It’s an experience and a sentiment that I’ve heard over and over again from Trump supporters in Minnesota and Wisconsin over the past few times.
In an attempt to stem the flow of viral misinformation on its platform, Facebook has hired third-party fact checkers over the past few years to label misinformation as false.
The long-standing mistrust in the mainstream media among conservatives – many of whom have been taught by Republican leaders – now extends to fact-checkers working for Facebook.
“I feel that the viewers are not looking in either direction,” another Trump supporter in Bemidji said, “immediately they are going to the conservative sites. [and] says, “That’s wrong.” Then they pull it, and they do not go to the liberal grounds, and that is the true lies. They are the real liars out there. ‘
In the United States, Facebook employs about 10 fact-checking organizations, including two with ties to extremely conservative stores
“We have nothing against anyone. We do not have an agenda. We are looking for facts and we are checking right and left,” he told CNN. “It just so happens that there is a lot more on the right to check facts. It’s just mathematical.”
Duke is not the stoic stereotype of the librarian that comes to mind when people suggest a fact checker.
“I’m just a boy from Georgia,” the six-foot military veteran told me in his southern appeal, “to try to do something for our country and our society. And journalism does it, with fact-checking. ‘
He often receives calls from annoyed Facebook users when they realize that a post they shared has actually been checked. He says he even received death threats that were investigated by the FBI.
When I met him, he was playing a voicemail from someone who was angry that Duke had made false allegations that former Vice President Joe Biden was wearing a hearing aid during the first presidential debate.
‘Hey, fucks, whoever you are,’ begins the voicemail, ‘I hope you die, please drink bleach and die. You are deceiving the American people and you are a democratic cap. ‘
Duke did as he regularly does and he called the person back. He tried to reason with him.
He passed the phone to me and I spoke briefly with the man who identified himself as an independent voice for Trump. “I’m much more conservative than the Republican Party,” he said. Knowing that he was talking to a CNN reporter, he convinced me that CNN was a biased outlet, and accused us of painting conservatives in a negative light, even falsely portraying them as homophobic. (He may have forgotten that he called Duke a ‘f * ggot’ in his voicemail.)
Duke said the threat he receives is not exclusively from the right. “The most vicious, aggressive response” he has ever received was after checking on Senator Bernie Sanders. The malice, according to Duke, comes from the so-called ‘Bernie Bros.’
“It’s not partisan work. Sometimes its outcome can benefit one side or the other, but we apply the same standards on both sides,” Angie Drobnic Holan, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, told CNN on Wednesday.
She said there is currently more misinformation being posted from right-wing sources than from left-wing ones. This is due in part to Trump, she said, as many of his supporters repeat things he said that are not supported by evidence and facts.
Politicians are exempt from fact checking on Facebook, which means they can spend millions of dollars on fake ads if they so choose. The policy has been repeatedly defended by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
Holan said PolitiFact, which was founded in 2007, long before Facebook worked with fact-checkers, was investigating the statements of both Republicans and Democrats. She pointed out that PolitiFact had given Biden a number of “pants on fire” values - PolitiFact’s way of pointing out the biggest inaccuracies and lies.
Fact-checkers should “not concentrate the fact-check unnecessarily on one side”, it reads.
Some Trump supporters do not buy it – despite the facts.