A newly sprung organization called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) has drafted a code of principles of news websites across the world to accept. Yesterday, Facebook announced that it would work with this organization and other third party fact checking organizations to crack down on the ‘fake news’ proliferating on its social media platform.

New international 'fact-checking' network has been criticized for left-wing bias

A spokesperson for the social media giant says that Facebook will rely on this third party fact checkers to determine if a story is fake. If a story is disputed by the fact-checking, then it will be marked as disputed. These stories will not be removed from the site altogether but will appear lower in the News Feed than other stories which have been marked as legitimate.

Despite the fact that the IFCN have claimed that they are committed to non-partisan reporting, transparency, and fairness, there are already concerns about the make-up of the organization.

IFCN is funded by George Soros

IFCN is hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies which is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the Omidyar Network, the Craig Newmark Foundation and the National Endowment for Democracy. All of these are large left-wing social organizations which suggest that there is an agenda in this supposedly independent fact-checking organization.

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies has come under criticism in the past for its controversial journalism programs, one of which was accused of deliberately suppressing the threat played by international Islamist terrorist activity. An expose by Fox News found that journalists enlisted in the program were being taught to “keep the death toll from Islamic terrorism in ‘context’ by comparing that toll to the number of people killed every year by malaria, HIV/AIDS, and other factors.” They were also taught that the term ‘jihad’ means internal struggle. They were also taught to make sure that sources that they spoke to didn’t have an agenda when it came to passing on information, but the organizations they were told to watch out for were exclusively right-wing racist groups.

All of this has suggested to critics that the new organization is likely to be strongly critical of right-wing news stories and may give a softer reception ‘fake news’ from a more left-wing perspective. Whether these fears will be realized should become apparent in the coming weeks and months.