Free Republic

Social media giant Twitter is taking upon itself the challenge of arbitrating what is truth and fiction about President Trump’s tweets. The reputed Minister of Truth at Twitter, Yoel Roth, whose job it is to determine that there is no such thing as mail-in ballot fraud, you imbecilic “tangerine racist,” “Nazi” lover, has determined that Trump’s prediction of voter fraud is “misleading.” Minister of Truth Roth made sure to refer people to news sites, manned by the same reporters who brought you that crack reportage on the Trump spying scandal. The president refers to the spying scandal as “Obamagate,” but...

The great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, in his classic Inferno described and classified the sins that the eternally damned perpetrate. One of the lowest circles in Dante’s Lower Hell – for those who pervert reason – is reserved for the hypocrites, who accuse others of deceit while guilty themselves. He describes the leaden coats they wear in the style of a monk’s habit... The stark image comes to mind with the constant Washington Post “news” reports detailing the supposed thousands of lies told by President Trump in his first three years. So let’s fact-check The Washington Post’s “fact-check”...

The AP’s statement has no basis in reality. There is currently no body of research that demonstrates people are less likely to take their lives in time of economic hardship. The pace of information during the COVID-19 crisis has been extraordinary. Last week President Trump said thousands could die by suicide as a result of the economic crisis created by the coronavirus.The Associated Press (AP) immediately released a “fact check” on the president’s prediction, saying it was false. Over the weekend, The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported more people died from suicides in east Tennessee than from the coronavirus. In the...

Twitter is experimenting with adding brightly colored labels directly beneath lies and misinformation posted by politicians and public figures, according to a leaked demo of new features sent to NBC News. Twitter confirmed that the leaked demo, which was accessible on a publicly available site, is one possible iteration of a new policy to target misinformation it plans to roll out March 5. In this version, disinformation or misleading information posted by public figures will be corrected directly beneath the tweet by fact-checkers and journalists who are verified on the platform, and possibly other users who will participate in a...

Facebook-owned Instagram is “fact-checking” satirical posts and memes on the platform via its third-party fact-checkers, and filtering them from hashtag and “explore” results. A spokeswoman for Facebook confirmed that satirical images of far-left climate activist Greta Thunberg had indeed been tagged with warnings that “fact-checkers” had rated the images as “false,” as originally reported by Summit. “We work with third-party fact-checkers to help identify, review, and label false information on Instagram,” said the spokeswoman. “When content is rated as false or partly false by a third-party fact-checker, we reduce its distribution by removing it from Explore and hashtag pages. In...

Our News Analysis Division has given this fact checker a rating of: Deeply Distorted Deeply Distorted Alexandra DeSanctis of National Review pointed out the silliness of what they call a "Fact Check" these days. On Monday, Snopes.com asked the question "Was a Baby Born Alive at 23 Weeks ‘Thrown in the Trash’?" The factual answer is "Yes." But Snopes had to define it down to a "Mixture" of truth and falsehood....because facts can be spun! What's True The co-owner of an abortion clinic in Florida did cut the umbilical cord of a baby who had been born alive before the...

Did you happen to catch this moment from Joe Biden’s campaign rally in Pittsburgh? As he worked to gin up the crowd and convince them that the Bad Orange Man wasn’t doing anything to help the little guy, he decided to take a swing at the 2017 tax cuts. Here’s what he said: There’s a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not. All of it went to folks at the top and corporations. Huh. That doesn’t seem to comport with what most reports have been...

Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler's latest "Zillion Lies" update on the president was headlined "President Trump made 8,158 false or misleading claims in his first two years." Nevertheless, leftists got extremely angry that Kessler would "obsess" over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mangling facts. Eric Alterman, who unintentionally wrote the Funniest Book of 2003 -- What Liberal Media? -- now complains that Kessler is obsessed in a romantic way with AOC. Er, when Kessler's written on her precisely once in 2019, and 12 times on Trump. The president is called out for 8,158 whoppers, and AOC is up, to what, three? (Salon...

Facts for the Fact Checkers: GAO: CRIMINAL ALIEN STATISTICS: Information on Incarcerations, Arrests, and Costs (2011)

Adding insult to injury: Breitbart News, the pro-Trump media outlet that is scorned by many in the mainstream press, has been fact-checking their mainstream counterparts with some success. Breitbart’s Washington political editor Matthew Boyle was first to call into question a CNN story on alleged ties between a Trump associate and Russia that was later retracted. Boyle was also reporting on an error in an Associated Press report when the newswire corrected and later rewrote the story. Together, the corrections and retractions amount to only a few stories out of the thousands published every day. But the high-profile nature of...

Further, these "fact checkers" have taken advantage of their platforms to select and evaluate politicians' and pundits' claims in a decidedly unfair and unbalanced manner. Finally, thanks to the willing cooperation of the world's dominant search engine and the leader in social media, "fact checkers" are transitioning into roles which could ultimately position them as de facto news censors.

(CNN) – The White House press secretary tried to twist a cap on reporters' questions Tuesday about the Trump team's alleged ties to the Kremlin. "If the President puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that's a Russia connection," Sean Spicer said. Thing is, Russian dressing isn't Russian. The mayo and ketchup concoction -- often dressed up with horseradish and spices -- was created in Nashua, New Hampshire.

At his press conference this week President Donald Trump asserted that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "gave 20% of our uranium to Russia." The self-described fact checking website PolitiFact quickly pronounced Trump's statement as "mostly false." "First of all, Secretary Clinton did not act alone," PolitiFact spokesman Nicholas Pecker pointed out. "She had the full backing of President Obama. Second, the deal was for 20% of the United States' uranium production capacity. That's a totally different thing. Finally, the uranium wasn't given to Russia. Former President Bill Clinton got a $500,000 speaking fee and the Clinton Foundation got more...

"I recognize … it is unprecedented, at least in modern times, to hold a conference to talk about special precautions that need to be taken because your opponent is a habitual liar. But that is the circumstance that we are in," Palmieri said Friday. She went on, and continued to work the referees by stating her team is worried about the moderators situation. "For the moderator to let lies … go unchallenged would give Donald Trump an unfair advantage, and we believe it is the role of the moderator, particularly in this case to call out those lies and to...

Ann B. Davis, aka Alice from “The Brady Bunch,” passed away this past weekend. This morning, MSNBC took a moment to remember her — by showing a picture of someone else:

In making his case for re-election in the face of historically high unemployment and sluggish growth, President Obama has a simple and straightforward argument. Things were terrible when I arrived, he says, thanks to Bush-era policies of tax cuts and deregulation. We stopped the decline, but the ditch was so deep that it will take time to get out. Still, we are making progress, even if it isn't as fast as everyone would like. So the last thing we want to do is return to the failed Bush policies that, he says, drove us into the ditch. That argument appears...

Fact-checking is evolving from a newspaper dominated activity to a favorite sport on the Internet. After all, all it takes is a computer and a search engine. One of the most popular activities is fact-checking the fact-checkers in the media. I thought I would give it a go after reading the fact-checkers at FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a blatantly Liberal organization. This should not surprise anyone since higher ed lists so far Left that Columbia Professor Nicholas De Genova only made news on the Right when he proclaimed "The only...

<p>Anyone watching the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night heard the number 4.5 million several times.</p> <p>"Despite incredible odds and united Republican opposition, our president took action, and now we've seen 4.5 million new jobs," San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, the party's keynote speaker, said.</p>

Seems like fact checkers need to do some fact checking of their own assumptions. Paul Ryan's speech last night included a reference to a GM plant in Janesville that closed, which Ryan used to criticize Barack Obama for failing to meet his campaign promises. A number of "fact" checkers jumped all over Ryan's anecdote to claim that he lied about the circumstances of the plant's closure. We'll just take one example, from the AP's "fact" check: RYAN: Said Obama misled people in Ryan's hometown of Janesville, Wis., by making them think a General Motors plant there threatened with closure could...

The negative job growth that began during the last year of Bush's presidency was perfectly normal, and even expected; it was the natural byproduct of the market correction. It was expected to last for about a year -- and, it did. Job creation was expected to return to normal in February of 2009, but as the chart shows, under Obama's dismal leadership, job creation recovered too slowly, taking a year to get to baseline, when it should have taken no more than three months.