The term fact-checker is a household name, and reached its peak popularity during Donald Trump’s 2017 white house win, “because of Russian interference,” as some Democrats might say.
During Trump’s four years of presidency, the American people found left-leaning news and media outlets depending on these mysterious fact-checkers to either dismiss the information as false or deem it worthy of being truthful.
Today, the list of websites and organizations that fact check is growing, which makes you wonder why we need more fact-checkers. Just several years ago the general public did a pretty good job on their own using tried and true critical thinking methods and old-fashioned research.
Snopes.com, co-founded in 1994 by Barbara and David Mikkelson, was one of the first online fact-checking websites and grew in popularity, initially, because of their ability to answer questions without much fluff. Conveniently, Snopes began receiving donations from GoFundMe and Facebook starting in 2018, the year after Trump was elected into office.
George Soros, an acquaintance of Hillary Clinton, recently helped launch a new fact-checking company, Good Information. Soros funds millions into social groups like Black Lives Matter.
Lead Stories, which represents themselves as a neutral party, recently partnered with Facebook and the Chinese Communist Party (linked to TikTok). It was founded by Perry Sanders, known for his hefty donations to the democratic party. The National Pulse dug into the company after Lead Stories deemed a true story to be false, and discovered the “organization staffed almost entirely by Democratic donors, half of whom had worked for CNN in the past.”
PolitiFact, known to be a loyal Democratic lapdog, is owned by the Poynter Institute since 2018 and has offices in both St. Petersburg, Florida, and in Washington DC. The website started in 2007 and coined the phrase “Truth-o-meter.” In 2010 PolitiFact begin showing its bias when deeming a true statement by Rand Paul to be false.
FactCheck.org, whose political lean to the left is no secret, especially during the Trump administration, has accepted funding from Facebook, Google, and the Annenberg Foundation.
These so-called “fact-checking” websites seem to have a strong political bias, which doesn’t help disseminate straight-up facts, from fiction to opinion. It might be naive to think the majority of the fact-checkers are doing the world an honest service by helping us to determine what is a “fact” or not.
