Facebook’s fact-checkers

 

WASHINGTON POST

Facebook’s fact-checkers have ruled claims in Trump ads are false — but Facebook is doing nothing about it.

Fact-checkers were unanimous in their assessments when President Trump began claiming in June that Democrat Joe Biden wanted to “defund” police forces. PolitiFact called the allegations “false,” as did CheckYourFact. The Associated Press detailed “distortions” in Trump’s claims. FactCheck.org called an ad airing them “deceptive.” Another site, the Dispatch, said there is “nothing currently to support” Trump’s claims.

But these judgments, made by five fact-checking organizations that are part of Facebook’s independent network for policing falsehoods on the platform, were not shared with Facebook’s users. That is because the company specifically exempts politicians from its rules against deception. Ads containing the falsehoods continue to run freely on the platform, without any kind of warning or label. 

Enabled by Facebook’s rules, Trump’s reelection campaign has shown versions of the false claim on Facebook at least 22.5 million times, in more than 1,400 ads costing between $350,000 and $553,000, a Washington Post analysis found based on data from Facebook’s Ad Library. The ads, bought by the campaign directly or in a partnership with the Republican National Committee, were targeted at Facebook users mainly in swing states such as Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida and Pennsylvania.

Those were not the only times Trump’s campaign has taken advantage of Facebook’s policy allowing politicians to lie with impunity, something the company does not tolerate from nonpolitical advertisers

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Fact-checking organizations that partner with Facebook also have ruled that Trump ads have made untrue claims about Biden’s positions on school choice and health care for immigrants, as well as on the effectiveness of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, yet ads including these claims have been allowed to stay on the platform and carry no warning label, The Post’s review found.

Biden’s campaign has not taken similar advantage of Facebook’s leniency about political claims. Fact-checkers working with Facebook have found far fewer misleading statements from him or his campaign, a review of their work since May found.

Facebook created its fact-checking program in December 2016 as a key part of its response to the rampant misinformation spread on its platform during the presidential campaign that concluded with Trump’s victory.

The company signed up some of the biggest names in fact-checking, such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, which long considered curbing deception by politicians as central to their institutional missions.

But Facebook excluded from its fact-checking program statements by politicians, a policy formalized last year in an announcement denounced by many Democrats, civil rights groups and independent disinformation researchers. They complained that Facebook was removing one of the few checks on deceptions by Trump as the 2020 vote loomed.

Critics particularly warned that the ability of political advertisers to narrowly target demographic slices undermined transparency and created the opportunity to rapidly and strategically push falsehoods far more easily than in broadcast ads, which typically are seen by everyone in a particular area — allowing obviously misleading statements to be challenged.

Facebook has defended its position by saying that political speech should be as unfettered as possible and noting that traditional forms of political advertising — on radio, television and in mass mailings — are not required to be free of falsehoods.

Concern about falsehoods in Facebook advertising stems from the rampant lies, distortions and disinformation that flooded the platform in 2016, including by Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which used rubles to buy ads in which the operatives pretended to be American political activists. U.S. intelligence officials later determined Russia’s goal was to divide Americans along racial, social, religious and other political fault lines and to help elect Trump.

But Trump’s routine use of false and misleading claims during his presidency, along with his heavy and sophisticated use of social media, has fueled concern that unchecked disinformation would be a problem during the 2020 election season. 

PolitiFact, part of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, also has had combating political lies at the core of institutional mission since its founding in 2007. Editor in chief Angie Drobnic Holan said the claims of politicians should get more scrutiny, not less, though she praised Facebook for having a fact-checking system that goes beyond what other platforms do. 

“I feel like they’re giving politicians a privilege they don’t give to ordinary people, and why would they do that?” Holan said. “The politician’s exemption, from a fact-checking point of view, doesn’t make a lot of sense. They’re giving a break to power.”

Could A Second Term Mean More Gridlock?

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/07/164609577/ornstein-could-a-second-term-mean-more-gridlock
President Obama has been re-elected. Democrats and Republicans have maintained their respective majorities in the Senate and in the House. So does this mean there will be more partisan gridlock? Fresh Air talks with political analyst Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.



President Obama has been re-elected. Democrats and Republicans have maintained their respective majorities in the Senate and in the House. So does this mean there will be more partisan gridlock?
Norm Ornstein, a writer for Roll Call and a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that it's a mixed message.

While it's a substantial victory for Obama, Ornstein says, "I think we're going to see conflicting themes in the Republican Party. They held the House of Representatives despite low approval of Congress — didn't suffer serious losses there, and House Republicans are going to come back saying, 'We've been vindicated.' "
For moderate Republicans, Ornstein thinks Obama's victory is a crushing defeat. He says the Republican Party could become a minority party for a very long period of time when it comes to the presidency — "unless they can broaden [their] appeal, especially to Latino voters, who made up for the first time a double-digit share of the electorate and are growing."

With Congress coming back next week to deal with the so-called fiscal cliff and other issues, Ornstein says, "there's going to be a lot of soul-searching, and a lot of jockeying for position in the Republican Party. And if you're [House Speaker] John Boehner at this point, or [Senate Republican Leader] Mitch McConnell, you've got some heavy thinking to do."

Ornstein is known for his bipartisan approach to public policy. He co-founded a bipartisan election reform group and a campaign finance reform group that played a role in drafting the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which put some limits on campaign spending.
In his latest book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, co-authored with Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, Ornstein says that although he has no partisan agenda, "it's time to acknowledge how far the Republican Party has veered towards tolerating extreme ideological beliefs and policies, and how the GOP has embraced cynical and destructive means to advance political ends over problem-solving."

On whether the new Congress will be more or less polarized

In 2010 a lot of those Blue Dog moderate and conservative Democrats lost as well. And on the Republican side, there's a shift, if you can believe it, even more to the right - one major reason being that a lot of those Tea Party freshman, as we call them, had challenges in primaries from the right. They mostly prevailed, but the lesson that you draw from that is move to the middle and you're vulnerable, and your vulnerability is not in a general election, it comes in a primary.
So the challenge to find middle ground, common ground in the middle when there is no middle, is substantial, and you know, I've been thinking a lot lately about the challenge to John Boehner.
"About the only way he can get things done ... is going to be to bring things to the floor that will probably have at least as many Democrats, if not more, supporting [them] as Republicans. And that is so alien to the contemporary Republican Party in the House. And it's not as if other leaders like Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy will have his back — they will have his back, dirk in hand. So it's a real challenge.
"And of course it becomes a huge challenge for President Obama to try and figure out how he can use inside leverage, and maybe something he didn't do much in his first term — using that bully pulpit and going to the public to try and push them to act in areas where there's an urgent need to act."

On the influence of the Tea Party post-election

"We use ['Tea Party'] as a catchall phrase ... but it's really almost the radical wing of the Republican Party. At one level it was pretty devastating, if you think about the fact that Republicans have now, in several instances, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Senate races where they had surefire winners: 2010 with Sharron Angle and Nevada; Christine O'Donnell in Delaware; this time in Indiana with Richard Mourdock; in Missouri with Todd Akin. This was not a good night for them at that level.
"On the other hand, almost all of the Tea Party freshmen elected in that huge class — 63 seats gained for Republicans in the House in 2010 — held on, and they have some new compatriots joining them as well. They're a serious force within the Republican Party. And of course one of the real challenges for the more mainstream and pragmatic Republicans is, how do you control those forces which bring you energy but ... can also bring you loser candidates?"

reform the filibuster rule

"We've seen the filibuster used in the last three or four years in ways it was never used throughout our history. And it's not just the rule — the rule's been the same since 1975 [when the Senate reduced the majority requirement from two-thirds to three-fifths, or 60 members]. It was a deliberate misuse of the rule. ... The whole idea behind Rule 22 as it is ... is that you could have a minority, not necessarily a partisan one, feel so intensely about an issue that they're willing to put themselves on the line, to debate around the clock, to sleep on mattresses outside the chamber, to take the issue to the country.

What's happened since the rule's change in 1975, and especially in the last few years, is you don't have to do any of that. You lift your little finger and say, 'I intend to filibuster,' ... and to stop that process, the majority needs to produce 60 votes. We had a spectacle, a couple of times in the last Congress, where Democrats had to bring in 92-year-old Robert Byrd, out of his hospital bed basically ... to provide that 60th vote. And instead, if you basically say, 'If you want to keep blocking action, [to] keep debate going, you have to consistently provide the 40 votes' — it's different.
"It used to be that before we had this last change, it took two-thirds of those senators [who were] present and voting. So if the majority said, 'You want to bring the place to a halt, we'll do that, we'll go 'round the clock,' [then] the minority had to keep its members around — because if they didn't show up, you could get two-thirds of 50 ... members of the majority to stop debate and move forward.
"Now, the minority only has to keep one or two people around to note that there's no quorum of a majority of members, and to block unanimous consent action. And it's the majority that has to keep its members on the couches and the mattresses going around the clock, so it doesn't work in the traditional fashion."

Why partisan officials oversee voting

"We are the only country that does this. Every other democracy uses independent authorities to handle the administration of elections. And basically it's got a couple of roots; the single largest root is we have traditionally handled elections at the state and local level. Now, that includes of course all the federal elections, and Congress does have the constitutional authority to regulate the time, manner and place of federal elections. [But] we've left it to the states, and the states, over many decades, decided that elected officials, secretaries of state, would [be] running elections.
"Nobody, I think, thought this through, [and] the result was something that is really terrible. It's the equivalent of having an NFL game where the referees are part owners of one of the teams. It's just a terrible way to run an election process. It evolved without forethought, but now it's there."

Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem."

It's true. That's the reality of it. This is different from what we've seen before. And you know, it's not a criticism of conservatism, and it's not as if I want the Republican Party to be demolished or disappear. I want two vibrant parties, and the Republican Party's going to be a conservative party, but it's lost the problem-solving element and it's moved from being conservative to being radical.
You know, you have a sizable group, including leadership coalition in the party, that basically has become dismissive not just of public policy since Franklin Roosevelt but since Teddy Roosevelt, wanting to demolish the entire regulatory state and basically an awful lot of the functions that we have.
You put that together with pretty dramatic and radical positions in many cases on social policy, you put that together with a campaign money system that has careened out of control, and it's not healthy.


The Australian system of mandatory voting

In Australia, you don't have to vote, but if you don't show up at the polls where you can cast a ballot for none of the above, and you don't write an excuse - I was sick, I was traveling - you're subject to a fine of roughly 15, now it may be $20. And that's increased turnout to over 90 percent in every election in the seven decades they've been doing it.

If you know that your base is going to turn out and their base is going to turn out, that you don't have politics driven by I'm going to scare the crap out of my base to get them out there or suppress the other sides. You focus on the voters in the middle, and it changes the issues you talk about and the way you talk about them. If I could do that, and if I could change the Supreme Court so that we didn't have terrible, destructive, foolish decisions like Citizens United coming down the pike, I'd be a happy camper.

The Misery of Present-day Political life

You think about 20, 25 years ago and the stereotype, and I think it's an accurate one, is that people in a community would go to somebody and say you've had an exemplary record. You've done so many things in your law practice or your business, or as an educator, now it's time to give something back to public service. We'd like you to run for Congress. And you'd get a lot of those people running.
What if you tried to do that today? You'd go to somebody and say you've had an exemplary life. You've done so much. You've built this reputation. We want you to run for Congress. First thing that's going to happen is (technical difficulties) his or her forces are going to raise millions of dollars with the express objective of trashing you and shredding that reputation. And they will do a victory dance in the streets.

If your kids come home from school crying and saying they can't go back anymore because everybody's ridiculing you, you'll do the same to your opponent and maybe you'll win. And then you'll get there and you'll go back and forth between two residences and nothing will get done because of the tribalism.
And every spare minute you'll run out of the Capitol grounds to do call time so you could raise money for yourself and your team, and to guard against some alien predator group that can parachute in behind your lines with two weeks to go in the campaign and spend $20 million sliming you further. Isn't that wonderful?

And the miracle is that we still get some good people who are willing to go through this craziness to serve. But let's face it; increasingly we're getting people who do it because they are true ideologues and this is a crusade, or because they are cynical opportunists who see it as a springboard to something else. It's - or people who are going to figure if I make it I'll get more money than I could ever have anywhere else.

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