I can't tell if you are serious or if this is just a god-tier straw man but it's all wrong. If I didn't find it so damn annoying, I'd call this response a fact check. First of all, newspapers don't turn fact-checkers on their own employees. Maybe if some of the employees are supposed to play the part of controlled opposition, it might happen. But fact-checkers exist to discredit information from other sources. Secondly, fact-checkers were used as a pretext for silencing people all over social media. This happened extensively in the West, including in the US, and many politicians still crave the power to deanonymize and silence their opposition under the pretense of misinformation or hate speech. Finally, people can decide for themselves who is credible, and nobody is trustworthy enough to decide for everyone what is true. That even goes for most so-called objectively knowable information. The importance of having a free market of ideas is perhaps proportional to the tendency for people to lie or misrepresent the facts. People are not as stupid as the proponents of fact-checking would have you believe.
That is a little interesting but those are not the fact-checkers I'm talking about, nor the ones that the post is talking about (since they mention tech companies). Don't hold me to that. Maybe there is some overlap because working for a media outlet might count as a credential in the eyes of the people who appointed them to work in social media. In any event, so-called fact-checkers were used as a pretense to censor social media and silence contrarians. I obviously have no problem with legitimate researchers, especially if their job is internal to particular news agencies so that they can avoid lawsuits for libel or whatever.
