Disclosure How Russians are creating an “association of fact-checkers”
In Russia, they want to create a whole separate international “fact-checking” association – the Global Fact-checking Network (GFCN), to unite those who share “Russian views and values”. As for the specific goals and values that the Russian so-called “fact-checkers” are going to defend, the Russians did not specify.
In general, the creation of such a quasi-organization became the main goal of the so-called international forum “Dialogue on Fakes 2.0” held in Moscow on November 20, which essentially brought together all the main Kremlin propagandists and their henchmen from around the world. The first, main panel of the discussion, whose participants included the voice of the Russian Foreign Ministry Mariia Zakharova, Steven Seagal, one of the main propagandists from Telegram - Mykhailo Zvinchuk (owner of the Telegram channel "Rybar"), as well as the general director of the TASS agency Andrii Kondrashov and others, can already say a lot about the level of the forum.
In addition to the usual rhetoric about the West continuing to aggressively “impose” its only correct point of view on others, while Russia remains an unwavering fighter for the truth, it was at this conference that they decided to announce the creation of a new international fact-checking association. Because those that already exist – meaning the global IFCN network and its European analogue EFCSN – in the opinion of Russians “sometimes only perform a political mission and sometimes have nothing in common with real objective fact-checking”. But the Russian association will be called upon to provide “a healthy alternative that will help make the world a better place”.
The founders of the international association even showed the code of a responsible fact-checker with the right words about objectivity, openness of methodology, which must be signed before joining the association. To emphasize that it is the Russian association of “fact-checkers” that is more open than its Western counterparts, Kondrashov even stated that “the American association annually checks its members for political loyalty”, because these organizations that are part of their association “only work out the interests of other countries”. True, this implies an independent audit conducted by auditors from different countries and checking, among other things, the compliance of the work.