
Candace Owens: “The Fact-Checkers Are Lying for Democrats.”
Conservative writer Candace Owens has had it with the fact-checking industry, and she’s not taking their biased, fictitious propaganda lying down. And, with lawyers at her side ready to sue the pants off some of the primary offenders, Owens is already getting results. This week, PolitiFact backed down from one of their articles in which they accused her of “falsely” saying that Joe Biden was not the president-elect. Owens not only compelled the site to take down the article but to post a correction admitting that their original assertion was out of bounds.
The trouble started when Owens posted a video on November 12 using the caption: “Joe Biden is literally and legally not the President-elect. So why is the media pretending he is?”
That ruffled PolitiFact’s feathers, and they slapped a “false” rating on Owens’ video. That would be bad enough in a vacuum; the real problem, however, is that PolitiFact is a partner with Facebook. And when they label a video or post as “false,” it has an immediate impact on how (or whether) that post is shown to social media users. In other words, it hurts a content creator’s bottom line – an extraordinary amount of power to give to sites that have shown that “fact-checking” is a fluid, inexact science. And that’s being kind.
Owens wasn’t about to stand idly by while PolitiFact took money out of her pocket.
“I wanted to show that these fact-checkers just lie, and they usually go unchecked because most people don’t have the money, don’t have the time, and don’t have the platform to go after them — and I have all three,” she told the Daily Wire.
With the help of her lawyers, she succeeded in getting the site to back down from their original rating.
“Correction: PolitiFact originally labeled this video false in our capacity as a third-party fact-checker for Facebook,” they wrote in a subsequent tag. “On Nov. 20, an appeal to that decision was made on behalf of Ms. Owens. PolitiFact approved the appeal on Nov. 20, determined that a correction was appropriate, and removed the false rating.”
To be clear: Joe Biden will not officially be the “president-elect” until the Electoral College casts their votes for him in December.
As for Owens, she is determined to keep holding fact-checkers accountable.
“These people are sitting back thinking they’re the gods of tech; opinion-checkers, they’re censorship lords,” she told the Daily Wire. “I want to make it so there’s no incentive for PolitiFact, USAToday, Lead Stories to sign-on to be a fact-checker. I want to show that they can get sued and lose money. So, what is the point of them taking on that liability on behalf of Facebook?”
Well, as they say: money talks and BS walks. And sites like PolitiFact have been spreading a whole lot of the latter in recent years. Maybe, when it’s their wallet on the line, they’ll think better of it.