Debunking Debunkers: Global Disinformation Index (GDI)

A useful exercise is to debunk the debunkers. I've done it before with the UK's fact-checker Full Fact .

It's particularly important in this coronavirus climate of frantic "fact-checking" and "information-correcting".

An article recently published on the website of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) is about a physicist, Danny Rogers, who has co-founded and is Chief Technical Officer of the Global Disinformation Index, with the noble purpose of saving the internet from lies, errors, fake news and what have you.

The first disinformation service he should perform is against some of his own claims during the interview, for example: "QAnon has led to people’s deaths."

This is a wide and sweeping generalisation with no basis in reality. If it refers, as the only tenuous link, to the murder of alleged mob boss Frank Cali by Anthony Comello in March 2019, it is highly flimsy.

Apparently on the advice of his lawyer Robert Gottlieb, Comello pleaded not guilty, since Gottlieb is trying to defend his client as not guilty due to mental defect.

According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Comello wanted to perform a citizen’s arrest on Cali to help Trump, as he believed the Gambino crime family's presumed boss was part of the deep state and that he "was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself" to place Cali under citizen's arrest. When Cali didn’t comply, the documents say, Comello killed him out of fear that Cali would kill him.

What is unclear, among many things, is why Comello thought Cali belonged to the deep state.

The connection of this murder with QAnon, what Leftists call a "conspiracy theory" that Trump and his presidency have been under attack by the deep state, is at the very least dubious.

On the same grounds we could blame any political movement, in most cases with better reason, of "leading to people’s deaths". Many examples come to mind, for instance the 14 June 2017 shooting At Alexandria, Virginia, Congressional Republican Baseball Practice which only for the presence of a security detail by a miracle didn't kill anyone but could have been a massacre,

James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on GOP lawmakers and staffers with a rifle as they prepared for the annual summer baseball game between Republicans and Democrats, wounding several people.

Hodgkinson’s social media profile revealed he was a Left-wing Bernie Sanders supporter who believed President Trump was a “traitor.” In one Facebook post of 3 months before Hodgkinson wrote: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

The AAAS article goes on to say:

GDI’s [the above-mentioned Global Disinformation Index] system analyzes content and context flags which can help assess any domain’s risk of disinformation. It rates the disinformation risk for websites based upon variables that include overall credibility, whether they push sensationalism, whether they contain hate speech, and whether the company embraces sound policies regarding content.

Now, since the article is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the "debunking" website with a high-sounding name it analyses is co-founded and headed by a physicist, we would expect some more precision in its chosen criteria than this. What objective characteristics does "overall credibility" entail?

And, even more importantly, how do you define "hate speech"? What does this concept mean? What role can it have in a science-led effort of exposing disinformation?

It's an impossible task to give "hate speech" a role in refuting falsehoods, for many reasons. First of all, hate is a sentiment, an emotion, a passion. As such, it's in the realm of the subjective, not the objective. What you consider hate another may consider simply justice, or telling the truth. There's no objective yardstick for definition, let alone measurement.

Furthermore, "hate" has been overused ad nauseam by the political and cultural Left to stigmatise, place beyond the pale and therefore silence (or at least the Left hopes) its adversaries.

So, this other "fact-checking" enterprise on the face of it seems to be, like so many of the same kind, Leftist propaganda masquerading as a quest for the truth.



PHOTO CREDIT
Pixabay

UK Fact-Checker "Full Fact" Is not Impartial

This post is also in Italian: Il Sito di Fact-Checking Inglese "Full Fact" Non È Imparziale


Like me, you may have been attracted to the reassuringly-named Full Fact website and non-profit company.

It's a fact-checking group, whose tagline is "Promoting accuracy in public debate".

After hearing about it from David Dimbleby on Question Time, I was immediately interested in this site, which I believe follows a trend set by Americans whose fact-checking after, for example, televised presidential debates becomes frenetic.

I am a firm believer in evidence-based reasoning in every sphere, using the scientific method of investigation whenever we can.

In politics as much as in health, in sociology as much as in the environmental subjects, empiricism and logic are what we need.

Therefore I welcomed the existence of this British site, and I read it. Certain things in it didn't seem too impartial to me, though, for example about Portugal's drugs decriminalization laws' outcomes.

So I checked who is behind Full Fact. I discovered that its "core funding comes from three independent charitable trusts: the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Nuffield Foundation and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation".

A look at The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust's site reveals that it has a strong focus on "racial justice" and "Islamophobia". Its pamphlet The Quest for Racial Justice has the picture of a hijab-wearing woman on its cover, so we know immediately what kind of "racial justice" we're talking about.

It doesn't take much to realize that this is a charitable, Quaker in origin, but politically not unbiased organization, believing in multiculturalism and seeing things only from the perspective of ethnic groups and immigrants, legal or not, and not the indigenous population of Britain.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust does not define what it means by "racial justice", probably assuming that it should be obvious, and indeed it is obvious what it intends when you see that it is in full support of the Macpherson Report on the death of Stephen Lawrence, which accuses the police of being "institutionally racist" and contains a pearl like this: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person" opening the door to any abuse of the term. Or when you read in The Quest for Racial Justice statements like this:

"Stephen Lawrence died at the hands of racists in 1993... In the meantime, many others have lost their lives in a similar way"

without any mention of the many white victims of non-white racism, about whom the national media are totally silent, a situation so scandalous as to prompt even Muslim multiculturalist and leftist Yasmin Alibhai Brown to write an article whose headline says it all: "When the victim is white, does anyone care?" (The article has then been removed from the website of London newspaper Evening Standard, apparently the only link left is on an online library).

It's clear that for this organization victims cannot be white. Yet, the mentioned article reports, "Almost half of the 58 known victims of racially motivated murders between 1995 and 2004 were white".

Yorkshire Conservative Councillor Roger Taylor called JUST West Yorkshire, a group affiliated with The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, an "ultra-left organization".

Discover the Networks gives this description:

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) was founded in 1904 by its namesake, a prominent Quaker entrepreneur and philanthropist. Viewing the unequal distribution of wealth as a defect inherent in all capitalist countries, JRCT aims to change “the existing power imbalances in society” and create “a better world.” Led by a board whose members are guided by the principles and values of Quakerism, the Trust focuses especially on eradicating the “root” causes of poverty, “social injustice,” and “political inequality”—and not merely on treating “the superficial manifestations” of those problems.

The second major funder of Full Fact, the Nuffield Foundation, has a website that welcomes you with talk of class divide and disadvantaged backgrounds.

The third, finally, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, supports "vulnerable migrants" and "social change".

The jargon is revealing, the picture is clear.

Full Fact is a bit like Wikipedia, pretending to be impartial and just offering "facts", but the people giving this information have a very specific, culturally Marxist, ideology colouring their fact-checking. I suspect that Dimbleby wouldn't have advertised it otherwise.


PHOTO CREDIT
Pixabay