

misinformation could ever possibly be while rigidly asserting that whether or not something is true or goes against

public perception or even offends the sensibilities of their fellow citizens is entirely irrelevant because the right

of the speaker to say it transcends any potential right for the government businesses or social media platforms to

stop them for the past few years it almost felt like background noise at least in my view it was certainly

happening factchecking all over the place but there wasn't really anything we could do to change it private social

media companies are going to do whatever it is they want to do and maybe long-term impacts like governmental

regulation over a multi-year period resulting from certain elected officials might have some sort of impact but boots

on the ground normal everyday people had very little effect on the overall concept of fact Checkers without getting

too far into the weeds factchecking was particularly prevalent during the rise of covid-19 and is also extremely common

when it comes to political discourse a couple of high-profile examp examples would be when fact chers adamantly

labeled or shut down rather discussion of the Wuhan lab League theory for covid-19 the origins of it or the hunter

Biden laptop story which took hold at the climax of the 2020 presidential race you might actually see down below this

video right now some kind of stupid little blue Banner with a link to like Wikipedia or something because I said Co

and Hunter Biden laptop and YouTube is making sure you know the truth with some boilerplate he the facts kind of

statement about whatever issue it perceives me to be talking about I had that happen recently with a story about

leaked files on a hacking Forum because I mentioned Area 51 with this dumbass definition of what area 51 really is

down below even though it had basically nothing to do with the actual video and there was nothing even remotely untrue

that I said in its entirety but regardless fact Checkers over the past eight or so years it feels like became a

pretty ubiquitous concept online that is they were until now it's a bit of an unexpected news break in my view but

recently Facebook now called meta is apparently distancing themselves from the idea of fact Checkers immediately

before the incoming Trump Administration takes power which has led to a very interesting divide in public opinion

about whether or not that's a good thing as I said earlier one side says yes the other says no but I want to take a

deeper look at the announcement what it means and who it impacts because in my view it's a very clear turning of the

tide if you will and I wouldn't be surprised if we look back on this 5 or 10 years from now as an inflection point

in the world of online discourse my premise is very simple fact checking in its basic rudimentary form is absolutely

good and extremely necessary however fact checking as we see it on social media here and now today is a complete

joke governed and manipulated by people who are deliberately bastardizing the concept as a result of their own

intrinsic bias and if we can't strip the system down to a much more neutral Baseline it really just shouldn't exist

here's the announcement from Z ber he did a 5minute video talking about what type of changes will be made and it's

also widely reported in the news cycle but the gist of it is that they're dialing back their content moderation

algorithms reintroducing more Civic content to the algorithm that's probably going to suck I can already feel it

eliminating their use of fact Checkers in favor of a community sourced alternative similar to what Twitter is

doing under Elon Musk and a few more things that I honestly don't really care about because I don't use Facebook the

important thing here obviously is the removal of fact Checkers which hopefully signals a wider shift in the social

media space but let me explain precisely why I think that way because again the basic premise of fact checking is

completely necessary in a modern Digital World I'll start with this Facebook uses a well-documented approach to

factchecking which relies on an organization called ifcn which is the international factchecking Network that

system however was only implemented in 2020 prior to that Facebook used more direct Partners such as snopes.com for a

multi-year period ending in 2019 interestingly snopes.com is actually one of the signatories for the ifcn which

means that Facebook is actually still working with them to a degree it's just not a direct link between the two

companies considering its direct partnership from 2016 to 2019 and its current approved status with the

international factchecking Network snopes is the example I chose to focus on for today while discussing the

concept of factchecking Facebook is obviously doing this because it perceives factchecking to be detrimental

to its business by itself that means nothing but one of the reasons directly cited by Mark Zuckerberg is political

bias and loss of trust well in order for Snopes to be approved by the ifcn it has to go through an evaluation process

which has happened four separate times in the past eight or so years twice during the time it was directly

partnered with Facebook bear with me here one of the criteria in that process reads quote nonpartisanship policy

evidence required please share evidence of your policy preventing staff from direct involvement in political parties

and advocacy organizations end quote and this is very obviously on its face A good rule to have because when

factchecking on social media is so inextricably linked to politics every single day you really can't have people

arbitrating the truth that are donating to or directly affiliated with one side of the political Spectrum it's called

bias and even if that writer or the employer thinks that they're capable of being unbiased they're not here's the

problem if you look at the actual assessment that was done here in 2018 which was during their partnership with

Facebook you can see the responses that were given by the person applying or rather organization applying and the

response that Snopes gave reads quote see the statements at the head of the staff page and the revenue page end

quote that's it well deciding to go down the rabbit hole because why not go down the rabbit hole I went and looked at the

staff page where way down at the bottom there's a note that says quote members of our editorial staff are precluded

from donating to or participating in political campaigns political party activities or political advocacy

organizations end quote that sounds fine right but something told me to start checking so I picked a name and I

checked I picked Jordan ly who is a senior reporter obviously part of the editorial staff working at Snopes for

the past eight years in various different positions and I looked up political campaign contributions which

turned up this right here showing a bunch of donations by people named Jordan ly to various committees and

politicians that's no big deal but small problem five of those donations in 2018 come from someone named Jordan lyes who

was employed at the time by a company called bardav and this is where I went way far down the rabbit hole because

bardav was apparently a joint company created by Barbara and David mikkelson founders of Snopes where each of them

owned a 50% share it's the parent organization of snopes.com and and connecting the dots now Jordan lyes

while working for Snopes at the level of video producer was donating actively to act blue which is a democratic super

pack and that was the first name I chose from here it got even worse it kind of spiraled out of control because bardav

the company was subjected to a battle for ownership rights around 2016 because the wife Barbara mikkelson sold her

shares to a company called proper media I'm not going to get too bogged down right now but that sale and the

situations afterward is eventually led to a lawsuit which contained allegations by Barbara mikkelson that her husband

Snopes founder David mikkelson had been embezzling money defrauding the company and spending the money on prostitutes

but wait there's more because not only did David mikkelson divorce her he also married another Snopes employee a

staffer named Alyssa Young Who according to a Daily Mail investigation maintained a website advertising her Services as an

escort while she was working at Snopes these are the people factchecking you I'm still not done because later down

the line in 2021 I you not it comes out that David mikkelson who still had his ownership stake in Snopes served as

an officer and apparently also worked for them in an editorial capacity was suspended because he wrote dozens of

plagiarized articles between 2015 and 2019 under an alias and these are the people that are factchecking you still

not even remotely done because if that was the Domino chain I found after randomly picking a single name off of

their staff list what was I going to find next let's find out the next name I picked trying to spread out across

various different positions was the chief Revenue officer Justin wole one person shows up in the political

donation archives who simultaneously gave money to act blue as well as the Biden campaign but the employer of this

person is Salon I thought to myself well that can't be him but that little voice came back in my head because the person

this person working at Salon was also a chief Revenue officer what are the chances of that happening so I checked

the LinkedIn page and wait a second Justin wo according to his employment history on his own social media

simultaneously worked as the chief Revenue officer at Snopes and Salon in 2020 which is when the donations were

made two for two and this time at least he chose a company other than bardav to put on the public record for his

political campaign contributions which I mean that's a choice you're employed by these two different companies and you

chose to put Salon but anyway we have two employees at Snopes right mid and high levels actively donating to a

political campaign during an election cycle while the website that they are employed by and help to operate is

factchecking at what seems to be like a very disproportionate ratio in my view after that I bounced between names for

kind of a while either finding nothing or being unable to directly prove that the person from the same state with the

same name who said unemployed on their donations was actually the same employee working for Snopes though it's very

possible that some of them were but then I found Anna I have no idea how to pronounce the last name but this is Anna

who is a straightup reporter for Snopes as in the people writing the fact checks well Anna comes up with a lot of small

donations to act blue in 2020 with an employer listed as annual reviews which it turns out is in fact the company that

she worked for in 2020 according to her LinkedIn profile which made three separate instances where Snopes

employees including those on the editorial team were either actively donating to a democratic Super PAC

during their employment or donated directly prior to their employment in that position remember as per the ifcn

criteria Snopes was asked for evidence of their policy preventing direct involvement in political parties it

doesn't specify who or how or when it just says involvement and sure you could technically make an argument that

donations directly prior to your involvement at a factchecking website for one political party don't compromise

you or violate the policy or that donations that were made when you were a video producer or a CET executive at the

company don't matter because you weren't technically on the editorial team per se but after going down the rabbit hole on

their founder who was simultaneously serving on the editorial staff plagiarizing articles for 5 years and

allegedly stealing money to buy hookers and marry an escort who was also employed by the

company I don't know I I think I'm fresh out of charitability here as to this company's credibility and their supposed

effort to be the unbiased jury of Truth as I went about making this video specifically the part about the founder

I read a really good quote from a writer at Forbes named cev laru I think is how you say it here it is quote while

technology pundits decry the black boxes of the algorithms that increasingly power comp companies like Facebook they

have forgotten that even the human powerered sites offer us little visibility into how they function at the

end of the day it is clear that before we rush to place factchecking organizations like Snopes in charge of

arbitrating what is truth on Facebook we need to have a lot more understanding of how they function internally and much

greater transparency into their work end quote I like that a lot because after Facebook has now disbanded its

factchecking initiatives a lot of people are crying and crying about how misinformation is going to be a huge

problem spoiler it already is a huge problem and companies like Snopes do not help with that Mark Zuckerberg made very

particular statements about bias and loss of credibility which we need to understand comes after a multi-year

partnership directly with Snopes and then after a partnership with the ifcn which verified Snopes as a trusted

signatory on four separate occasions despite the abundantly obvious political contributions that people all over their

company have made and continue to make I find it completely impossible to sit here and do anything other than Flatout

agree with Zuckerberg bias is a problem Snopes in my opinion is very clearly biased and I don't really expect to find

anything different if I switch over to another factchecking organization because the people that position

themselves to do this for the past decade or two have repeatedly proven who they are my final take on the situation

is that factchecking as an underlying premise is completely necessary and extremely valuable having the ability to

look at something objectively and discern truth is a skill set that everyone should have but in place of

that if they don't because not everyone does or even cares to some sort of unbiased thirdparty verification would

be in theory amazing sadly that's not what we have instead we have a particular group of people who sought

power for a particular purpose and continuously allow their own bias to infect the work that they do which led

to a complete erosion of trust in basically their entire Institution which is now seeing significant steps

towards abolishment in an article from wired we see quote one editor at a us-based factchecking organization that

works with metas who was not authorized to speak on the record told wired that meta's decision is going to eventually

drain us out and further down stated by the director of the ifcn which Facebook most recently worked with quote fact

Checkers have not been biased in their work that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to

exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction end quote but that statement from the director is fact Che

false because even the ifcn at least according to what I see is failing objectively to properly vet their

partners and contributing to an atmosphere where the value of factchecking is now widely and rightly

disputed as it stands the industry of factchecking has sustained a tremendous blow to its reach meta platforms

includes Facebook Instagram and threads which is a clear shift in the atmosphere of who gets to speak and who gets to

speak about what I have no idea if the end result of this new direction is a good thing no one really does yet but

it's certainly not unexpected I mean the announcement was unexpected but the loss of faith in the institution of

factchecking is not unexpected at all given how it's gone for the past few years but yeah it kind of feels natural

considering how obviously the fact Checkers have abused their positions in so many different controversial moments

that's it the video title says the death of fact Checkers which I believe may be true from an instit perspective and I'm

not really sad about it Community sourc moderation is a really good thing to try so let's try it I hope it works of

course they do need to moderate illegal content and other severe infractions obviously of course of course but

run-of-the-mill theories speculation and opinions especially ones that diverge from the common Collective yeah we don't

need people like Snopes over here to fact check that if you want to support the channel check out the links down

below a special VPN deal locals in patreon Channel memberships I'm trying to Branch away from ad Revenue so check

those if you want to and more but I'll cut it there and stop rambling as always thank you all for watching question

everything and have a nice night [Music] [Music]