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If you were applying for a security clearance and the government discovered you had massive amounts of debt and lots of questionable history that's ripe for blackmail, you would likely be denied. That's because those things could be used as leverage against you to make you act immorally.

So yes, I'm quite interested in the personal lives of the people running a company about to be ordained as "the objective truth" by Facebook/Google/et al

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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.

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.

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