While Facebook portrays its army of fact-checkers as independent, the money behind at least one carries a distinct taint. One such fact-checker, Lead Stories, is partly paid through a partnership with TikTok, a social media platform run by a Chinese company that owes its allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). TikTok currently is being probed by U.S. officials as a national security threat. Moreover, the organization that’s supposed to oversee the quality of fact-checkers is run by Poynter Institute, another TikTok partner. Lead Stories says it’s been contracted by ByteDance “for fact-checking-related work,” referring to TikTok’s announcement earlier this year that it has partnered with several organizations “to further aid our efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation,” particularly regarding the CCP virus pandemic, which originated in China and was exacerbated by the CCP regime’s coverup. Lead Stories was started in 2015 by Belgian website developer Maarten Schenk, CNN …
Facebook Fact-Checker Funded by Chinese Money Through TikTok
