The Daily Caller will partner with Facebook and the social media company’s fact-checking initiative, the website announced on Wednesday. The collaboration will not be with the Caller directly, but rather the news organization’s fact-checking website Check Your Fact.
“We’re pleased to announce our partnership with Facebook,” Neil Patel, co-founder and publisher of the Caller, said in a statement. “In the two years since we launched Check Your Fact, we’ve had incredible success. Our fact checks have been viewed by millions of users and have led some of the country’s biggest news outlets, including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and Vox, to issue corrections.”
While the Caller is a right-wing publication that was co-founded by Patel and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Check Your Fact is editorially independent and, according to Axios, was approved to work with Facebook by the Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network Board.
After facing scrutiny for allowing misinformation to spread on its platform during the 2016 presidential election, Facebook created an initiative to partner with third-party fact-checking organizations in an attempt to stem the problem that same year. The program currently includes Politifact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, Science Feedback among many others. In addition to the Caller, Science Feedback will also be joining Facebook’s slate of partner websites, Axios reported.
“Since we launched our third-party fact-checking program in 2016, we’ve been working with partners around the world who share our goal of stopping the spread of misinformation on our platform,” Meredith Carden, head of news integrity partnerships at Facebook said. “We now work with 47 partners around the world who fact-check content in 24 languages.”
Though it launched to much fanfare, Facebook’s fact-checking program has run into a number of speed-bumps in recent months including the departure of two major partners, Snopes and the Associated Press, which the BBC reported in February.
“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” Brooke Binkowski, a former managing editor for Snopes, told the Guardian last December. “They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”