Full Fact – a ‘fact-checking’ website funded by Google, Facebook and George Soros – has been lobbying MPs to include “health misinformation” in the Online Safety Bill. This would force websites to remove “harmful” “misinformation” relating to health – including off-narrative information about COVID-19, lockdowns, masks and vaccines – or face crippling fines.
Last week Full Fact – which received 70% of its 2019 declared funding from Big Tech companies – sent an email to its subscribers urging them to write to their MP and ask him or her to address the “gap” left by the Government’s rejection of the Labour and SNP amendment that would have added “health misinformation” to the online ‘harms’ prohibited by the Bill. Full Fact’s Policy and Parliamentary Relations Manager Alison Trew wrote:
Two years on from the outbreak of a global pandemic, it should be obvious that false or misleading claims about our health should be included in the types of online content addressed by the Bill.
A few weeks ago Full Fact’s Chief Executive, Will Moy, warned MPs that as it stands, the Online Safety Bill fails to meet the Government’s aim to make the U.K. the safest place in the world to be online.
Our fact checkers have seen first hand how COVID-19 misinformation has undermined public health, conspiracy theories have led to offline attacks, and disinformation – including on the war in Ukraine – has spread unchecked.
Digital minister Chris Philp told MPs this week that the Government agreed with the intention behind the amendment to tackle harmful health misinformation. And yet, disappointingly, the Government voted against the proposed changes.
This leaves a huge, and dangerous, gap in the Online Safety Bill. But there is still time for Parliament to close it.
Here’s the email in full.
Full Fact, which describes itself as “the U.K.’s independent fact checking charity”, is, according to some critics, a politically one-sided organisation with a history of partisan interventions in political debates. Government Minister Dominic Raab once said of it: “Who said Final [sic] Fact is the final arbiter of what the public get to see as the truth? There’s no God-given right, set in law. It doesn’t sound to me like they like the competition.”
However, various organisations including Google and Facebook, use Full Fact to inform them as to what ‘misinformation’ should be removed from their platforms. Worse, there’s a strong possibility that supplementary legislation accompanying the Online Safety Bill will instruct the big social media platforms to restrict or remove ‘misinformation’, forcing YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to remove any content designated as such by sites like Full Fact, or face swingeing fines from Ofcom (up to 10% of a social media company’s annual global turnover). Ofcom said last year that its “list of claims that could be considered false or misleading is provided to us by Full Fact”. It seems inappropriate, to put it mildly, that such a close relationship should exist between a state agency tasked with regulating big social media companies and a company that receives the lion’s share of its income from those very same companies.
Full Fact claims to be an “independent and impartial charity with a cross-party board”. But an investigation by David Scullion for the Critic found cast doubt on this claim.
The organisation claims to have a board of trustees with “members from the three main UK-wide political parties”. There is a Labour Peer (Baroness Janet Royall), a Lib-Dem peer, (Lord John Sharkey) but their former Conservative Party member, Lord Richard Inglewood, no longer sits as a Tory. When I asked Full Fact who their Conservative member was they pointed out that one of their trustees donates to the Conservative Party and that they have “representatives of different political parties” on their board. This is different wording which allows for the fact that they don’t, or aren’t sure whether they have a Conservative Party member amongst them. I pointed out that a donor was different to a member, but I did not receive a reply and the text on their website was not corrected.
Scullion notes that the departing editor was an ex-Mirror and Buzzfeed reporter, and concludes: “Full Fact is a charity with a small output of research compared to its size, funded primarily by big-tech and staffed to a large extent by former public sector workers or ex-reporters from left-wing media.”
Incidentally, Baroness Royall is the President of Somerville College which introduced mandatory unconscious bias training at the beginning of 2021. Not only were all students expected to take the course, but it was also mandatory for them to score 100% in the end-of-course assessment, which included such questions as: “Acknowledging your personal feelings about particular groups or individuals is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias.” Unless students answered “yes” to this question – an extremely contentious claim for which there is little robust research evidence – they would not score the “required” 100%. It was only after the Free Speech Union wrote to Lady Royall, pointing out that this requirement was almost certainly unlawful, that it was dropped.
Full Fact misleadingly claims no one has to listen to it: “We don’t ask people to take our word for any conclusion we make. We provide links to all sources so that readers can check what we’ve said for themselves.”
But when major internet sites and broadcasting regulators are relying on it to tell them what content to restrict or remove, and when it has a “Head of Advocacy” and a “Policy and Parliamentary Relations Manager”, its claims to merely be providing an advisory service look pretty threadbare.
Full Fact often gets things wrong. In February 2020 it joined in the now discredited effort to pour cold water on the lab leak theory, stating: “There’s no evidence that the 2019 coronavirus originated in a Chinese Government laboratory”, despite many scientists at the time suspecting, based on the evidence, that was the case. Last year the site claimed the Daily Sceptic was being misleading in reporting Government data showing infection rates higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. It wrote:
This data had already caused widespread confusion, because it seemed to show for the month in question (August 9th to September 5th) that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s were more likely to test positive for Covid if they had been vaccinated than if they hadn’t. In particular, a chart displaying the data seemed to give this impression.
Despite our pointing out to Full Fact that the Government data and chart didn’t “seem” to show this but plainly did show it, and this was not a result of “confusion” or a mistaken “impression” on anyone’s part and the only party guilty of ‘misinformation’ was Full Fact in attempting to muddy the waters about this, no correction was forthcoming.
Websites and other media checking one another’s facts is of course a worthwhile activity – and if anyone points out a genuine mistake in any of our articles we correct them. That’s one reason free speech is so important – it allows people to correct one another by drawing attention to new or overlooked evidence. But using politically one-sided fact-checking sites as a basis for censorship, as many websites and Government regulators are now in the habit of doing, is a fast-track to an authoritarian society where only officially approved speech and Government-endorsed ‘facts’ are allowed. It’s no surprise that Full Fact wants to use the Online Safety Bill to force websites to conform with the pronouncements of sites like itself. But that’s no reason for a Government that claims to care about freedom of speech to go along with it.
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Plan is being executed. They really believe they’re on the side of truth, honour, justice….
I do not thginbk so. They believe they are on the sde of the commercial interests which back them and the left of centre big government beliefs they stand for.
That too.
The Tories are digging their own grave if they even consider implementing policies like this from far-left bodies like Full Fact.
How long after being implemented would FF start censoring the Tories for misinformation? If they can do it to the democratically elected President of the USA, they can do it to Boris and chums.
The Tories are doing their usual act of being an anger sink while secretly encouraging the left to keep pushing in a direction most Conservative Party leaders want.
Hmmm. I think proof, if it were ever needed, to safely ignore the previous article – “Stop Panicking! YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Are Not Destroying Democracy”
I’d vote for the opposite. This whole drive for censoring communication/ expression online is based on the notions that The internet is terribly dangerous to all right-minded people!
and The state has a duty to protect them from getting harmed by it! That’s exactly the panicking (or rather, fear-mongering) the other article refers to.
Exactly. The headline seems to refer to the service, not the very dangerous people that own and control the companies and are trying to turn them into yet more agents of state power.
Are the Big Tech. companies that enforce what can and can’t be said destroying democracy? Yes. Is expression online destroying democracy? Yes and no. In theory, open & honest (and honesty is key here) conversation is a conduit for a more democratic and understanding society; all the studies referenced in the article support this. But… when conversation becomes guided (whether through the social media Thought Police themselves or whether through peer pressure coming from other sources) then a virtual reality bubble is created. Most people will post what they believe to be the right thing to say, not necessarily believing it themselves, and that in itself creates a vacuum – thought that goes against what appears to be popular is largely vented from online public discourse. With today’s obsession with virtual likes and creating virtual ‘friends’, people are generally more dishonest online than they are in-person. Sure, you’ll get people who feel it’s easier to express their true thoughts behind an online mask, but most people do the opposite – they express what they think will make them more popular. That is less true of a face-to-face conversation, where there are visual clues to what someone really thinks (even if they are saying something to the contrary). Even silence tells a story. Those subtle clues are missing from online conversation.
So, do I think that social media conversation is harmless if not censored by Big Tech. No, not really. It’s my belief that the faceless, isolated mechanism of conversation through social media is inherently flawed as it removes key elements of face-to-face conversation and means that other sources of peer pressure (MSM, politicians, woke advertisers etc) will create more dishonest conversation than in-person conversation. Dishonesty is a key threat to democracy and that’s exaggerated by social media with or without Big Techs intervention.
“Stop Panicking! YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Are Not Destroying Democracy”
One of the sharpest, keenest ripostes to a previous article ever seen on DS.
In the good old days we would be calling this an own goal.
I think you’ve misunderstood that. A recurring theme in the Gruesome is that uncontrolled communication on the internet, specifically, on Twitter and Facebooks is destroying democracy due to all the misinformation, radicalization, hate-speechization etc etc and that therefore, in order to save democracy, yet more censorship on the internat is urgently called for. And that’s what these headline alluded to, whose intended meaning was (most likely) No, dear woketards, democracy is not being destroyed by lack of internet censorship [, rather the opposite].
Background article:
https://fullfact.org/blog/2022/may/why-parliament-must-act-on-the-online-safety-bill/
The headline line is
Why Parliament must act on the Online Safety Bill
MPs can take action to protect us all from harmful misinformation
I admit this leaves me speechless. But it’s certainly worth knowing and thinking about.
The key question is who do the Conservative Party consider their opposition?
If they see the Labour Party as their rivals, then they don’t allow this amendment in a million years.
If on the other hand the major parties (Cons, Lab & SNP) view the public and social instability as their main threat and each other as reluctant allies to defend the system from which they benefit so much, then it goes through.
I think this post (I made somewhere else) is also germane to the censorship/anti-free speech trends that are alarming so many of us …
Dr. Robert Malone just published an excellent piece showing how the corporatized media doesn’t have any “qualified” journalists to really understand the (now corrupt) scientific process.
I somewhat disagree with Dr. Malone, who seems to think SOME corporate journalists are qualified and doing a credible job of presenting facts and analysis.
I haven’t found any examples of this in the thousands of mainstream Covid articles I’ve read by now. Or, if there are a few examples of real journalism (and I guess there have been a few), the journalists forget these pieces and still support the bottom-line (that our trusted public health agencies and scientists are giving us the real truth and should not be challenged).
With his essay today, Dr. Malone is making a point I’ve been trying to make for years now. Until we have a real “watchdog” press that is not afraid to challenge the pronouncements of trusted authorities, nothing is likely to change for the better. (This is why The Daily Skeptic is so important).
In Steve Kirsch’s dispatch today, he lists 17 (!) trusted institutions that probably shouldn’t be trusted anymore. But all of these institutions do not have the same influence. If someone could wave a magic wand and “fix” one of these institutions, this institution should be the Fourth Estate. Because, if through some miracle, many journalists in this profession started doing their most important job, we would actually have a chance to expose the other 16 corrupt institutions.
But if this does not happen, all 17 of these powerful organizations and institutions are going to remain co-opted and corrupt. Of all the institutions that affect the lives of the planet’s inhabitants, the press is really the most important. Today, most people still expect politicians or bureaucrats to “make things right.” They also expect the CDC and NIH-controlled “science” to provide the answers and solutions.
But all of these institutions are a major part of the PROBLEM. It was the leaders and actions of these institutions who got us into the mess we are in today. This would never have happened if the “watchdog” press had been doing its job. Nor will this be corrected until the watchdog press starts doing its vital job.
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/most-journalists-are-scientifically
Here is Steve Kirsch’s list of the 17 institutions (“and more”) that people are beginning to lose trust in …
“The other thing I know is that the scale of this deception is unprecedented. When this unravels, which I have no doubt that it will, it will destroy our trust in:
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/the-cdc-says-severe-reactions-to
Since the turn of the millennium in the UK we have had the carrot and stick NGOs Science Media Centre and Sense About Science: the one largely exists to tell journalists what to say and the other to punish them if they don’t say it. There are annual award ceremonies for science and medical journalists and their associations which are obscenely patronised by industry. There are effectively no science/medical journalist left who resist the system, and of course it has been made even more egregious by the arrival of Gates money.
I have not yet read the full text but how the hell can a biased media organisation funded by Google, Facebook and one of the biggest trouble causers on the planet be a “charity?”
Absolutely stinks. Orwellian indeed.
Such highly political organisations, acting also as front organisations for overseas based large commercial interests, should not be able to get or retain charitable status. Who will do anything about this – no one; the political class find it all too convenient.
Thursday last UK Column News showed extracts from a Somerville College meeting in which old girls Dame Kate Bingham and Dame June Raine boasted about their roles in the Covid debacle. Raine’s presentation about the MHRA talked about going “from watchdog to enabler”. Well, what does regulation mean and what about the MHRA’s “independence” vaunted by Matt Hancock and Sir Jonathan VanTam?
I’m still not even sure what misinformation even is.
It would appear to be “facts I don’t like”
I stumbled on Full**** facts during the panicdemic. It is a propaganda agency and should have its charitable status removed. Congratulations on this expose.. They can get their funding direct from the Chinese regime instead. But they must first be asked to change their name as it is currently in breach of the trade descriptions act. I welcome any suggestions from readers of alternative titles.
I suggest Full-of-it Fact or [vegan] Full fat fact.
It is okay, China is well on its way to owning the world. So if little britain insists on banning free speech, it is simply preparing to hand over this country to the CCP. Won’t that be fun.
That’s not going to be a problem. We’ll just rip off their facemasks and cough at them.