“They Used Us For Crisis PR” – Facebook’s Factcheckers Are In Open Revolt
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Sun, 12/16/2018
A group of former and current factcheckers hired by Facebook to flag false news have come forward to say they’ve “lost trust” in the social media giant after it did little to actually crack down on fake news. “They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” Brooke Binkowski, a former editor at Snopes, which partnered with Facebook for two years, told The Guardian. Another journalist said, “We were just collateral damage” — at a time during and after the 2016 presidential election when “fake news” was a front and center topic in national debate.
Not only has Facebook ignored the expertise of the very factcheckers it hired, but those interviewed for the explosive Guardian report point to the hypocrisy of Facebook executives over the recent Soros scandal, wherein the company admitted to paying a Republican PR firm to cast liberal critics as operatives for liberal financier George Soros, following a shocking exposé in a Nov. 14 New York Times report which shed light on a wide scope of questionable damage control techniques employed by the social media giant in the wake of several scandals. Essentially Facebook’s crisis PR firm pushed a Soros conspiracy in order to smear critics in a bizarre fake news planting false flag scenario likely personally ordered by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg herself.
Sanberg had also come under controversy within Facebook’s employee ranks after ordering an investigation into whether the billionaire activist had been shorting the company’s stock while calling it a “menace to society” in a blistering speech that same month at the World Economic Forum. Citing these scandals and general apathy for actually implementing factcheckers’ expertise journalists working in coordination with Facebook are now pushing to end the controversial media partnership which involves established media as well as factchecking outlets outlets like the Associated Press, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, ABC News, and Snopes acting in tandem with Facebook to flag fake or questionable news.
Concerning the revelations over the Soros conspiracy smear campaign Facebook recently admitted to, The Guardian report found that was a major tipping point for the factcheckers:
“Some said Facebook’s hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit critics – fueling the same kind of propaganda factcheckers regularly debunk – should be a deal-breaker.”
The Rest…HERE
