Fact-Checks Have Become Tools to Censor & Suppress Online Political Speech & Discussion
Fact-checks that include misinformation are immune from criticism and discussion as they are used to fact-check any source that questions their findings - Kafka would blush.
Dinesh D'Souza’s 2,000 Mules documentary is reportedly doing very well at the box office grossing more than $1M in its first 12 hours online.1 In fact, in less than two weeks it grossed more than $10M making it the most successful political documentary in a decade.2 This success was in spite of a coordinated effort to suppress discussion of the documentary and the concept of election integrity on social media through the creation of an ‘instant’ fact-check by Ali Swenson from the Associated Press titled, Fact check: Gaping holes in election fraud claims of ‘2000 Mules’ movie.3 The article appeared in over 200 papers across the United States and was used by social media to censor the study and the documentary.
The AP’s ‘fact-check’ articles are automatically included in misinformation algorithms used by social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to programmatically censor and suppress discussion about the target of the articles. Ironically, the ‘fact-check’ articles themselves are often riddled with errors and misinformation. For example, we fact-checked the AP’s fact-check on 2000 Mules ruling it “FALSE” in our own article titled, Fact-Checking the AP's Fact Check on 2000 Mules: The AP's hit piece on Dinesh D'Souza's documentary that ran in over 200 newspapers is full of gaping holes, flawed assumptions, and blatant speculation.4
Within 24 hours of publication, anyone who attempted to share our fact-check of the AP’s fact-check of 2000 on social media received a warning that we are spreading misinformation about misinformation. Since the publication of the AP’s ‘fact-check,’ additional fact-checks about the documentary have been linked to articles like ours triggering misinformation algorithms. Each of these fact-checks has been as flawed as the AP’s original hit piece on 2,000 Mules but they each have the effect of broadening the scope of big tech censorship and suppression of discussion of the documentary.
In fact, the only ‘fact-check’ I’ve read that brings up a compelling issue (one that I have discussed previously) is the Dispatch’s Fact Checking Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘2,000 Mules’. The film’s ballot harvesting theory is full of holes.5 Khaya Himmelman points out,
In the film, D'Souza relies on surveillance footage supposedly showing “mules” dropping off ballots at drop boxes. But the footage doesn't show this. The biggest issue, as Garrett Archer, data analyst at ABC15 in Phoenix and former senior elections analyst at the Arizona secretary of state’s office points out, is that we don’t see any surveillance footage of the “mules” going to drop boxes more than once.
There is NO doubt that if D’Souza was able to show videos of one mule dropping off ballots at multiple ballot boxes or multiple ballots at the same ballot boxes at different times the documentary would have been a LOT more compelling. I can imagine a number of reasons why this wasn’t possible but it is definitely worthy of discussion. The fact of the matter is that the absence of such a video is not proof that the claims are untrue just as the existence of such a video wouldn’t prove them. Sadly, the fact-check industrial complex and big tech ensure that discussion is impossible.
I’m a conservative and believe that if the data D’Souza presents in his documentary is accurate it should be investigated by the FBI. Personally, I have a LOT of experience attempting to use cellphone location data to determine when a particular shopper was in a particular aisle in front of a specific product. There are a lot of people with similar expertise and I suspect if we were allowed to discuss Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips’ research we might be able to better support or debunk their findings. As things stand now we’re only allowed to repeat the mantra, without evidence, that the 2020 election was the safest and most secure in history.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/in-less-than-12-hours-2000-mules-grosses-more-than-one-million-dollars-on-locals-and-rumble-301542260.html
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220511006114/en/2000-Mules-Becomes-the-Most-Successful-Political-Documentary-in-a-Decade-Seen-by-1-Million
https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2022/05/05/fact-check-gaping-holes-in-election-fraud-claims-of-2000-mules-movie/
