The CEO of disgruntled leftist fact-checker Snopes — yeah, the same website that got raked over the coals for "fact-checking" the satire site The Babylon Bee — had the chutzpah to excuse away the truth-gatekeeping industry’s notorious, censorial treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“Let's look at the most famous example of Facebook censoring content, and that was the Hunter Biden laptop story,” said Snopes CEO Chris Richmond during the Jan. 11 segment of MSNBC’s two-hour, weekend lefty spitballing puppet show Velshi.
After host Ali Velshi bemoaned the media being the “scapegoats for a lot of things,” Richmond was teed up to deflect blame away from the fact-checkers for how Big Tech suppressed the New York Post bombshell on Hunter Biden. “And we say, well, it was fact-checkers, right, who told Zuckerberg to limit the reach of that? No, it was the government. So, Facebook complied with the government, and then the fact-checkers get the blame.”
It’s too bad the MRC has receipts that completely upend Richmond’s gaslighting.
MRC Free Speech America conducted a 2022 study of the numerous instances between 2020 and 2020 of how Meta’s fact-checkers did their utmost to bury the Hunter Biden story. Although Facebook undoubtedly broke its own policy by preempting the fact-checkers in reducing distribution of the story as prima facie misinformation under pressure from government entities, its circle of Ministry of Truth operatives had no issues walking in lockstep, including Snopes. Here are some examples.
Oct. 28, 2020: A Snopes fact-check repeated the notorious 51 intelligence officials' false claims that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation.” “This story raised some immediate red flags, which included the fact that more than 50 former intelligence officials suspected the story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” Snopes misled.
April 6, 2021: A Snopes fact-check wrongly tags a social media post quoting Hunter Biden saying the laptop mentioned by the New York Post “could be” his as “misleading.”
March 17, 2022: Snopes was forced — over a year after the fact — to update an Oct. 15, 2020, fact-check that tried to dismantle the authenticity of the New York Post story by noting that The New York Times had authenticated the emails housed on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Of course, the 2020 election had long since passed and the damage was already done. Oops!
The irony of it all is that Facebook’s previous third-party fact-checker policy permitted the fact-checkers to decide what content gets restricted. Facebook’s fact-checking partners, which are certified by the George Soros-funded Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), are supposed to flag Facebook posts found to be “False,” “Altered,” “Missing Context,” or “Partly False.” Facebook may have been impulsive in jumping ahead of its own system on the Hunter Biden story, but the fact-checkers had no problem cooperating with its antics and burying it further. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced he was ditching his company’s fact-checking program for Facebook and Instagram to reorient the platforms to allow for more free speech.
But what Meta, Snopes and their Orwellian counterparts did in 2020 must never be forgotten.
Research conducted by The Polling Company for the Media Research Center after the 2020 election found that the media, Big Tech and the fact-checkers’s censorship (not just government) of the Hunter Biden story helped throw the election to his dad. The survey found that 45.1% of Biden voters in seven key swing states said they were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son, Hunter. According to the survey, full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, which would have given the former president 311 electoral votes.
In short, Richmond — and Velshi for that matter — can go pound sand.
Former MRC Free Speech America Associate Editor Brian Bradley contributed to this report.
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