Leftist fact-checkers target media outlets like The Babylon Bee to give social media platforms an excuse for censorship, the company’s CEO, Seth Dillon, told independent journalist Tucker Carlson.
Dillon broke down how fact-checks from outlets such as Snopes and USA Today lead to platforms such as Facebook censoring content, during a Dec. 18 interview with Carlson. Dillon told Carlson that, “Fact-checking is one of the methods that is employed by the lovers of censorship to guard the narrative not the truth,” before explaining how social media platforms justify their censorship by pointing to fact-checkers. When Carlson referred to fact-checkers as the “triggers that set into motion the censorship apparatus at the social media companies,” Dillon agreed.
Echoing Carlson’s point, Dillon stated that Big Tech companies and fact-checkers exonerate themselves from scrutiny by pointing to each other: “The fact-checkers are the way of [the social media companies] getting out of the way and saying, ‘Well, we’re not the ones determining, we’re not the arbiters of truth,’” Dillon said. Adding to that point, Dillon drew attention to Facebook. “Facebook could go, could punt to Snopes or whoever else, USA Today, whoever’s doing the fact-checking and say, ‘We’re not censoring you. We’re not removing your content based on arbitrary rules. We have third party fact-checkers. They’re objective and they’re the ones deciding what’s true and what’s false and what can stay and what goes.’”
The satirist preceded to blow up that narrative, addressing a Babylon Bee article, “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” which was ludicrously fact-checked by USA Today. Dillon said, “But the USA Today fact-check on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death that was funded by grants from Facebook, so Facebook paid USA Today to write that bit.”
The USA Today article, which reviewed whether the Ninth Circuit succeeded in raising former Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg from the dead, acknowledged Facebook at the end of the article: “Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.”
Dillon repeatedly ripped these fact-checkers over the course of the interview, accusing them of getting “the facts wrong on purpose” and being “super selective about what they fact-check.”
Earlier in the interview, Dillon said his team had threatened to sue Snopes for deliberately misinforming people. Disturbingly, Dillon laid out the consequences of being targeted by a fact-checker: “ [Snopes] were literally maligning us and suggesting that we were misinforming people on purpose and then Facebook was saying that they were going to demonetize and deplatform us because we were fact-checked by Snopes–saying you can’t spread fake news on our platform.”
Dillon said that his website had been fact-checked dozens of times and that Snopes had fact-checked the Babylon Bee at least twenty times.
Dillon also summed up the fact-checkers antipathy towards the Babylon Bee by saying that according to leftists, “the reason our jokes aren’t funny is because they aren’t riding on the back of truth; they aren’t carrying a message of truth; they’re pushing a narrative; they’re based on a narrative, so the joke isn’t funny because its rooted in a lie.”
In other words, the implied truths present in Babylon Bee articles, for example, the leftist bias of the Ninth Circuit implied by the Ginsburg article, contradict the narrative that the fact-checkers wish to push. Many of these fact-checkers, including USA Today and Snopes, became signatories of the code of principles of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a creation of the Poynter Institute. Leftist billionaire George Soros gave $493,000 to the Poynter Institute from 2016-2019, almost of which was earmarked for the IFCN.
Conservatives are under attack! Contact Facebook headquarters at (650) 308-7300 and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment and provide an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
