Everybody can be leveraged. It's a matter of how vulnerable or weak the one being leveraged is, who's doing the pressuring, and what the latter stand to benefit by doing it.

For that reason, I'm also interested in who's being made the gatekeeper, because I already know who's out there wanting what, and how much capital they have. None of this happens in a vacuum.

The thing is, fact checkers like Snopes and Politifact don't just give an opaque true or false proclamation, they explain how they arrived at that conclusion, which I think is the key bit. You're free to check the evidence for yourself and decide if their reasoning holds up. The people behind it aren't asking you to take their word on reputation alone.