Free Republic

The headline from Politico’s “Playbook” would have been unthinkable eight years ago: “Meta sends Trump a friend request.” After all, Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is a political lightning rod in conservative political circles, especially after the $300 million worth of “Zuckerbucks” spent during the 2020 election to elect like-minded politicians. Yet lately, Zuckerberg has been singing a much different tune. He referred to President-elect Trump as “badass,” visited him at Mar-a-Lago, and donated one million dollars to his inaugural fund. This week, Meta made news by adding Dana White, a longtime Trump ally and head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship...

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday launched a page on his campaign website he says is to combat "misinformation and disinformation" being spread online and by political leaders regarding the ongoing wildfires in Southern California. He says the site will "continue to update and provide valuable, fact-based information to the public around policies, budget allocations, personnel on the ground and more.." The webpage is notably located on Newsom's campaign website funded by Newsom for California, and not on an official government site. “There is an astonishing amount of mis- and dis-information being spread online -- much of it by so-called leaders...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's announcement earlier Tuesday that Meta platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, were abandoning the East German style censorship by "fact checking" in favor of other methods caught just about everyone by surprise; see WHOA: Meta Ends Fact-Checking As Zuckerberg Vows to Restore Free Expression on Facebook – RedState. The most surprised were the people currently grifting off, sorry, I mean employed by Meta as fact checkers. According to reports, Meta's contract fact checkers only learned they were out of work when the rest of us did. Meta’s fact-checking partners claim they were “blindsided” by the company’s...

As I write this, the vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is living up to the hype as Vance is wiping the floor with Walz, leaving him stammering and staring as though he can't remember anything from his script except "But Trump!"AdvertisementWalz at the VP debate: pic.twitter.com/0a2J79LmDS— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 2, 2024I think Walz is going to vote for Vance. 😂 #VPDebate2024 pic.twitter.com/3EfxGxBDKt— under construction! (@PHX_LC) October 2, 2024The best part of the night so far, in my opinion, was when the CBS News moderators tried to "fact check" Vance on the...

John Solomon @jsolomonReports Breaking: Former top Clinton adviser Mark Penn calls on ABC to launch internal probe into whether debate was rigged From justthenews.com 3:30 PM · Sep 12, 2024

CNN anchor Abby D. Phillip on Wednesday sought to justify the presidential debate moderators’ uneven fact-checking of former President Donald Trump and not Vice President Kamala Harris, despite her numerous lies. “Just fyi: when there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact checking,” Abby D. Phillip posted on X. Her post came in response to criticism from the right over ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis’s constantly fact-checking Trump and letting Harris skirt by with falsehoods.

Former President Donald Trump shredded ABC News for what he considered a "rigged deal" on the debate stage after he went head-to-head against Vice President Kamala Harris on various issues. Trump tore into the network during "FOX & Friends," calling out co-moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis for only fact-checking him and refusing to call out the vice president for her false claims

Thursday’s presidential debate is “not the ideal arena for live fact-checking” former President Donald Trump, CNN political director David Chalian warned potential viewers Monday. CNN’s coverage of Trump often includes network personnel attempting to fact-check Trump in real time or trying to fact-check him immediately after live coverage ends. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was widely criticized last year for failing to successfully fact-check Trump during her town hall event. The audience cheered Trump’s performance, while Republicans lauded Trump’s delivery as one of the best by the former president. Chalian, who believes Trump “doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt on words,”...

CNN — President Joe Biden delivered his annual State of the Union address on Thursday. His statements were mostly accurate, a CNN fact check found, but he also made a smattering of claims that were false, misleading or lacking key context. Biden repeated his familiar misleading boast about how he had supposedly reduced the federal budget deficit, failing to explain that the decline overwhelmingly occurred because emergency pandemic spending from President Donald Trump’s tenure expired as schedule. He falsely claimed that “not anymore” would big companies be able to pay no federal income tax, overstating the impact of the 15%...

President Joe Biden gave a press conference Thursday night after the release of a report from special counsel Robert Hur … Biden was combative, forcefully rejecting Hur’s claims that he has a poor memory. But the president was also repeatedly inaccurate, making the claims that were clearly contradicted by Hur’s report. (1)Where the classified material was stored … Biden embellished his argument with a false claim. Biden said: “All the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked.”Facts First: The special counsel’s report says … classified documents, about Afghanistan,...

The Washington Post’s fact-checking department has yet again quietly updated — rather than corrected — its most-read story, which contained glaring errors about first son Hunter Biden’s laptop and an infamous dinner involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi. Glenn Kessler, the paper’s chief fact-checker, has made six updates and authored an entirely new article about The Post’s bombshell reports in October 2020 and May 2021 that revealed Hunter Biden introduced his father to Pozharskyi at Café Milano in Georgetown months after joining the natural gas firm’s board. The initial fact check relied on statements from Andrew...

Our world is becoming a creepier place with each passing day. Most of us just want to live our lives in peace without excessive governmental interference, but unfortunately the control freaks that are running things just can’t help themselves. Ultimately, they aren’t going to be happy until they are able to watch, track, monitor and control virtually everything that we write, say and do. This is one of the big reasons why they are gearing up to introduce “central bank digital currencies” all over the western world. Such digital currencies will make it much easier for them to control us...

We are going to need a new industry that simply spends its time fact-checking the so-called “fact-checkers.” That’s the story after a new landmark study published in The Lancet offered vindication to everyone who touted natural immunity to COVID-19 as an alternative to vaccination. For years, the powers that be, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House, and the press, dismissed the idea of taking natural immunity into account when debating vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. They were wrong, so much so that even the mainstream media are having to admit it. ... This study also puts to rest another...

Over the past few years, a cottage industry of “fact checkers” and “misinformation” experts has emerged to advance the left’s mission of silencing dissent to its agenda around the world. Analysis of the funding of these organizations leads back to a familiar figure: left-wing billionaire George Soros. The New York Post broke down the trail of Soros dollars linking a global network of organizations intent on suppressing and discrediting conservative voices online. Via the New York Post: Later in the year, heading into the midterms, in an open letter signed by 11 other leftist groups, the Soros-funded Leadership Conference on...

New documents reveal how the United States government used a secret Twitter portal to censor COVID-19 content that contradicted the government’s narrative. In its ongoing probe into Twitter’s censorship practices, America First Legal has obtained a fourth set of documents (pdf) exposing a secret Twitter portal, which U.S. government officials used to censor dissenting COVID-19 views in violation of the First Amendment. It’s a revelation Elon Musk described as “extremely concerning.” The documents reveal that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was collaborating with UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Mafindo to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook...

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich) blamed their lackluster performances in two separate debates this week on the debate moderators. During her debate with Whitmer, Republican challenger Tudor Dixon argued that “I am merely trying to call attention to the gap between the Governor’s 2018 pre-election promises and her performance in office. Rather than keeping the people safe from criminals she wants to disarm law-abiding gun owners. While rioting in America’s streets over the death of George Floyd was killing people and destroying property the Governor said she supported the ‘spirit’ of the defund the police movement.”...

The media has long downplayed and softened President Biden’s decades-long history of falsehoods, as most recently evidenced by a euphemism-filled New York Times report that referred to outright fabrications and lies as "folklore" stories with "factual edges shaved. The Times finally discovered Biden’s trouble with the truth on Tuesday but was widely mocked for using mealy-mouthed language in the report. The Times noted Biden has lied about being "raised in the Puerto Rican community at home," his academic record, his life story, being arrested when protesting civil rights, being arrested in South Africa, pinning a Silver Star on a Navy...

On a day when President Joe Biden’s mental faculties are being questioned again, a new report suggests the media is covering for the 79-year-old president in a way it never did for former President Donald Trump. In studying media fact-checking under Biden and Trump, the conservative Media Research Center said that the truth police have found “zero” examples of Biden lying or being 100% wrong despite his frequent verbal flubs and fabricated life stories...... “There were zero ‘Pants on Fire’ rulings about President Biden in his first 20 months. By contrast, Donald Trump has 10 in that time span. Biden...

The hypocrisy of Facebook’s fact-checking partners knows no bounds. In an act of discrimination against the Media Research Center, a Meta platform fact-checking partner threw a fit after MRC’s video division, MRCTV, dared to write about a video that showed President Joe Biden getting smacked with a white or yellow substance, depending on the photo or video. MRCTV managing editor Brittany Hughes published a piece April 13 headlined, “Yes, a Bird Just Crapped On Biden During a Speech.” Hughes quipped that “It appears a bird proceeded to crap on Joe Biden while the president was speaking in Iowa Tuesday, dropping...

A few days ago, I got an email from a fact-checker at PolitiFact. His name is Bill McCarthy. He said he was checking a quotation from me taken from my appearance on the “Ingraham Angle” on Fox News. We had an exchange of emails that gives a very interesting window into the otherwise obscure world of fact-checking. So I’d like to track our correspondence, because, after all, these are the kinds of checks that get people tagged, restricted, and even banned on social media. Here’s what I said on Fox: “If you follow Jan. 6 at the granular level with...