Because these groups are applying pressure to a privately owned company, Facebook, many conservatives are shrugging and saying “it’s a private company, man.” This is the small minded hobgoblin at work that prevents conservatives from winning and makes a fetish of being a virtuous loser. They are giving Facebook a right, to censor speech, that is not permitted to television stations in connection with political speech. Unless the “fake news” is libelous or slanderous, Facebook had no business trying to rate which opinions are correct. Because this be clear, these people are not interested in labeling as “fake news” stories about alien abductions and Bat Boy. What they do want to label as “fake news” are stories opposed to the global warming scam or stories that show how homosexual pairing are dangerous to children or stories that discuss the national security implications of Hillary Clinton’s private email server. For that matter, do you think the Duke Lacrosse scandal and the Rolling Stone rape story or the George Bush TANG documents story would have been batted down without unfettered questioning of the stories by non-reporters? No. Under the proposed regime the pushback on those stories would have undoubtedly been labeled “fake news” and effectively shut down.

No, the cure is much worse than the disease. The impetus behind this effort it to prevent you, the citizen, from hearing multiple points of view… some of them stupid (we’re used to that after eight years of the Obama administration)… and make the decision for you what you will hear and what you will believe.

The “Big Three” of fact checking are trying to set themselves up as the arbiters of what you may and may not read on your personal Facebook feed. There are exactly two reasons to do that: power and money. The power is obvious. The money would become very obvious with only a little investigation. That would be a great job for a fact checking organization, wouldn’t it?