'Fact-checkers' and disinformation
By CERES team.
In George Orwell's 1984 science fiction dystopia, he imagined a totalitarian society run by four "ministries." The titles given to each ministry were deliberately the opposite of what they did:
"Even the names of the four ministries through which we are governed exhibit a kind of impertinence in their deliberate inversion of the facts. The Ministry of Peace deals with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Bounty with famine. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they stem from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling opposites that power can be maintained indefinitely." – George Orwell, 1984, vol. 2, chapter 9 (1949).
In recent years, a modern-day equivalent of "the Ministry of Truth" has emerged with the rise of so-called "act-checking organizations." Currently, there are 118 such organizations that are "verified active signatories" (archived link) of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) Code of Principles. The IFCN is a unit of the Poynter Institute that was "founded in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and factual information advocates in the global fight against disinformation."
The officially stated purpose of each of these 'fact-checkororganisations' is to 'fact-check' alleged 'misinformation' and 'disinformation'. Specifically, the IFCN states
https://www.climategate.nl/2024/02/factcheckers-en-desinformatie/
