In recent years, a real-life equivalent to “the Ministry of Truth” has arisen with the rise of so-called “fact-checking organizations”. Currently, there are 118 such organizations that are “verified active signatories” (Archived link) of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)’s code of principles. The IFCN is a unit of the Poynter Institute that “was launched in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”

The official stated goal of each of these “fact-checking organizations” is to “fact-check” alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Specifically, the IFCN state that,

“We believe truth and transparency can help people be better informed and equipped to navigate harmful misinformation.” – Poynter Institute, IFCN. (Archived link).

However, as we will discuss, the reality is that, in many cases, these organizations are themselves actively generating disinformation and promoting misinformation. Their definition of “truth” seems to be that practiced by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In terms of “transparency”, these organizations apparently are accountable to nobody but themselves as the self-proclaimed arbiters of “truth”.

Often these “fact-check” articles might seem harmless, innocuous, and even useful. Naïvely, one might assume that if you disagreed with a particular fact-check, you could simply ignore it. However, they are much more consequential than you might think. This is because the top global social media platforms explicitly delegate these IFCN “independent fact-checker organizations” to evaluate “the truth” of content shared by the platform users. The social media platforms will substantially downrank or penalize users who are sharing content that has been “fact-checked” by one of these IFCN organizations.
As can be seen from the chart above, the number of monthly active users on these platforms represent a substantial proportion of the world’s population. Facebook has 3 billion users (nearly 40% of the world’s population); Instagram has 2 billion users (25% of the world’s population); and TikTok has 1.2 billion users (15% of the world’s population). [As an aside, TikTok also have a Chinese version, “Douyin”, that has an additional 0.7 billion users.]

Facebook and Instagram, owned by the same company, Meta, explicitly rely on IFCN-approved fact-checking organizations (link here; archived link here) to alter the information users see in their timelines, as described below:

“Fighting misinformation is an ever-evolving problem, and Meta can’t do it alone. We rely on independent fact-checkers to review and rate the accuracy of stories through original reporting, which may include interviewing primary sources, consulting public data and conducting analyses of media, including photos and video.

Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false on our platforms, we significantly reduce that content’s distribution so that fewer people see it, label it accordingly and notify people who try to share it. Fact-checkers do not remove content, accounts or Pages from our apps. We remove content when it violates our Community Standards, which are separate from our fact-checking programs.” – Facebook (2024) (Archived link)

TikTok’s fact-checking “partners” are also IFCN-approved organizations – see here (Archived link).

A major problem with most of these “fact-checker organizations” is that they do not provide any right of reply – or any mechanism for the people they accuse of spreading misinformation to even respond to the claims made against them. Nor can the victims of a “fact-check” get the social media platforms to review or withdraw the allegations made by the alleged “fact-checker” website because those platforms do not assess the accuracy of content themselves. Instead, the platforms insist that it is not their responsibility to evaluate the accuracy of a fact-checker’s claims.

Indeed, the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, recently admitted that much of the content that his platform was asked to be censored, “in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”:
Watts Up With That? who wrote for you fuckers that don't know who that is...use should get use to them by now.