Facebook doesn’t think you know what’s “fake news” and what’s not.

In an announcement Thursday, the social media giant said it was going to crack down on fake news through a variety of ways, including letting users report what they deem to be fake news.

But one item on Facebook’s list of methods to crack down was particularly concerning:

We’ve started a program to work with third-party fact-checking organizations that are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Code of Principles. We’ll use the reports from our community, along with other signals, to send stories to these organizations. If the fact-checking organizations identify a story as fake, it will get flagged as disputed and there will be a link to the corresponding article explaining why.

When you look at the signatories on the Poynter list, you’ll find seven from the United States: ABC News, The Washington Post, Snopes, Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Climate Feedback, and Politifact.

Aha.

Talk about the devil being in the details. These are hardly unbiased fact-checkers—conservatives have raised alarms about several of them. Let’s go through some examples:

1). Snopes. You may have heard that the terrorist who murdered 49 people and injured dozens more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was a Democrat. That’s for a reason: Omar Mateen was registered as a Democrat. Yet Snopes took issue with that characterization, saying it was “undetermined” because Mateen’s “U.S. political affiliation (if any) at the time of the shooting is unknown.”

Snopes’ Kim LaCapria continued:

However, being a member of any particular political party involves expressing an ongoing allegiance to that party and its principles: one could be pegged as a Democrat (or a Republican, or a member of any other party) if he ran for office as a member of that party, exclusively campaigned or raised money for that party and its candidates, or consistently voted for that party’s candidates. But there’s no evidence that Mateen materially supported any particular political party, nor do we know how he voted (or whether he ever voted at all).

All we know is that 10 years ago he registered as a Democrat, and voter registration is an imperfect indicator that governs nothing more than which party’s primary a citizen is eligible to vote in …

What?

It’s hard to make sense of this, but it basically boils down to: No one can be labeled a member of any party unless they consistently have run for office, donated money, or voted for that party’s candidates (something that could never be proved, incidentally, since we have secret ballots).

Which is a ridiculous standard. Look, I’m someone who is registered Republican to vote in the primaries, and who has plenty of quibbles with the GOP, and yet I would agree if I were identified as a Republican by a news site, it would be true—because I am registered as a Republican.

2). Politifact. Back in June, Donald Trump said, “Crime is rising.” Politifact blasted this claim as “pants on fire.” Then the American Enterprise Institute’s Sean Kennedy looked into the facts, noted Politifact had looked at statistics ending in 2014, and wrote: “The FBI’s preliminary 2015 figures actually do show crime rising in most categories across the country between 2014 and 2015.” Politifact responded … that it stood by its rating.

3). The Washington Post. Here’s a fun one: in 2015, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said that “we, right now, have more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible.” The Post looked at the claim and wrote, “The literally translated King James Version of the Bible contains just over 800,000 words. There are as many as 3.7 million individual words in the IRS tax code.” So Cruz deserves a true rating, right? Wrong—at least according to The Post, which went on to say: “This is a nonsense fact, something that is technically correct but ultimately meaningless.”

So perhaps in the new Facebook era, the Orlando terrorist being a Democrat, Trump discussing the rise in crime, and Cruz saying the IRS code has more words than the Bible would all be buried as “fake news” … despite being true.

Other U.S. organizations listed in the Poynter directory Facebook says it will rely on are Climate Feedback (which I’m not familiar with, but at a cursory glance does not appear to be challenging the liberal groupthink on climate change), and ABC News (home to George Stephanopoulos, who worked for the Clinton White House, and oh, didn’t disclose he had donated to the Clinton Foundation).

There is undoubtedly “fake news” online—and consumers should work to be responsible about sharing information, fact-checking themselves claims that seem spurious.

And Facebook, of course, is a private company that legally can do what it wants regarding its content.

But while Facebook legally can crack down on “fake news,” it’s unfortunate it has chosen to do so, particularly by relying on liberal organizations’ fact-checks as the arbiters.

It’s clear that the system Facebook has announced is much more likely to result in crackdowns on conservative outlets than liberal outlets—which is bad news for all of us conservatives on Facebook. (For more from the author of “Facebook’s Reliance on Liberal Fact-Checkers Means Your News Is About to Be Censored” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Facebook is adding a training program for its employees to address concerns that the company has a bias against conservatives.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, announced the addition of a “political bias” section to the company’s managing unconscious bias class during a Wednesday event at the American Enterprise Institute.

“We have a managing bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create. And we focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we’re going to add in a scenario now on political bias,” Sandberg said. “So as we think about helping people understand different points of view and being open to different points of view, we’re dealing with political bias as well going forward.”

Sandberg’s announcement comes six weeks after a former Facebook contractor accused the company of suppressing conservative news on the platform. Since that Gizmodo report on May 9, Facebook has revamped how it operates the Trending Topics feature. The company also hosted more than a dozen conservative leaders, including Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters on May 18 to address the fallout.

AEI President Arthur Brooks, who attended the May 18 meeting, called the addition of “political bias” training both “interesting and encouraging.”

Sandberg used her appearance at AEI to articulate Facebook’s commitment to all points of view.

“Facebook is a platform for all ideas and all voices,” she said. “We have 1.6 billion people using the platform, which means all ideas have to be able to be expressed.”

She acknowledged, however, that Facebook and other tech companies are perceived to be liberal.

“That’s a pretty important accusation and it’s one we take seriously,” Sandberg said. “It’s also one which frankly rang true to some people because there is concern that Silicon Valley companies have a liberal bias. And so we took it very seriously and did a thorough investigation, and we didn’t find a liberal bias.”

Those perceptions about Facebook are at least partly fueled by donations Facebook employees have made to political causes. According to a Reuters analysis of campaign finance data, 79 percent of Facebook employee contributions in 2016 have supported Democrats. Those employees donated more than $114,000 to Democrat Hillary Clinton—nearly $100,000 more than to the closest Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio, before he dropped out of the presidential race, according to The Hill.

Even though Facebook’s investigation found “no systematic bias,” Sandberg said the company decided to take steps to improve.

“We think a lot about diversity at Facebook. It’s something our industry has struggled with, we’ve struggled with,” she said. “We think to build a product that 1.6 billion people use, you need diversity. And what you really want is cognitive diversity … intellectual diversity.”

Sandberg noted that Donald Trump has almost as many Facebook fans as Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders—combined. She also praised Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., as a model example of a member of Congress who is using the platform effectively.

In her role as a leader at Facebook, Sandberg said, she encourages employees to speak up and disagree with her. She shared with Brooks two examples of how that played out at the company and why employees were rewarded as a result.

“You need people with different opinions and you need an environment where people can express those opinions,” she told the packed room at AEI’s 12th floor conference center in downtown Washington.

“People are not going to speak truth to power unless you make that apparent,” she added. “And that’s how we get not just different voices into the company but make sure we’re listening to different voices.”

At a time when publishers of all ideological perspectives use Facebook as a distribution platform, Brooks pressed Sandberg on the company’s role in the dissemination of news. But Sandberg dismissed the notion that Facebook wanted to be a media company.

“We’re clear about the industry we’re in and the company we’re in: We’re a tech company, we’re not a media company,” she said. “We’re not trying to hire journalists and we’re not trying to write news.” (For more from the author of “Facebook to Provide ‘Political Bias’ Training for Employees” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.