A Facebook fact-checking company named Lead Stories, gets part of its money from its partnership with TikTok.

TikTok made headlines when Trump was going to ban them from being able to operate within the US due to their ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They have been deemed a national security threat by American authorities.

A company that is supposed to oversee the fact checkers is ran by the Poynter Institute which is another TikTok partner.

Epoch Times reports:

Lead Stories says it’s been contracted by ByteDance “for fact checking related work” referring to TikTok’s announcement earlier this year that it has partnered with several organizations “to further aid our efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation,” particularly regarding the CCP virus pandemic which originated in China and was exacerbated by the CCP regime’s coverup.

Lead Stories was started in 2015 by Belgian website developer Maarten Schenk, CNN veteran Alan Duke, and two lawyers from Florida and Colorado. It listed operating expenses of less than $50,000 in 2017, but had expanded seven-fold by 2019, largely thanks to the more than $460,000 Facebook paid it for fact-checking services in 2018 and 2019. The company took on more than a dozen staffers, about half of them CNN alumni, and became one of Facebook’s most prolific fact-checkers of American content.

This year, the funding sources included Google, Facebook, ByteDance, and several online advertising services. Advertising brought it less than $25,000 last year, the group said.

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