About those "fact checkers"

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta would end its partnership with the network of fact checkers it had used to censor content, and would move toward a community notes mechanism instead. Under the current system, if a fact check group tags a claim or link as false, missing context, etc. Facebook and Instagram slap it with a notice, reduce its visibility, and punish the user who posted it by reducing the visibility of their posts in general (shadow banning). As a result of the flagging, far fewer people see the post, though Meta has never made concrete numbers available.

Leftists have reacted with alarm, decrying the loss of fact checkers, arguing that this will increase the spread of “misinformation”.

This is unlikely, and it rests on the assumption that these purported fact checkers are reliable and their fact checks accurate. This is false. They’re partisan leftist activist groups, have published an enormous corpus of false and misleading fact checks, are extremely biased in what they choose to fact check and what they ignore, and they lack a valid epistemic framework and the training needed to be competent and reliable.

We have a vast number of examples to draw from. Today I’ll just grab one from last week. A leftist team called VERIFY published this:

No, Los Angeles didn’t refuse to fill water reservoirs prior to fires

That’s odd. If you’ve followed the Los Angeles fires story at all, you’ve likely read about the fact that the 117 million gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty, and has been for 11 months. It’s all over the news — here’s the LA Times:

How does VERIFY resolve this discrepancy?

They don’t. They don’t even mention the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which was perfectly situated in the middle of Pacific Palisades. How is this possible? It’s implausible that they haven’t seen the news. Even leftist media reported it, and that the reservoir would’ve have made a difference:

“Had the reservoir been operable, water pressure in the Palisades would have lasted longer on Tuesday night, said former DWP general manager Martin Adams, an expert on the city’s water system. But only for a time.” (LA Times)

(The ambiguity about how much of a difference it would’ve made makes me think it would’ve been big, more than they’re saying.)

Yet, VERIFY doesn’t even mention the reservoir, and falsely claims that the water supply was not an issue. They open with:

“Los Angeles filled its water tanks earlier this week, prior to the start of the current wildfire outbreak.”

See what they did? They pulled a switch. The claim is about reservoirs, but they switched to tanks. Tanks are not reservoirs — they’re smaller and downstream. They’re fed by reservoirs.

There’s a clue when they say: “Even if the city has plenty of water available, an area’s fire hydrants will run out of water if the tanks aren’t being refilled at the same rate the water is being used.”

Yes, they’re refilled by reservoirs, like the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir.

So this fact check was cleanly false, inexcusably so. Los Angeles did “refuse” or fail to fill a reservoir — the Santa Ynez Reservoir. (Your interest in the excuses they make about needed maintenance will likely vary by your knowledge of what high performing and even normal organizations can do, how California governments operate, etc.)

NewsGuard

It gets somewhat more interesting. NewsGuard is a leftist NGO that assigns arbitrary “Trust Ratings” to media outlets. I say arbitrary because they don’t actually measure the reliability of the outlets by any valid method – they don’t take a huge sample of headlines and articles and rigorously assess them for false claims. They just have someone write a subjective synopsis along their several criteria and give a score. There’s no data, no study, no serious methodology at all, and even the little write-ups and scores are not public — you can’t look them up without paying.

They assign high Trust Scores to leftist media, including notably unreliable outlets like the Washington Post¹, and low Trust Scores to non-leftist media. In doing so, they’re able to harm non-leftist outlets, costing them ad revenue and hosting service, reducing their reach. For example, they gave PragerU a low Trust Score, which led prominent video hosting platform JW Player to boot them. PragerU isn’t even a media or news outlet — they produce videos on conservative philosophy, personal stories, and short documentaries. They had to scramble to find a different hosting service, one that wasn’t mindlessly using a leftist NGO’s ratings to “fight misinformation”. The implications are straightforward — if enough platform and infrastructure providers use NewsGuard’s ratings, non-leftist outlets could be kicked off the internet.

Amazingly, NewsGuard cited VERIFY’s false fact check in its newsletter.

Notice the Trust Scores. This is rich. VERIFY is so unreliable that they made the wildly false claim that no reservoirs were empty, yet they have a perfect 100. (And they’ve published many other false fact checks, and refuse to fact check egregiously false claims by leftist politicians like Gavin Newsom or Adam Schiff.)

And notice the switch is embedded in their summary — the claim says reservoirs, yet the Actually (☺️) refers only to tanks. Did NewsGuard not notice?

The outlets that accurately reported the empty reservoir have low Trust Scores. I have no idea how reliable those outlets are, and neither does NewsGuard, but they were more reliable than VERIFY in this case (if their only empirical claim was that the reservoir was empty). The issue of blame is potentially complex, might ride subjective judgments, and is a poor fit for fact checkers.

Outfits like NewsGuard and VERIFY are creating a reality distortion field. Anyone credulously reading their output would think none of the reservoirs were empty, that Republicans were liars to say they were, and so on. They and similar media outlets have cut a large population of Americans off from reality, and made them think that conservatives “don’t believe in facts”. It’s an extremely disturbing and unprecedented situation.

TEGNA

What is VERIFY, exactly? It’s a team created by TEGNA, which owns 68 television stations in the US, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks. TEGNA was formerly Gannett’s broadcast division, and split off in 2015.

For whatever reason, VERIFY is staffed by radical leftists. Like every other fact checking group in the US, they apparently only hire leftists, and these people are more activists than journalists. Even in the context of the strong leftist bias of legacy American media, VERIFY stands out as unusually extreme. Of their two journalists, one has pronouns in his bio, and the other has pronouns in her display name. That’s a less than 1 in 1,000 behavior even for leftists — it marks extreme fealty to the new leftist “gender” ideology, and I only know of one other person who does it. Even pronouns in bios is somewhat rare in 2025, even for leftists, and signifies a staunch leftist identity.

For purported journalists to have pronouns in bios, much less their display names, is a red flag. We have to be realistic — these people hate non-leftists, conservatives, Republicans, etc. Someone who identifies herself as “Megan Loe (she/her)” simply cannot be a fact checker on political topics (and everything is political to leftists — this is one of their tenets). There’s no realistic possibility that she will call out brazen falsehoods and lies by leftist politicians, or that she would favorably fact check a non-leftist noting, for example, that over 6,000 thousand American children have been mutilated on leftist “gender” ideology grounds (mostly girls age 12+ whose healthy breasts were cut off, and hundreds of genital mutilations).

Anything related to leftist gender ideology is obviously impossible for these two since they’re staunch adherents of that ideology. Another big clue is that the author of the above false fact check, Emery Winter, features himself wearing a cloth mask, outdoors, in his profile picture in 2025.

Again, let’s be realistic — this person will not soberly and impartially fact check political topics. Staunch leftists hate non-leftists and don’t contemplate sincere disagreement with leftist ideology or their beliefs — they truly do not comprehend disagreement, or leftists being wrong about anything. A leftist “fact checker” will see Republicans and conservatives as evil and stupid people who need constant debunking, and will overestimate their own intelligence and knowledge in relation to their targets. And the bottom line here is that the fact check was plainly false, and Winter made no mention of the empty reservoir.

This was an egregiously false fact check. What do you think the odds of a correction or retraction are?

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Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.

1. In my next installment, I’ll expose what might be the funniest fact check of all time, by Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post. It’s incredible that no one noticed it.