Follow the Money

PolitiFact is funded by the Poynter Institute, which receives major grants from Google, the Knight Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Facebook's fact-checking program — which determines what content gets suppressed in your feed — is operated by organizations that receive direct payments from Meta for their services.

This isn't conspiracy theory. It's public information, available in annual reports and IRS filings. The organizations that decide what's "true" on the internet are funded by the companies whose platforms they're supposed to be policing.

If a pharmaceutical company funded the FDA's drug approval process — which, actually, it does through PDUFA fees — we'd call that a conflict of interest. When tech companies fund their own fact-checkers, we call it "fighting misinformation."

The Selection Bias

Fact-checking is presented as neutral adjudication. In practice, it's editorial curation. The decision about what to check is itself a form of bias. When PolitiFact checks 47 Republican claims and 12 Democratic claims in a given month — as it did in February — the disparity isn't evidence of which party lies more. It's evidence of which party the fact-checkers consider worth scrutinizing.

The rating systems compound the problem. "Mostly true" and "half true" are subjective judgments that depend entirely on which aspects of a claim the checker chooses to evaluate. A statement that is factually accurate but contextually incomplete gets rated "misleading." A statement that is technically imprecise but directionally correct gets rated "false."

These aren't facts. They're opinions with a verification badge.

The Platform Power

The real issue isn't the fact-checkers themselves — it's the platform enforcement mechanism they enable. A "false" rating on Facebook triggers algorithmic suppression that can reduce a post's reach by 80% or more. On Google, demoted content functionally disappears from search results.

This gives a handful of organizations — funded by a handful of companies — effective editorial control over what billions of people see online. No newspaper editor in history has wielded that kind of power. And newspaper editors, at least, were accountable to subscribers.

When your audience trusts a guy with a microphone in his basement more than your institutional fact-checking apparatus, the problem isn't the guy in the basement. It's the institution.

The Alternative

Transparency. Disclose funding sources on every fact-check. Publish selection criteria. Apply consistent standards across parties. And most importantly, separate the fact-checking function from the platform enforcement mechanism. Let users see the check and make their own judgment — don't algorithmically suppress content based on one organization's ruling.

The fact-checkers aren't referees. They're players. And it's time the audience understood the game.