U.S. social media giant Facebook has increased its censorship of user speech in recent years. It has been revealed that the company’s “fact-checking” team receives Chinese funding through TikTok, an overseas version of the short-video app “ShakeYin” developed in mainland China.
Facebook described the company’s “fact-checking” partner as an independent organization, but it was found to have received some of its funding from Chinese companies controlled by the Chinese Communist government, The Epoch Times reported Thursday (10).
The report said that the fact-checking agency working with Facebook, called Lead Stories, was funded in part through a partnership with TikTok, whose other partner, the Poynter Institute, oversees the “quality” of the “fact-checking” work.
Notably, TikTok is a social media platform run by a Chinese company called ByteTok, which is loyal to the Chinese Communist government and is now considered by the U.S. government to be one of the companies that pose a threat to U.S. national security.
TikTok announced at the time that it had worked with several organizations to “reduce the spread of misinformation,” and that among the messages it had blocked was the one that led to the global pandemic. Among the messages it blocked was the fact that the virus that caused the global pandemic originated in China.
Lead Stories was created in 2015 and employs a dozen people, about half of whom are from CNN, according to The Epoch Times. The agency listed operating expenses of less than $50,000 in 2017, but after it began working for Facebook in 2018, its operating expenses quickly skyrocketed, increasing sevenfold by 2019, as it received $460,000 in fees from Facebook for “fact-checking” services in those two years.
This year, the agency’s sources of funding include Google, Facebook, BytePop and some online advertising services, but most of its money still comes from Facebook.
Lead Stories has recently focused on controversial claims about voter fraud in the U.S. election, which has helped censor related issues on Facebook, the paper said.
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