Tech

Zuckerberg Cites Unreliable Liberal Fact-Checker As Objective News Source

REUTERS/Robert Galbraith.

Alex Pfeiffer White House Correspondent
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Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday night outlined a plan to combat fake news on the social media giant and suggested that Snopes would take a role in this fight. Snopes, which claims to be a “myth-busting” website, has a proven liberal bias.

“Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others — like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes — to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.

He went on to outline a plan to combat fake news using third parties like Snopes. “There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.”

Facebook declined to say if Snopes is one of the fact-checking organizations they reached out to. A spokeswoman responded, “right now we don’t have anything more to share beyond what’s in the post from Mark.”

Zuckerberg’s post does suggest that Snopes would be one of those “respected fact-checking organizations” since he singled it out.

The Daily Caller has previously reported that Snopes’ main “fact-checker” has a history of expressing liberal ideas and dubious facts. The writer, Kim Lacapria, once accused the George W. Bush administration of “at least guilty of criminal negligience” in the September 11 terror attacks.

While writing for Snopes she dismissed the report that Facebook’s trending news workers suppressed conservative news as “rumors.” Facebook eventually fired the whole trending news team and replaced them with an algorithm. (RELATED: Liberals Furious Over Trump Victory Demand Changes To Facebook News Feed)

Also, when Snopes previously referred to a Daily Caller reporter in an article they included the word “reporter” within quotation marks. They failed to email any questions before publishing their story and questioned if the reporter was even at the Democratic National Convention. The reporter was in fact present at the DNC.

In other hit piece on TheDC, Snopes claimed there was no correction on a story that had one.