Oh, you thought this censorship stuff wasn’t about you, because you weren’t about Trump.
A friend of mind posted the follow on Facebook, only to have the site apply a “fact-check” to it. Understand that “fact-checks” are more than just checking facts. When run by the AP and by FB, they amount to entering the debate on the leftist side.
The Tax Foundation – the source of the data for the graphic used by Fox News – is a thoroughly center-right think tank, devoted to tax policy at all levels of government. The “fact-check” isn’t a fact-check, since it admits the facts are correct. In fact, the “context” that is allegedly missing – that the rates posted are only for the top earners, is literally in the headline for the graphic.
I look forward to any post by the left-of-center Brookings, The Urban League, Urban Institute, or Bell Policy Center being similarly “fact-checked.”
More realistically, we should be waiting to see how long it is before the Tax Foundation is demonetized and then deplatformed altogether.
But consider this an object lesson in how even policy-based right-of-center discussion is forced into pariah status. By putting a “fact-check” on this, it forces someone who posts it to defend the Tax Foundation and their work, with the allegedly objective FB and AP having put their thumb on the scale. Conservatives must work even to have their analyses considered legitimate and within the bounds of informed discussion, never mind get a debate on the facts. Left-of-center posts, no matter how far to the left, are granted immediate legitimacy.
