Who watches the watchmen?
And who fact checks the fact checkers?
The Twitterati, as they were then, spat the collective dummy when the space cadet freed the bird, got rid of its fact checkers, and replaced them with community notes. They raged at the demise of their safe space and wept as their tightly controlled social platform was transformed into the wild west. And yet the world continues to turn.
Now, as Orange Don prepares to sit his fat arse down in an off-circular office at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Mark Sugarhill knows which way the winds are blowing. He's summarily fired the fact checkers righting wrongthink at F*c*book, to be replaced with…drum roll…community notes.
Who couldn't see that coming? Well certainly not the fact checkers themselves, who were blindsided.
What's surprising is the fact checkers that Meta has been using to date and, more pointedly, the lack of transparency at one of them; one which for years has been the go-to site for debunking media myths and internet rumours: Snopes. For it appears that Snopes doesn't fully abide by the standards of the International Fact-Checking Network.
Yes, for those of us who were living in ignorance, there is an International Fact-Checking Network, and it has standards.
Now, for anyone concerned that Snopes cannot be trusted to debunk age-old myths such as a London bus found at the south pole or a WWII bomber on the moon—or was the bus on the moon and the bomber in the Antarctic?—that's not the case. At least I don't think so anyway. No, its biases are more of a political nature, to the effect of supporting one of the major US parties over the other. Although what that does mean is that any debunking related to the US government over the last eight years, and of the last four in particular, may be suspect.
But no more suspect than SloJo himself.