This is an excerpt from Matt Palumbo’s book Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry.

As has been emphasized many times already, the true purpose of fact-checking is to serve as a rubber stamp for censorship—and it works.

The New York Times reported in the aftermath of the 2020 election that Facebook would be taking even more steps to curtail right-wing sites: Employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than two billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls ‘news ecosystem quality’ scores, or N.E.Q., a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.

…The change was part of the ‘break glass’ plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath of a contested election.