Pirate's Cove

The Washington Post considers almost everything a Republican writes to be “misinformation”. Weirdly, they do not touch on any of the crazy spewed by Democrats (non-paywalled Yahoo version here)

This year, GOP election deniers got a free pass from Twitter and Facebook

Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate seeking to oversee Arizona’s election system as that state’s secretary of state, made a last-minute fundraising pitch on Wednesday using one of his favorite talking points: the looming threat of voter fraud.

Finchem falsely argued on Facebook and Twitter that his Democratic opponent, Adrian Fontes, is a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a “Cartel criminal” who has “rigged elections before.”

It wasn’t the first time Finchem spread unfounded election-rigging conspiracy theories on social media. In September, Finchem misleadingly posted that Fontes was being “bankrolled” by billionaire George Soros and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and they want to “RIG our elections & our voter rolls.”

Nowhere in the article does the WP show that Finchem is wrong. I also cannot find that specific accusation, though, Finchem does show that Fontes took trips sponsored by a Chinese Communist influence group. And Fontes does support open borders.

For years, Facebook and Twitter have pledged to fight falsehoods that could confuse users about America’s electoral system by tagging questionable posts with accurate information about voting and removing rule-breaking misinformation. But this electoral cycle, at least 26 candidates have posted inaccurate election claims since April, but the platforms have done virtually nothing to refute them, according to a Washington Post review of the companies’ misinformation labeling practices.

In August, Facebook said it had received feedback from users that its labels promoting reliable information were so overused that the company had decided if they did use labels it would be in a more “targeted and strategic way.” Late last year, Twitter started experimenting with newly designed misinformation labels that the company says led to decreases in replies, retweets and likes of falsehoods and an increase in people clicking through to the debunking content.

In Liberal World, everything that doesn’t help them is considered misinformation.

The Post reviewed thousands of social media posts on Twitter, Facebook and other, smaller platforms from nearly 300 GOP elected officials and candidates to evaluate how they have been portraying the upcoming vote over the past six months and the platforms’ reaction to that.The Post’s review relied on a previous Post analysis from October that examined every Republican running for House, Senate or key statewide offices to see whether they had challenged or refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.

Yet, they didn’t do this for the Democrats. No, no, don’t call the WP biased. It’s really not the job of Facebook or Twitter to moderate what is “misinformation”: people can look it up themselves. A Biden tweet, probably written by an intern, was flagged and had context added. That’s not a bad method, but, that could end up being overused, too. Regardless, the WP offers zero proof that any of the tweets and posts by Republicans are factually incorrect. We’re just supposed to take their word for it. The Washington Post is, itself, a leader in misinformation, spinning things to make them great for Democrats and bad for Republicans.

Politics has always included massive amounts of spin. Welcome to Politics 101. What the Credentialed Media doesn’t like is the ability of Republican candidates to get their message out, bypassing the CM. You can bet that the CM will use this as a reason for Democratic Party losses, especially for close races.