“But that’s not a fact check,” says Thacker. “You just don’t like the story.”

From The British Medical Journal Story That Exposed Politicized "Fact-Checking" by Matt Taibbi.  Excellent old-style reporting which is now broadly absent from mainstream media.  My frequent accusation that much of mainstream media, in pursuit of reducing costs, now functions substantially as press release journalism.  Enterprises, advocacy groups and agencies write the press release and the mainstream media rewords it.

At the heart of the story is Paul Thacker, a seasoned reporter/researcher working with a whistle-blower from the subcontractor who performed some of the Pfizer vaccine trial.  It is basically a traditional story of a commercial enterprise not managing itself or its processes well but in the context of a massive government investment.  

But the main point is that technology companies are using "fact-checking" firms to throttle inconvenient information and to attempt to shape the narrative.

It is a convoluted story, difficult to extract.  Here is a teaser.

The significance of the British Medical Journal story is that it showed how easily reporting that is true can be made to look untrue or conspiratorial. The growing bureaucracy of “fact-checking” sites that help platforms like Facebook decide what to flag is now taking into account issues like: the political beliefs of your sources, the presence of people of ill repute among your readers, and the tendency of audiences to draw unwanted inferences from the reported facts. All of this can now become part of how authorities do or do not define reporting as factual.

“But that’s not a fact check,” says Thacker. “You just don’t like the story.”

An excellent read.