Social media fact-checking organizations are not the independent public health watchdogs they’re made out to be. Fact-checkers for Facebook are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given more than $250 million in grants to steer media outlets

In what it describes as a commitment to “fighting the spread of misinformation,”^[i] Facebook claims to work with “independent, third-party fact-checking organizations” to review content and take action against that deemed to be “viral misinformation” or fake news.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that when a post is identified as misinformation, meaning it’s given a warning label as such by Facebook, it results in users not clicking through 95% of the time.^[ii]

While presented as a tool to protect the public, what…