Al Mayadeen English

  • Ar
  • Es
  • x
Al Mayadeen English

Slogan

  • News
    • Politics
    • Economy
    • Sports
    • Arts&Culture
    • Health
    • Miscellaneous
    • Technology
    • Environment
  • Articles
    • Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Blog
    • Features
  • Videos
    • NewsFeed
    • Video Features
    • Explainers
    • TV
    • Digital Series
  • Infographs
  • In Pictures
  • • LIVE
News
  • Politics
  • Economy
  • Sports
  • Arts&Culture
  • Health
  • Miscellaneous
  • Technology
  • Environment
Articles
  • Opinion
  • Analysis
  • Blog
  • Features
Videos
  • NewsFeed
  • Video Features
  • Explainers
  • TV
  • Digital Series
Infographs
In Pictures
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • Asia-Pacific
  • Europe
  • Latin America
  • MENA
  • Palestine
  • US & Canada
BREAKING
Nicolas Maduro: Maria Corina Machado and imperialism wanted to spread violence and chaos so there would be no elections.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro: We were able to neutralize 60 attacks on oil refineries and oil facilities and arrest more than 70 individuals involved.
CNN citing sources: Talks between Washington and Tehran are close to reaching a comprehensive agreement that could be concluded during the next meeting.
US Secretary of State: Washington will begin revoking visas for Chinese students affiliated with the Communist Party or studying in sensitive fields.
Israeli media: Western diplomats: There is a possibility that the US administration will sign an interim agreement or understanding with Iran.
Hamas: We affirm that we are making great efforts to stop the barbaric war on the Gaza Strip.
Hamas: We reached an agreement with Witkoff that includes the flow of aid and a professional committee taking over the management of the Gaza Strip's affairs immediately after the deal is announced.
Hamas: The agreement with Witkoff includes the release of 10 Israeli prisoners and bodies in exchange for the release of a number of Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas: We agreed with Witkoff on a general framework that would achieve a permanent ceasefire and a complete withdrawal of the occupation from Gaza.
Hamas: We have agreed to the framework of Witkoff's proposal and are awaiting the final response.

How Western fact checkers promote fake news

  • Tim Anderson Tim Anderson
  • Source: Al Mayadeen English
  • 8 May 2025 12:59
  • 6 Shares
9 Min Read

Tim Anderson exposes how Western “fact checkers” and AI tools act as propaganda arms of the Anglo-American media empire, reinforcing disinformation to sustain US hegemony and silence independent states.

  • x
  • The new wave of ‘fact checkers’ and AI machines are mostly extensions of existing media monopolies, which aim to reinforce key messages of the Western hegemonic cartel. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)
    The new wave of ‘fact checkers’ and AI machines is mostly an extension of existing media monopolies, which aim to reinforce key messages of the Western hegemonic cartel. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

The well integrated Anglo-American corporate and state media networks have been trying to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, using in house and state funded “fact checkers” (including AI engines) to confirm their own misinformation about independent nations. The aim has been to reinforce Western media monopolies in face of a push back by those same independent states, subject to the globalist propaganda wars.

Little wonder that the Latin Americans, Chinese, and Russians are sick of these media monopolies and are developing their own capabilities to counter the lies told about them.

  • So Venezuela and the other Latin American countries who formed the continental media network Telesur twenty years ago, to “reflect our realities”, recently held a conference in Havana, Cuba, on the subject of countering imperial misinformation;
  • China has so far relied on state agencies and state media to combat the infowars, alongside huge virtual armies on social media - but Beijing is growing uneasy about its perceived media disadvantages;
  • Russia more recently set up its own  Global Fact Checking Network (GFCN)  to counter the propaganda war it faces.

To understand the deception of the raft of new Western ‘fact checkers’ we should start with some principles:

  1. While responsible providers of information and analysis should check their own facts and correct their own errors, anyone else can impose scrutiny on particular reports;
  2. Nothing is added by corporations or states pretending to “verify” their own stories;
  3. Such “verification” is worse when it comes from the Western “colonial media,” which has a track record of promoting false pretexts for each new US war or intervention;
  4. “Fact checking,” which relies on the discredited Wikipedia method (“authoritative” secondary sources and anonymous editors) is worse than useless, as it mostly presents summaries of Western media stories, dressed up as independent accounts;
  5. Front groups and anonymous authorities are misleading - responsible sources will not hide their authors, but will rather take responsibility for their information and analysis, while using a wide range of mainly primary sources;
  6. No source or country can be banned from debate, but we have to learn how to read interested parties and biased sources and make intelligent use of them.

The Wikipedia method (relying on secondary “authoritative” sources compiled by anonymous editors), shared by many “fact checkers” and AI engines, is utterly unreliable for anything that matters. Unlike traditional encyclopaedia, which follows academic conventions of authorship and attribution, Wikipedia is utterly reliant on Western secondary sources; thus presenting a pre-digested summary of the Western media. Even Wikipedia acknowledges that it is “not a reliable source” and carries a disclaimer: “Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here.” (Much the same should be added to these new fact checkers.

Fake news was first recognised as a widespread practice in the USA, where private companies paid media outlets to promote their goods and services. By the 2016 US elections, it came to be seen as a practice linked to political campaigns, including the new forms of hybrid warfare, designed to undermine independent states. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump correctly accused Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama of covertly creating ISIS terrorism to pursue the regime change wars in Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

By then, the Western corporate and state media were already deeply embedded in liberal propaganda. They sold us persistent myths like the following:

  • That the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a matter of Anglo-American self-defence, while the 2022 Russian intervention in SE Ukraine was “unprovoked” and had nothing to do with Russian self-defence;
  • The repeated fake news about Syrian President Assad and the Syrian Army supposedly bombing and using chemical weapons against their own people, while shielding the NATO-backed terrorist groups from responsibility for these crimes;
  • The slaughter in Gaza was not really genocide but a matter of Israeli “self defence” against terrorism, while promoting the fiction of a Chinese “genocide” against its own Muslim population in Xinjiang;
  • Telling us that French and US troops were in West and North Africa to help “fight terrorism” and not to secure strategic control of natural resources;
  • Selling us the big lie that successive unelected US puppets were actually the “presidents” of Venezuela.

Related News

Tears once a year

A glaring double standard on conflict resolution- A case of the DRC

This rubber stamping of each and every Washington-led foreign intervention has led me to refer to much of the Western corporate and state media as the “colonial media”. They reliably defer to the official Washington line and move against the representatives of independent nations like attack dogs, all the while styling themselves as the guardians of democracy, human rights, and truth; indeed,d pretending to hold a monopoly of truth.

Their greatest damage is done in strategic claims, not particular facts, which can be more easily debunked. Anyone can check particular facts, not least by the use of historical online searches. We do not need biased ‘ratings’ agencies for that.

For example, former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, obsessed with the need to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, made 200 posts on Twitter over 2014-2015, many of them using images from the destruction in places such as Gaza and Kobani, to falsely suggest attacks on Syrian civilians by the Syrian Arab Army. Juxtaposition of photos can expose this deception for those who care to look.

We must admit their skill; even as the Anglo-American empire is in serious economic decline, its capacity to build myths is unparalleled, albeit with typical neoliberal blindness to conflicts of interest, not least of which is “fact checking” their own stories. They build fortresses of disinformation to advance Washington’s hybrid wars, which I have called ‘wars of hegemonic decline”. In so doing, they hope to support the pretexts for the next hot war, while attempting to isolate and demoralize any resistance.

This colonial media machine is not just the embedded corporate and state media, in lock step. It includes state agencies like the European ‘EU vs Disinfo’ and its (now disbanded) US state equivalent, the Global Engagement Center. Then there are the various EU and US state funded NGOs and “media activists”, particularly focused on Washington’s latest interventions. Knitting all this together, we have the ubiquitous Wikipedia, embedded social media like the Meta agencies, and embedded artificial intelligence and search engines (e.g. Google) which always take us back to the same embedded sources, like Wikipedia.

Into this self-referential, circular mess we have the latest “fact checkers” and online AI machines, most of which are set up by the same colonial media. Most Western ‘fact checkers’ are corporate and state media agencies, with the odd academic body. While some of these ‘fact checkers’ claim to follow the  International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) code - which includes a commitment to impartiality, disclosure of method and affiliation and use of mainly primary sources - most self-proclaimed fact checkers do not meet these standards and, even if they comply with some, most are set up precisely to amplify the message of their sponsors.

For example, AAP is a non-profit media agency owned by a shifting consortium of media companies which has its own “fact checker” arm called AAP FactCheck. In a misleading manner, AAP claims to be a “primary source” (journalism is normally only a “primary source” as regards interviews) and so does not require references or hyperlinks. It also hides its corporate ownership.

This network can cross continents. For example the Australian state media agency ABC recently cited a report on Russia by Check First, a software company in Finland which investigates online disinformation, and Reset Tech, in an attempt to discredit Russia’s new GFCN network. However, ‘Check First’ is funded by European states and the European Commission and is obsessed with Russian influence, including supposed Russian attempts to “pollute” Wikipedia. It is a state funded political agent and far from impartial.

Reset Tech Australia is the Australian branch of a US media company funded by various groups, including the US Internet Society Foundation. They specialize in promoting what they claim is “needed to mitigate the personal and national security risks that social media platforms and other digital platforms routinely generate”. In other words, they are a corporate lobby group.

This ‘Fact checking’ has not come close to resolving the info wars within the USA. For example, ‘Allsides’ presents a right aligned view of the problem they see as the domination of  left-liberal “fact checkers”, while on the left-liberal side, similar concerns are expressed about right aligned media.

Some new agencies have moved beyond ‘fact checking’ particular reports into pretending to rate the overall reliability of media bodies. For example, Newsguard, led by corporate media journalist Stephen Brill, claims to provide “transparent” ratings on media, "to help consumers identify reliable information online". However it relies on US government and intelligence sources, including CIA and NATO sources, and is heavily US-biased on international matters.

Media Bias/Fact Check is another media ratings company which follows the misleading “authoritative” sources rule, is also US centric, and produces similar results to Newsguard.

Artificial intelligence (AI) engines often suffer the same bias as Wikipedia and corporate ‘fact checkers’, they are set up by groups which control inputs. For example, you cannot hope to get independent or impartial information about Saudi Arabia from the Saudi agency SAMI AI.

In the end, the new wave of ‘fact checkers’ and AI machines is mostly an extension of existing media monopolies, which aim to reinforce key messages of the Western hegemonic cartel. Analysts have to look at the interests and methods behind their claims. Ordinary news consumers, who have no time for such things, will simply have to pick their news sources as before, paying little attention to the ‘bootstraps’ agencies.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Mayadeen’s editorial stance.
  • Western Media
  • fake news
  • fact check
Tim Anderson

Tim Anderson

Director of the Sydney-based Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies.

Most Read

All
Although the background information does not indicate direct US involvement, considering the broader geopolitical context, it is plausible that the US would have an indirect impact. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)

Did 'Israel', US fight a proxy war with China in South Asia during the India-Pakistan escalation?

  • Feature
  • 19 May 2025
It is clear that the Israeli project in Syria is not over and that Tel Aviv seeks to use what it sees as a historic opportunity to divide the country and achieve “Greater Israel”. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)

The Israeli Syria Dilemma

  • Opinion
  • 15 May 2025
The two countries need to sit down and resolve the crisis with maturity, to consider carefully that they could be being manipulated to be easily dominated. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Algeria and Mali, divided and almost conquered

  • Opinion
  • 25 May 2025
The spirit of Bandung: 70 years on

The spirit of Bandung: 70 years on

  • Opinion
  • 18 May 2025

Coverage

All
The Ummah's Martyrs

More from this writer

All
Cuba faces an urgent need for relief, and the second Trump administration is doing its best to sabotage recovery in all sectors as a means of punishing the Cuban people. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)

Update March 2025: The Cuban economy and living conditions

The world sat back and watched Gaza in horror, but few did anything, except for the Yemeni people and the Hezbollah-led resistance in Lebanon. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)

Moral imperative: Recognise Yemen and Palestine

Fanatical pro-‘Israel’ judge given the casting vote in intellectual freedom test case Tim Anderson

Fanatical pro-‘Israel’ judge given the casting vote in intellectual freedom test case

In 2024, a hard rain stole our beating heart, but we still live. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Nasrallah: The loss and the promise

Al Mayadeen English

Al Mayadeen is an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel.

All Rights Reserved

  • x
  • Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Authors
Android
iOS