For years, the Media Research Center has pushed the nonsensical narrative that fact-checking is “censorship,” because lies and misinformation should never be corrected, especially if they advance right-wing political narratives. Even when given the opportunity to defend that narrative, it utterly fails. Witness Catherine Salgado’s July 2 post:
A George Soros-funded fact-checking organization heads up a coalition arguing that fact-checks are … free speech. Huh?
The director of the Soros-funded International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the leftist Poynter Institute announced a statement gaslighting on behalf of 130 organizations at a global fact-checking summit.
“World’s fact-checkers issue ‘Sarajevo statement’ supporting fact-checking as free speech, not censorship,” IFCN director Angie Drobnic Holan proudly announced. However, this is false, as multiple social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have actively partnered with IFCN affiliates to deboost any content that has been fact-checked. Poynter is also notorious for trying to blacklist right-leaning media.
Holan, in effect, is attempting to twist around the meaning of what censorship really is, even though it received grants from one of the most prolific funders of censorship in America today.
Morever, fact-checking often operates as a harsh form of censorship online. For instance, fact-check interstitials on Facebook stop users from clicking through to view the content 95 percent of the time, according to the tech company. Facebook’s parent company Meta partners with Poynter.
Salgado did not explain why lies and misinformation deserve to be treated the same as factual information, or why alerting people to those lies and misinformation is a bad thing. She also offered no proof that Poynter has engaged in blacklisting of “right-leaning media” solely because of political bias and not because those media outlets promote, you know, lies and misinformation.
Instead, she continued to beat the Soros-bashing drum:
Soros gave $492,000 to Poynter for IFCN between 2016 and 2019 alone. In light of Soros’s $80 million investment in groups pushing Big Tech to censor speech ahead of the 2024 U.S. election, it is particularly concerning that the so-called “Sarajevo statement” highlighted election interference as supposedly important to “give the public accurate information.”
Holan was spinning herself silly trying to paint censorship zealots as victims of smear campaigns. “In the United States, political and legal attacks on the misinformation research community have pressured academic researchers to curtail work that aids the fact-checking community and widespread efforts to improve election voting processes,” she railed.
Of course, Salgado and her fellow MRCers are, in fact, engaging in smear campaigns against fact-checkers, media literacy promoters and organizations like NewsGuard and Ad Fontes seeking to promote accurately information online — and, indeed, it’s a part of that campaign to smear them as “censorship zealots.”
Only partisan activists like Salgado and the MRC would think it’s “gaslighting” to counter lies and misinformation online — it’s as if the MRC depends on those lies to advance their partisan narratives. And, of course, nowhere does Salgado explain why it’s bad to correct those lies.