I regularly read Breitbart and Alex Jones (the ideological yangs to my yin), and they are apoplectic about this push towards fact checking. It's unsettling how

I regularly read Breitbart and Alex Jones (the ideological yangs to my yin), and they are apoplectic about this push towards fact checking. It's unsettling how readily their audience accepts their claims that snopes et al are liberal rags. I've done some due diligence in the past on snopes, and afaik any bias is well within the margin of error from zero. The narrative is that fact checking is a "globalist"-orchestrated move to suppress what they call the "independent media" in favor of the "MSM" (mainstream media). I argue that whenever someone spends more time defaming their critics than defending their stances and claims, readers ought to run away. But following these news sources, it seems like most readers are completely trapped in an unfalsifiable narrative. It's really disheartening to think that our current best weapon against this sort of charlatinism is screening content thru fact-checkers. But I do think these platforms are obligated here, and indeed long overdue. Tom Friedman makes a compelling argument about platforms' responsibilities here: 'Facebook et al want the NYT readership, the NYT page views, but none of the NYT overhead that comes with being accountable for the information they share. And that's bullshit.'