So fact-checking has become a new way of distorting and censoring articles that have credible sources but seem to disagree with the overall bias of the platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
Maybe one should just go back to the age old saying: 'Don't believe everything you read on the internet.' Given that even these so-called 'independent fact-checkers' can also be wrong.
Who checks the 80+ so-called fact-checkers? Or the 'trusted news initiative' [0], which Meta (Facebook) is part of?
Unverifiable theory, but I think when the news was just the few media companies who ran TV and newspapers, selling a narrative was easy. Look how easily we got tricked into going into Iraq and staying in Afghanistan for 20 years. Now that news is more distributed (as originally intended) by independent journalist on things like YouTube and substack. Not only do these independent journalistic outlets exist, they are more popular than traditional news (TV/print), making various propaganda efforts much more difficult to stick. This is one of several strategies to regain control of that propaganda channel.
I'm sceptical that the population that was "tricked" back then wouldn't be just as easily swayed nowadays. Political affiliation is largely an emotional matter to a great mass of people, and rationality has a limited role in it.
>Sorry but there was enormous international pushback against it
Sure, there was domestic pushback too, but the "trusted" news sources actually countered that pushback by not questioning the government line and bolstered the whole WMD fear mongering. The NYT actually apologized for it after the fact to try to save their reputation.
The NYT, et al also refused to publish the Snowden revelations until they absolutely had to (after the guardian pushed it). Same with the Clinton/Lewinsky thing. They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop either, which, like it or not, is "fit to print." There were also quite a few anti-Assange articles if I recall.
I've seen multiple hit pieces to defame on "fact check" articles including on Reuters - which prior to that I thought was credible as a brand. These hit piece articles aren't balanced either and I even contacted a site once to ask for citations for their counter-claims - not to mention the other dishonest tactics to diminish someone's arguments/statements, where they didn't actually list any author, where they promised to respond within 48 business hours to all inquiries - but that was months ago and I haven't heard back. These are all for show but people trust them because they look good, just like poorly done science dressed up to look like it's science to the layperson - but then used as a primary citation by bad actors or incompetent ideologues who want to push a certain narrative or toe the line to not cause friction in their life. We need to figure out proper trust networks again, and how to teach/train everyone to be critical - and provide the time for this, and societally, culturally, make this process perhaps the sole thing we put on a pedestal - truth, the base or other side to coin of love.
It couldn't have been figured out, because we kept the 1st Amendment for a reason. We figured not having the ruling class/big corporations/government/big media be the sole arbiters of information truth doesn't end well either.
It does appear that any half-assed study, done on the quick with obviously poor data, is trumpeted immediately as "trust the science!", but completely obvious facts, like that no one in Florida is wearing masks even in tight spaces (I'm in Florida now, and bars / restaurants / beaches / streets are packed with no-maskers), yet their covid rate is lower than New York, California, and Massachusetts which have very strict requirements. It's hard for me to trust any official statement on covid anymore.
Florida accepted that everyone will eventually get covid, and the statistics for death / hospitalization rates for the non-immuno-compromised and non-elderly are very low, so they just did the "Keep Calm and Carry On" ethos and it became endemic much sooner. However they did have strict requirements for nursing homes.
Basically, let everyone choose their own risk tolerance, and accept that we can't control this. Very slowly, after years of trying to fight the inevitable, liberal states are understanding this. But they are still pretending that a force-field surrounds you the moment you start eating food or drinking which makes masks not required at that moment, which is obviously absurd.
> But they are still pretending that a force-field surrounds you the moment you start eating food or drinking which makes masks not required at that moment, which is obviously absurd.
Here in SF the force field comes into effect the instant you sit down at your table and only dissipates when you stand up to leave... but God help you if, after a 90 minute maskless meal, you don't put your mask back on for the 15 second walk to the door.
Case numbers are meaningless for comparisons between states due to inconsistencies in testing. If you want to make a valid comparison then look at hospitalizations and deaths, then adjust for differences in population demographics.
> yet [Florida's] covid rate is lower than New York, California, and Massachusetts
If you're talking about deaths/1M pop, California (1905) is much lower than Florida (2905) whilst Massachusetts is fractionally higher (2922) but New York (3068) is dramatically higher, yes.
If you're not talking about deaths/1M pop, which rate are you looking at?
The more relevant metric is age adjusted death rate. Age is the primary risk factor for COVID-19. There is a much higher percentage of elderly people in Florida.
They don't seem to explain their methodology for how they've "age-adjusted" the figures which is a shame.
But assuming these are valid numbers: by this metric, both California (214) and Mass. (206) are doing better than Florida (235) which again contradicts the claim. Or am I reading these numbers wrongly?
Same. No one talks about this, especially not our "official organizations" who clearly have no agenda to fear monger or increase expansion of control and power through fear, and then people wonder why trust levels are so low.
It takes a lot to violate ones trust, but once its there, you don't get it back overnight. I speculate we are at the cusp of no return- the only way I can see new trust in any big US govt organization is well what history tells us. Destruction and recreation.
I don't know, I think CDC may have diminished capacity in putting out good justification studies for it's recommendations/edicts. That should be called out with or without "bad intent". The crazy thing is that you will only find these bold call outs on political rags, why don't we see "moderate" media scrutinize the science behind the decisions affecting hundreds of millions?
"Founded in 1968, Reason is the nation's leading libertarian magazine. We produce hard-hitting independent journalism on civil liberties, politics, technology, culture, policy, and commerce. As the magazine of free minds and free markets, Reason exists outside of the left/right echo chamber. Our goal is to deliver fresh, unbiased information and insights to our readers, viewers, and listeners every day."
The title of the reason article is: The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science
And a quote from the article: For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question. Any public official—including and especially Walensky—who purports to follow the science should toss this one in the trash.
They weren’t simply technically correct — they were being quite cautious about clarifying that only this study is under question.
> Given that Reason is a political rag, and I doubt very much their intent was to further scientific discussion on the issue
That’s exactly the kind of thing “fact checkers” shouldn’t be factoring in. What Reason says elsewhere should have little to no bearing on what they say here, beyond a question of less or more scrutiny.
This isn’t an issue so much of malice, but the inherent political bias provided by these self-declared independent arbiters of truth. It’s a nonsensical setup.
One problem I see right off the bat is: how does the author know that this is "the study" that convinced the CDC?
He doesn't. That's made-up BS. The CDC is a large scientific organization that has built up a lot of credibility over decades. I trust it far more than any single off-the-cuff writer like this guy. And unless there is very strong evidence, I don't accept the claim at face value that CDC acted, or generally acts, on the basis of a single study.
Did you read it or the linked The Atlantic article? CDC representatives site the 3.5x number over and over again as the justification. The number came from this study. A led to B led to C.
If you and I are experts, and I gave you a hundred pieces of evidence, and you were already convinced by the 20th piece of evidence, and they're all complicated and hard to understand, and then I gave you one more piece of evidence that had a really easy to understand statistic you could easily share with lay people, how would you communicate with the public? Would you purposefully avoid sharing the really easy to understand statistic? Would someone be correct that that one piece of evidence was "what convinced you?"
You and I don't know how heavily this study weighed in their deliberations, and we especially don't know it to a degree of certainty to say "THE STUDY THAT CONVINCED THE CDC."
I suppose I could have worded that more clearly. I wasn't saying they did in real life. I was continuing a hypothetical started in the comment I replied to, and in the hypothetical they obviously did.
I'm not saying that the CDC actually did lie in this case. I'm continuing the hypothetical from your previous comment, where you said that the CDC would be convinced by evidence piece #20, but then tell the public that they were convinced by evidence piece #21.
They did not "then tell the public" that "the one that convinced them" was this one study.
In communicating with the public, they happened to cite #21, because explaining all 21 would take too long and be confusing for you, and be distracting.
Refuting the specific evidence in #21 does not directly refute the other 20, and does not make the conclusion "Junk Science" as the headline apparently unintentionally implied. And the headline had no business saying "The study," when they have no idea how many studies the CDC internally considered.
Me: "Hi boss, because of Y the company needs to do X".
Boss: "Okay".
a few days later
Boss: "Y is not true, we should re-evaluate X since Y is what convinced us"
This would be a totally fair exchange and 100% correct. It does not matter if there are 5 other things that prompted me to bring this up to my boss. I hung my hat on Y being true and that's how I presented it. It's what convinced us. It shouldn't be a big deal for me, as an adult and a professional, to say "yep, I messed up. here's the other reasons to still do X."
I agree! In fact, they just did it with their 5-day quarantine recommendation. Which is why I think it's important that the facts they use to publicly justify their decision are under constant scrutiny. If they are not, the CDC's credibility disintegrates.
There are reasonable discussions to be had about the CDC's credibility.
Then there are bad faith discussions about the CDC's credibility.
Are you aware that repeatedly exposing someone to false information leads them to believe it?
If you start from the belief that the CDC is credible, you can use phrases like, "The CDC made a mistake in relying on this study."
If you start from the belief that the CDC is not credible, you would can use phrases like "CDC / Junk Science."
You could, as another commented on this thread, say "If the CDC intentionally chose to lie to the public about their reason for a decision, that's really really bad."
There's is ZERO EVIDENCE that they intentionally lied.
That's like me saying, "If user lghh was involved in dog fighting, that's really really bad."
I have no evidence of it, and it gives people a bad impression of you.
The CDC has well-earned credibility, and the people who are questioning the CDC most effectively in the public circle (Fox News, Infowars, Joe Rogan) should have lost any credibility they had long, long ago. But questioning the CDC is profitable. People are exploiting fears to make money.
So, if you want to engage in good faith discussions, that's awesome. But maybe, just maybe, avoid phrases like "The study (implying there was only one) that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in schools is JUNK SCIENCE!"
Doctor: "You should eat a healthy diet and exercise, especially because of your blood pressure readings today."
You: "I just ran up the stairs, so that blood pressure reading is junk science."
Doctor: "Oh, okay then, yeah, then you are unique in all of mankind that you no longer need to worry about a healthy diet and exercise."
It is totally reasonable to ask for the other evidence they used to support mask mandates for kids, yes, for sure. It's not reasonable to even imply mask mandates for kids are junk science. Not yet.
Should we continue our dialog with the CDC? Yes.
Was the CDC intentionally basing its decisions on Junk Science? No.
Was this one study the one that "convinced" the CDC? Some people in this thread (including the author) seem certain it was. I believe their certainty is ridiculous.
Your analogy is not representative of what I posted or what happened in the article.
I think we're talking past each other.
> It's not reasonable to even imply mask mandates for kids are junk science. Not yet.
Nobody did this. I didn't. The posted links didn't. This never happened. Can you point out what you read that made you think this was anyone's point? In fact, the linked article specifically says this isn't the case.
I am stating my belief that the article headline did exactly that:
"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
That reads to me as click bait, which gives the impression, "Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
I can state that because the headline has the phrase, "Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science" at the end of it, and people are lazy readers.
I'm also stating my belief that the author has NO WAY of knowing how many studies the CDC used to convince them to support Mask Mandates in Schools, so it's wildly inappropriate for the author to use the word "THE." They should have instead said "A."
Quite cautious would have been, "A Study That the CDC Used," which connotes that the evidence was considered. Rather than "The Study That Convinced the CDC," which connotes that without this evidence, the CDC would have been convinced NOT to have mask mandates.
They had a click bait title, and Facebook temporarily pumped the brakes on spreading the story.
That’s exactly the kind of thing “fact checkers” shouldn’t be factoring in. What Reason says elsewhere should have little to no bearing on what they say here, beyond a question of less or more scrutiny.
Maybe this all depends on the scope of what Meta is trying to do. Think of a blog dedicated to lies about the shape of the Earth. Let's say most of their content wouldn't pass muster, but they post one truthful article a week about which team won that week's football games, just to get published on other platforms. Now, people can click to honestly see who won the game, but all over the page are headlines full of lies that link to stories that would otherwise not be allowed on other platforms. Is this other content on the page included in teh fact check? I don't think Meta is open about that...
Calling out the CDC for using studies that will jeopardize the public's trust in them in a time when public trust in the CDC, assuming they are correctly using that trust to help thwart the global pandemic, is of critical importance is pretty much the opposite of what a "political rag" would do.
It was both _technically_ correct and also correct on its face. I will say that the article is a bit of a rehash of the quoted The Atlantic article, but that should be even more reason that its fact-checked removal is dubious. They even have very similar titles, so it's not like Reason's title is particularly inflammatory. Is The Atlantic also a political rag?
According to Reason's headline, the CDC looked at one study and it convinced them that masks were effective in schools. Even Reason disputes what their headline implies, admitting it's misleading. Also, how did Reason know that that one study is what convinced he CDC? Isn't that totally made up?/Fabricated?/Fake news?/In need of fact-checking?
None of this should be taken as an argument against fact-checking either in theory or in practice. There is no set of fact checking policies that will be free from errors. (Indeed nor are the journalists who write the articles infallible, as they would surely admit.)
What’s important is that the fact checkers accept corrections and recognize that they are fallible too.
After they’ve already imposed their biases and censored information.
It’s ok that I ran over your dog while driving blindfolded - I owned up to it after all.
Fact checking has no benefits other than imposing the biases of the fact checkers. Sometimes imposing those biases is “good”, sometimes it’s “bad”. But let’s call a spade a spade - this isn’t fact checking. This is bias imposition.
Whatever, better to block the spread of medical information from uninformed sources even if a stopped clock is right twice a day. Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm concerned. The misinformation is worse.
Science does make mistakes but the process in general is thorough enough that they are rarer than idiots dishing out medical advice & spreading fear on Facebook.
"Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm concerned. The misinformation is worse."
Have you read 1984 or alike? Maybe do so at times.
The BS online surely is bad, but did you know, that you can just buy a MD in certain parts of the world?
So, we are in the middle of a question: which countries MD's do we recognize to speak censor free?
(and who are "we" btw.)
And well, governemnts do have some record of power abuse and missinformation, too. Even the democratic ones. And they take ages to get along and make contracts.
So lots of golden firewalled nations then, but less vaxxer bs online? I am not sure, if this is a good trade.
"maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false statements"
Or a chilling effect of unpopular opinions and facts.
And a much harder climate to find out, what is a fact at all, if you have to be scared, that some government commitee strips you of your right to publish, if they do not like your results.
If I've learned anything in the past 2 years it's that sometimes even random information (Twitter shitposters) is better than deliberately misleading fake information (e.g. early-pandemic WHO announcements).
I've much more confidence in myself (and my own ability to evaluate information) than in any member of any government (or any "expert" credentialed by said government).
There’s plenty of misinformation coming from MDs too. Just because they have an MD doesn’t mean they know anything about topics outside of their specialty.
In science you constantly have MD disagrees. How do you propose to reconcile this? Someone very qualified will inherently be "fact checked" because the information the fact checker acted on was old and outdated.
Anyways this is severely flawed and mistaken because what they're doing today is censoring everyone with or without an MD that their "black box algorithm" disagrees with. You propose keeping up stale information (which IMO amounts to killing people through misinformation not the reverse) and those with the stance to dumb down all information to the safest common denominator are making the social media experience worse for everyone else.
Censorship is not inherently bad. The USA has never extended the general principle of freedom of speech to the subject of medical information, for good reason. Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over. Organized medical societies must retain a monopoly on medical speech.
In the pandemic, speech about public health was censored less than treatment advice or drug facts would have been. Tens of thousands died as a result. A disastrous experiment in granting a freedom that no one responsible needs or wants.
>Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over. Organized medical societies must retain a monopoly on medical speech.
Instead of censorship like you're advocating for (an approach that absolutely will not work within the framework of the US constitution), we usually solve this by exclusively allowing the organized medical societies to have and show medical credentials. Those who fraudulently claim to have these credentials are viciously prosecuted. The fraudsters are free to push whatever medical advice they like, provided that they do not mislead others into thinking that they are credentialed.
To my knowledge, the FDA only gets involved when you try to sell things because that may qualify as false advertisement. However, Facebook posts like the ones in question here don't fall under that umbrella.
Disclaimer: I'm fully vaxxed and am happy with the way the FDA is run. My only dog in this conversation is censorship.
It would be very interesting if the outcome of Facebook's contracted checking was to prominently indicate such credential or lack thereof, rather than trying to indicate true/false.
That is not legally correct. The FDA has some limited authority over commercial speech by companies selling drugs, supplements, and medical devices. However there is no legal basis for the government to censor medical speech. It is perfectly legal for a physician (or anyone else) to make bullshit claims like "5G radiation causes COVID" or whatever. Organized medical societies have no special legal standing when it comes to speech.
Of course Facebook has a legal right to censor anything they want for any reason, or no reason at all.
> Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over.
Everybody talks about snake oil salesmen in the 19th century, but do you know what doctors were hawking back then? You can find plenty of examples of garbage products not because of the lack of regulation but because of the lack of contemporary science. Even medical professionals at the time didn't know any better -- or else anyone could have asked their doctor about Snake Oil(TM) and known not to try it.
Today nobody is going to believe that you can cure a disease with "Indian blood" or any of that nonsense, because the information on its harms or ineffectiveness is widely available and not seriously in contention.
The problem comes when you get to the medical information which is still in contention today. That's when censorship is the most harmful because when something is still actively unfolding and it's poorly understood with limited data, there is no basis for anyone to authoritatively declare something to be definitively true. And if the thing authorities are telling everyone is false, censoring the people challenging them is the harm.
Most biases are detrimental (political, cognitive, various phobias), but I'm not sure that a bias toward truth ought to be discouraged. If "in favor of truth" and "leftist" happen to correlate for some particular issue, that doesn't necessarily mean a truth bias needs to be avoided.
I’m not a right winger, conservative, or whatever. I’m more “leftist” than the average person, so I’m assuming I’m more “leftist” than the average fact checker. That doesn’t mean I’m absent of biases towards things that are not true.
The fact checkers are not using the scientific method or any sort of standard based one evidence to make their determinations. They’re using politically aligned news sources and their own opinions.
I’ve not yet seen any news by CNN or MSNBC or any other “reputable” news source be fact checked even though I know they regularly mislead and lie (maybe they have been and I’ve missed it - would love to see that). I’ve seen obvious bullshit by conservative media outlets be fact checked. And I’ve seen cases like this article where actual facts are superseded by political opinion.
I’m not advocating for avoiding a truth bias, but that’s not what’s present. We can act all high and mighty and pretend like the left is guided by science, but it isn’t. We’re guided by what our side says is true and don’t question it and don’t look at the science. When someone actually looks at the science and negates what our side says, we fact-check it and say it’s misinformation.
That's like a drug addict saying, "I wish I had an alternative to heroin."
The cure is to detox and move on. Nobody "needs" social media.
This is usually the place where the pedant HN crowd (many employed by social media companies) like to imagine a bunch of hypothetical edge cases and pretend that the .0001% situations where social media is useful somehow outweighs the massive harm that social media has done over the last decade plus.
This is your brain. This is your brain on social media. Any questions?
Most of the time, you need to mail them a dozen times to get the “fact-check” tag off from your articles. If their fact check is proven to be false (which it usually happens) they do not voluntary alter and take back their fact-check. They are quick to jump for bogus fact-checking, but not for taking back their wrong fact-checks.
I misphrased it, the “good” result of imposing your biases I was referring to is preventing the spread of misinformation in places like Myanmar where genocide is rampant and amplified by social media. If there were no theoretical benefit, social media platforms would have never been pressured to start fact checking.
Imposing your biases is a neutral action that can have good or bad results. But it’s not in defense of the truth.
What about anti-vaxers? Harmful misinformation isn't confined to places like Myanmar.
I don't see how you can just say it's "imposing your biases" to fact check things. The fact checking may be influenced by your biases, but "vaccines are safe and effective" isn't a bias. It's the truth.
Brava, you've drawn a line from "Politifact exists" to "AHHH WE'LL ALL BE IN REEDUCATION CAMPS". When you've calmed down, consider that there are reasons we should compare claims against reality (i.e. fact check) that are not "suppress[ing] undesired opinions or truths".
And you conveniently danced around the middle step that maybe was important and went right into the absurd one. Maybe you shouldn't be so calm, somebody may be pulling a fast one on you.
The issue of fact checking is the centralisation of truth. Errors of fact checking have a much higher impact on society than the influence of news sites. Secondly, we can’t assume all fact checking will be honest mistakes forever. Someday someone will be down right corrupt and will abuse this power.
Also note that the fact checker errors are not random uncorrelated errors. Fact checks are performed through a political lens. The subconscious question is asked, how will this affect <policy agenda>? If something is factually correct but could lead to <bad outcome> then the fact checkers will consider that when choosing how to check the claim.
For instance, in the article that was censored was about faults in the study that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in schools. The fact checkers read that as a claim that masking does not help limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in schools, which is not what the article was about.
On the contrary, it seems that the anti-vaxx misinformation is what's political. I've never seen such strong resentment of vaccines, public health policy and science in general until Republicans came out against vaccines in 2020 for political reasons.
To call something fake news when it is actually true is not an error it is deliberate manipulation of information and is censorship not an error.
Deliberately misunderstanding something is also not an error but disingenuous.
Why is this so hard to understand?
Sorry, I've misunderstood your original comment / lost the context between it and the parent comment. I had somehow read your comment to mean that it's an error, not censorship.
Fact checking can certainly only be done in a transparent process with democratic legitimization.
Anyway the idea to take on the responsibility for fact-checking seems kinda awful if I were a corporation I'd try to hand that over to someone else, there is going to be a lot of trouble in that area in the future.
What's important is fact checkers will never be right all the time, and we should have an inherent UI design to account for that and/or convey it to the user rather than the current "witch hunt style" where anyone who posts content is vilified and attacked until a later correction is made (which of course is done under the shadows without the erring entity making any kind of update to your audience that they were wrong).
Maybe we shouldn't have ran this experiment instead?
Maybe they should stop calling themselves fact checkers and use a label like "our thoughts on this issue" like most people do when giving their opinion. Elevating their opinion to the level of fact is arrogant and antisocial. Don't understand why anyone would defend this other than perhaps a belief that the "fact" checkers will always be inclined to "fact" check in favor of their ideological bias. History shows monsters rarely obey their creators once they get powerful enough to break free of the creator's control.
I'd imagine if Facebook wanted to clamp down on Coronavirus-related "misinformation", they'd do a sentiment analysis on any phrase with CDC, FDA, etc. and if the sentiment was negative or "bad", then it'd automatically get flagged.
If there is a human in the loop, I doubt they are reading the full article, or have any meaningful expertise. Probably just reading the headline, and clicking approve.
I don't get why that's contradictory or bad. It's FB's website, FB's property. They're quite free to say "In our opinion, this is factual and that is false". They're under no obligation to allow others to say whatever they want.
We wouldn't say anything about a restaurant or bar owner kicking out patrons because they offend other patrons or staff. Why is FB any different?
Because it has become the only bar in town with free booze sponsored by the local hospital handling drunk driving accidents.
Make the social media platforms interoperable, and force them to charge the costs directly to consumers (so that the platforms could compete on price/quality) and people will run away from it like rats from a sinking ship.
So all this "censorship" talk is really an XY problem[1], then.
My honest opinion is that most people who cry "censorship" don't care about truth or actual freedom. They just want their shit to go to the widest audience possible. I'll change my opinion when more of the "censorship" crowd acknowledges that while they strongly disagree, FB (or any other website) has every legal and moral right to "censor" them, because that's also what freedom is about. You can't be for freedom only when it favors you.
Even if there is an XY problem, censorship is so inherently evil that it needs to be stopped even if there's a different problem that we should be solving too.
Is it "censorship" if I throw you out of my Christmas party because you got drunk and insulted my wife? Is it "censorship" if I throw you out of my 2000-person seminar because you keep interrupting? Is it "censorship" if I kick you out for handing out flyers for a competitor on my premises? Are they all "inherently evil" acts?
Keep in mind, I'm using the scare quoted version of censorship because all of my examples are censorship by definition. But no reasonable person would find anything objectionable in them, let alone "inherently evil".
I can't (and won't) stop you from saying whatever you want. But I don't have to let you be on my property to say it. I respect your freedom to say what you want. Please respect my freedom to enforce codes of conduct on my property.
This phrase is key. The public square is supposed to be 100% censorship free. Facebook stole the public square from us, and is now censoring it as if it were legitimately private property.
All of this "censorship" scare-mongering has the potential to turn into a slippery slope that could seriously erode property rights online. Fix the actual problem, rather than whatever's most convenient for you at the moment.
Well let's say you have a certain agenda as a government, to prioritize a risk/reward ratio over pure freedom, and decides that you can afford to make everyone unhappy but alive by maintaining very strict information control. Say like China does but not just for the party, for the country itself.
You can then prioritize opinions by their reward if correct vs risk of being incorrect. Even if you're incorrect, it's better to be incorrect saying mask are useful, than being incorrect saying mask are useless. The probability of masks worsening the situation is lower (but not null) than the probability of masks improving it.
I don't see the problem with that, it's like saying "veterans fought for our freedom and deserve our respect" instead of "veterans used tax money to oppress foreigners and enforce national policies abroad at the detriment of most people involved, and they did that for money not for the country". There are opinions better not shared by official message to lead the country towards some sort of coherent path no ?
You re unironically calling "evil" a clearly stated, well defined, historically precedented, very human behaviour China put in place for the specific purpose, like it or not, to position the party before the country.
It's not evil, it's maybe short sighted and selfish, or who knows, the only way to transition to something better eventually. But "evil", resist these emotional adjectives, you make Chinese people just handwave any attempt at rational evolution.
Not the point of the posted article, since it specifically deals with the ridiculous reasons for Facebook censoring the post.
However, you seem to have stopped reading the Atlantic article after sentence you took out of context. "The authors defined an outbreak as being two or more COVID-19 cases among students or staff members at a school within a 14-day period that are epidemiologically linked. “The measure of two cases in a school is problematic,” Louise-Anne McNutt, a former Epidemic Intelligence Service officer for the CDC and an epidemiologist at the State University of New York at Albany, told me. “It doesn’t tell us that transmission occurred in school.” She pointed to the fact that, according to Maricopa County guidelines, students are considered “close contacts” of an infected student—and thus subject to potential testing and quarantine—only if they (or that infected student) were unmasked. As a result, students in Maricopa schools with mask mandates may have been less likely than students in schools without mandates to get tested following an initial exposure. This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."
Your quote is not in the reason.com article linked here. Anyway, text quoted points out incomplete identification of outbreaks, not that it was not right to track them. In fact, it would have made no difference tracking cases because of school district's policy of testing only 'unmasked' individuals.
>Your quote is not in the reason.com article linked here.
No, it's in the Atlantic article specifically linked in the Reason.com article. I'd suggest reading that since the entire thing is based off of it.
>In fact, it would have made no difference tracking cases because of school district's policy of testing only 'unmasked' individuals.
You may want to reread this part...
This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."
These are early symptoms of a Truth-Market-Fit approach[1] where "fact-checking" is defined by the financial benefits in keeping a following or customer base.
The "Fact checkers" have become Trust Providers. Different groups of people will choose to 'believe' different Trust Providers according to their own views.
This is my biggest problem with the response to Covid in the USA.. the very "loose" information provided/parroted by officials that are designed to manipulate public perception without simply providing the facts for people to make their own judgments. One of the current ones is how you keep hearing how hospitals are "overwhelmed" and we are running out of beds.. they neglect to tell you the impact of all health care providers that had quit because they refused to take the vaccine. So in affect it was the hospitals own policies that caused this issue. This is why Minnesota has called on the National Guard to help replace all the nurses that quit. There are plenty of beds/ICUs just not enough employees to cover them.
Hi, I have friends and family who are doctors in Minnesota. They were overwhelmed even before the hospitals decided to fire the health care workers who don't listen to health care advice.
Your local hospitals in Minnesota are not hospitals nationwide. I have many hospitals in Northern Virginia, DC, and even LA that have been nothing close to "full" for many months of the last year, the media portrayed them as full.
If you ask a fact checker that, no. Years later when they change their tune, then yes. So the answer is no: because we live in a fact checker society now.
Are you Straw Manning and Ad Hominem attacking the author in the same post?
Where did he say that these people don't believe in medicine? In fact, being a Doctor or Nurse by definition means believing in medicine and protecting the patient is your job. More so than some random hacker news stranger.
> Where did he say that these people don't believe in medicine?
Refusing to take a vaccine that appears to be safe and reasonably effective despite being in a pandemic and in a field of work that both increases your risk of exposure and increases the potential damage caused by said exposure (spreading the disease around people who might be already weakened by other medical conditions) suggests they don't.
> Ad Hominem attacking the author
Could you elaborate? I don't see anything in my comment that's attacking the author directly rather than their claims which I totally disagree with.
The problem is fact checks would do the damage on a post like yours above, and by the time they're proven "wrong" have done the damage and moved on.
it really is just information parroting/parading, and anyone defending it, is OK with it because its supporting their own "interpretation of the facts". It's wild how polarized we are, but not really, because these things are just further supporting the echo chamber of opinions one side already had.
If you want to make the argument that it was losing staff to vaccine mandates that resulted in hospitals being overwhelmed, I think you have a big hill to climb to make a credible argument.
Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning. It is inherently biased. The heavy political leanings of those in direct control of the organizations' verdicts are brought up time and time again, and even memes are being made about sites like Snopes. My favorite meme goes something like:
Did x member of y political organization get arrested for hitting some in the head with a baseball bat?
FALSE.
[big block of text]
X member of y political organization was arrested for hitting someone in the head with a cricket bat.
There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form:
"X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say that's wrong."
i.e. "fact-checking" a prediction about something that will happen in the future. Unless you're clairvoyant, that isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't happened yet! So any rating at all is misleading.
I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse will happen. But they do it for economic and social and political issues. They just shouldn't, at all.
"Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some category that has magically different standards or incentives than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart, skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and motivations of every other news outlet.
When you say that "this whole article just should not exist", are you stating that predictions should never be investigated, validated, measured against the statements of experts? Or are you just quibbling that it shouldn't count as "fact checking"? The former seems silly and the latter gets a shrug from me (who cares if there's a better phrase than "fact checking").
Of course the predictions should be investigated and validated, but only after the events have come to pass. If you're going to write something beforehand (e.g. contrasting the predictions of various experts), don't call it a fact-check, because it's not about facts, it's about opinions. Informed, educated opinions yes, but still fundamentally opinions.
There are many important predictions to be made about medium term outcomes (say, in the 5-25 year range).
If someone says "We will never develop grid-level energy storage because elves cannot fly, therefore renewable energy is hopeless", we don't have to wait one second to investigate and (in)validate this claim.
If someone says "Sea level will drop by 3m within 15 years because today's cows are farting less", we do no thave to wait 15 years to investigate and (in)validate this.
If someone says "Astronomical body N28291k will hit the earth at 13:45 on Dec 2nd 2037", we do not need to wait until 2037 to investigate and validate the claim.
If someone says "The cost of coal will decrease by 20% over the next 10 years", when all known reserves of coal are more difficult to access than historical ones and when demand for coal appears to be dropping, we do not need to wait 10 years to investigate and (in)validate this.
the first two things you said are preposterous strawmen, the third I already mentioned, the fourth is wrong. you don't know what will happen in 10 years, maybe some new coal extraction technology will be invented, maybe new sources will be discovered, maybe it becomes possible to economically extract the CO2 from the smokestacks and coal becomes green and gets tons of subsidies. yeah it's unlikely, but it's not something you can "fact-check". it does violence to the meaning of the term.
imagine telling someone ten years ago that oil prices would go negative, which they did last year.
and apart from all of this, for every example you can give me of an obvious black-and-white issue where you really could fact-check it 10 years in advance, there will be 99 others where it's really not so clear-cut, but partisans want there to be fact-checker approved talking points for their side. and the market will fill this demand. for subjects outside your domain-expertise, good luck telling the difference.
> yeah it's unlikely, but it's not something you can "fact-check". it does violence to the meaning of the term.
One of the points of fact-checking is to point out to "yeah, it's unlikely" to people who would not otherwise know.
Lots of claims are made about stuff, in particular climate change and energy supplies, that completely fall into the "yeah, it's unlikely" zone, and yet most ordinary readers and viewers would not know this.
It's always going to be in the interest of someone to say "this might happen by the year XXXX". There's generally no shortage of black-swan boosterism. Having someone step who actually knows the field step in and point out that yes, it might happen but it almost certainly will not is of incredible value.
Your response reminds me of the situation in the current satirical movie "Don't Look Up", where because the probability of an asteroid colliding with earth is only 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president decides it's OK to "sit tight and assess". I mean, sure it could miss, and *"yeah, it's unlikely but...."
> One of the points of fact-checking is to point out to "yeah, it's unlikely" to people who would not otherwise know.
Saying some prediction about the future is unlikely to be correct is not fact-checking. That's the whole point. Predictions aren't facts. Unlikely predictions aren't false facts. They're unlikely predictions.
> because the probability of an asteroid colliding with earth is only 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president decides it's OK to "sit tight and assess".
Saying that it is a good idea to act on predictions that are overwhelmingly likely is not the same as saying that those predictions are facts.
If you want to improve other people's critical thinking skills, you need to make sure yours are good. Calling predictions facts and acting as if they're the same thing is not good critical thinking.
> Saying some prediction about the future is unlikely to be correct is not fact-checking. That's the whole point. Predictions aren't facts. Unlikely predictions aren't false facts. They're unlikely predictions.
Our culture has become filled with a certain kind of noise in which people who frequently don't know what they are talking about make predictions about the future. I don't really care what you want to call a counter-balancing trend to that - I would agree that "fact-checking" for things that are clearly predictions is likely not the best term, but it's not the worst either, since frequently the process of pointing out just how ridiculous the predictions are will involve using actual facts. So in that context, "fact checking" does not mean "check that the facts claimed are correct", it means "check the facts underlying the prediction".
But call it what it should be called or not, it's still a valuable act.
> Our culture has become filled with a certain kind of noise in which people who frequently don't know what they are talking about make predictions about the future.
Focusing on "fact-checking" in general, let alone expanding it to include "prediction checking", worsens the huge amount of noise in our culture of supposedly authoritative pronouncements being made that turn out to be wrong. The Facebook "fact check" that is the subject of the article we are discussing is a case in point. If Facebook weren't so fixated on trying to remove "noise" through "fact checking", they wouldn't be going overboard all the time and removing things that aren't noise at all, but useful dissent.
Also, the very term "fact checking", as it is being used in our culture now, is a Russell conjugation (someone else brought up Russell conjugations elsewhere in this thread). Facebook is "fact checking" (actually their outsourced third parties who remain anonymous and unaccountable are doing it, but let that pass); those who support Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "helping to spread authoritative information"; those who question Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "questioning authority" (even if they cite actual facts).
In short, while I agree that our culture is filled with noise, I don't think all the noise is from individuals who don't know what they're talking about; I think a lot of it is from organizations who don't like to have their power and authority questioned.
I haven't provided any information at all. I provided some opinions. If you're actually a fact checker, that would seem to behavior that plays directly into the critiques of such work. However, I suspect this remark is just a play on the "they are stubborn, i am persistent" trope, in which case I don't see the relevance at this point in this sub-thread.
I would agree that "fact checking" (at least of several varieties) is not unambiguously good, and may in fact turn out to be harmful, quite possibly for reasons not directly related to the content of "fact checking" itself. I would also agree that the case discussed in TFA is a good example of "fact checking" that likely does more harm than good.
However, that doesn't mean that the concept of "fact checking" is inherently problematic. It could be that there is no way in our current culture of doing anything remotely like what "fact checking" probably needs to be. To me, that's still not an argument against the concept, even if it is necessary to accept for now, the actual execution issues force us all to be profoundly skeptical about it.
> that doesn't mean that the concept of "fact checking" is inherently problematic
Perhaps not, but I think there are wrinkles in it that you might not be considering.
First, if "fact checking" just means "consulting other sources of information to see if they say the same thing", then you have to deal with the question of the credibility of those other sources of information. No source of information is always right. Nor is any "fact checker" always right in judging the relative credibility of sources of information. Ultimately, unless you have your own personal knowledge of some fact, any "fact checking" is going to come down to which sources you trust and which sources you don't. Those are always judgment calls and there will always be some degree of residual skepticism, so citing "fact checks" as if they were authoritative is problematic.
Second, if you try to go beyond that and actually do things like independent experiments to check claims (for example, when scientists try to replicate experiments or studies), then you're not really checking on previous facts, you're creating new facts, which you are then going to use to judge the validity of previous claims. But those previous claims were not factual claims but theoretical ones (for example, doing study B to help in judging the claim "study A shows that treatment X is effective against illness Y"). And again, these kinds of comparisons are judgment calls (sure, sometimes you uncover strong evidence that, for example, the data in study A was fabricated, but study B alone won't tell you that).
> t could be that there is no way in our current culture of doing anything remotely like what "fact checking" probably needs to be.
The critical problem I see with the Facebook case is that their "fact checking" results in something more than just publishing whatever Facebook's ultimate judgment is on some website (as, for example, Snopes and other "fact checking" sites do). Facebook's "fact checking" has other consequences, such as blocking access to things people have posted. And since our current culture seems to be fixated on using "fact checking" in this way, not just to arrive at judgments which are then published as speech, for the reader to take or leave, but to take actions that amount to filtering, restricting, or blocking other speech, yes, I think our current culture is not really capable of doing the limited kind of things that "fact checking" properly done would consist of.
> And again, these kinds of comparisons are judgment calls (sure, sometimes you uncover strong evidence that, for example, the data in study A was fabricated, but study B alone won't tell you that).
Making statements like "these kinds of comparisons are judgement calls" is precisely what I'd consider to be a part of any good "fact checking".
> Ultimately, unless you have your own personal knowledge of some fact, any "fact checking" is going to come down to which sources you trust and which sources you don't. Those are always judgment calls and there will always be some degree of residual skepticism, so citing "fact checks" as if they were authoritative is problematic.
If you follow through on this as far as possible, you vanish in a cloud of solipsism. If it is not possible to establish some ground rules for epistemological truth, then really things have just completely fallen apart (which, indeed, to some extent they have).
> Making statements like "these kinds of comparisons are judgement calls" is precisely what I'd consider to be a part of any good "fact checking".
But the very fact that judgment calls are involved means that it isn't "fact checking"; it's not just reporting facts and giving obvious "true" or "false" labels to statements.
> If you follow through on this as far as possible, you vanish in a cloud of solipsism.
Oh, please. Saying that other people might not be trustworthy as sources of information is not at all the same as saying that other people don't exist.
> If it is not possible to establish some ground rules for epistemological truth
The problem isn't "epistemological truth". The problem is that people have many reasons for not telling the truth, either because they have incentives to deliberately lie or because they have incentives to fool themselves.
In theory the idea of "just tell the truth as best you know it", independently of any incentives to do otherwise, sounds good. But in practice it never works out that way. The present time is not exceptional for the low level of trustworthiness of information; it's exceptional for how widespread the consequences of that are. Our culture has a belief that if only everyone would just listen to the "right" authorities, everything would work out fine. The idea that there are no "right authorities" at all and never have been--that every adult human being needs to have their own set of critical thinking skills, and that if some piece of knowledge is important to you, you have to make the effort to verify it for yourself, and that there is no way to avoid this by any form of social organization--is not one that our culture wants to consider. With what results, we see.
Every time a prediction is made in connection to a fact-check, the prediction should be falsified 100% immediately. You are right, we don't have to wait.
They should have called it bullshit check and all claims about the future not backed by data and scientific modelling should be automatically marked as BS.
Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being undoubtedly true. This is a big part of the widening divide between right and left, which is a major issue.
> Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being undoubtedly true.
In my experience, people with poor critical reading skills don't read. Instead they just regurgitate what they heard on FOX, which is that fact check websites are a liberal scam.
False equivalence. Fox went to court to call themselves entertainment because of all the verifiable lies they were pushing. In court, Tucker Carlson said “no reasonable person” would believe him.
New York Times standards are much higher than Fox. Are they perfect? No. But generally they are far less likely to lie to you.
I complain about all USA corporate media, perhaps more accurately described as "war media". I don't recognize a difference between "conservative" and "liberal" flavors, since they are about as distinct as Coke and Pepsi. It isn't a surprise that both Carlson and Maddow use these techniques, since they both learned from Roger Ailes. NYT like to pretend they are somehow above these clowns, but they too have lied us into our every war. The idea is that fools will pay lots of attention to the spectacle of false disagreement and ignore the actual policies of every politician in the employ of billionaires.
> Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being undoubtedly true.
People with poor critical reading skills will probably just accept (or, if it conflicts with the preexisting world view, reject) the original claim as true without referencing a “fact check” at all.
Clearly people can and do make predictions and sometimes those predictions are quite right - and sometimes wrong. Even a really really good predictor like Nate Silver gets things wrong.
Future predictions are not fact checkable. You can argue likelihoods, present contrary evidence or whatnot but predictions are not facts, they are predictions.
A good predictor gives odds to every outcome. That is not something a fact checker can respond to well.
> Even a really really good predictor like Nate Silver gets things wrong.
That's because if he doesn't use mathematical modelling and data he's only ever accidentally correct. There's no such thing as good predictor. If you don't use knowledge (and the only real knowledge comes from scientific process) you can't get your predictions better than chance.
It's a combination of brief luck and "predicting" the obvious.
With interesting personality you can make a good career out of predicting that dice roll will result in >1. You'll by wrong in less than 20% of cases.
Being good predictor is getting popular while you are on the roll. There's nothing else going there.
All predictions that don't have a form of scientific paper with clear mathematical model and ample data are just making stuff up and should be labelled as BS in all media.
Knowledge is not a binary. The world is not a mix of "true" and "false", especially not in the realm of analyzing future outcomes.
You need to not only get multiple analysis, but normalize them, give them confidence scores and then interpret them - and you may interpret them differently than their authors. You may entirely discard some.
How do you get a confidence score? Sure sometimes we can analyze the history of an analysis such as with political polling where we have someone like Rasmussen who has done it for a long long time... but you still need to account for changes in their own process. If Rasmussen gets a new head data scientist tomorrow, does that alter our confidence level?
"Just use math!" is about the same as saying "Just don't be wrong!". Math is a tool, not a magic 8 ball.
Knowledge is not binary. Knowledge is a subset of science. If you draw from outside of science you can't have any knowlegde. An can't make any predictions or even evaluations of the present better than chance.
The issue in my opinion is that there are various, almost-equally "true" perspectives that can be reenforced with facts and presented. That there is no single objective truth to all matters means that biases (political, religious, etc.) act as a lens and the "truth" presented on fact-checking sites (and elsewhere) is shaped by this lens. This is why you can have news organizations with different political slants painting a story two entirely different ways, without directly lying.
Out of curiosity I googled the current state of articles regarding "Wuhan Lab Leak" theory and potential NIH connection to gain of function research. Both issues that aren't clear-cut but have compelling evidence. None of these articles show the nuance you are claiming they would show.
Except for the time that Snopes fact checked this article as "disputed": "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication". (The article was very clearly labeled as satire.)
Snopes exists in large part because idiots can't discern joke/fake from fact. This isn't really Snope's fault. Some people genuinely don't understand satire. We hear about people sharing Onion articles legitimately still.
Poe's law. I don't know if we need to call people who fall for that 'idiots'. Do people who fall for April 1st jokes count as 'idiots'? Furthermore, can you cure from being an idiot? We used to April 1st a bit on elementary school. I guess I managed to define some idiots back then.
Do you think they look less "stupid" for having to point out that there is no evidence for a cannibalistic, baby-eating cabal of pedophilic Democrat sex-traffickers?
Seems like a pretty thin line between satire and reality these days.
They only retroactively changed this later. Web Archive didn't archive that page for a whole 3 years unfortunately, but you can see in this article that Snopes initially issued the verdict of "false".
So it was labelled "false" and not "disputed" as claimed by nradov? Then it is hard for me to see how this is an example of the phenomenon that hereforphone discusses.
Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak. Reality is the whole Acitvist Industrial Complex and many elites, who have financial ties w/ China including HN favorites like Apple and Amazon [3][4], are trying to regain control of the narrative they lost because of internet.
In my experience, that's how left wing disinformation works. Using rhetorical tricks to mislead the audience. It's even more ironic when most left wing journalists and pundits are followers of Foucault and Derrida.
In this specific example, given the context (that a virus would have a simple time going 400 meters from lab to market via some host), isn't the difference between 400m and 26km valid to point out?
Hi, I've been revisiting an old thread from way back in April of 2020, and you are the only person that replied to me that appears to still be active on HN.
Both links place the 'laughed' piece of the claim in the 'true' column of the analysis, with more accurate characterizations and contextualization of 'about it'
I think the more salient factor is which facts they choose to check. Better to leave some stories un-checked, so they can be dismissed as only reported by right-wing sources.
In one instance, PolitiFact requested NewsBusters to prove a chart on illegal immigration they posted was true, with the implied threat of labeling it false. When NewsBusters complied within the 14 hour window given, proving their claims true, PolitiFact did.. nothing. No post telling NewsBuster's claim was proven true.
Sure, but give examples and you often start to find that the topics are so far afield from reality that they don't merit the cost of a fact-check.
Snopes has fact-checked claims that Donald Trump said Earth is flat (false) but not whether Earth is flat, and they won't fact-check that any time soon.
You're being downvoted for no reason I can tell, other than the fact that NewsBuster is a source popular with right-wing audiences. There are people on HN who basically will downvote anything they perceive as being supportive of their political enemies, with no regard to the content of the message. Message to those downvoting this:
If your position on free speech changes depending on who is doing the moderating, you don't have a position on free speech.
I had the oddest experience in trying to upvote his comment. I’m on mobile so it may just be be that. But, when I upvoted, there was a small delay but it seemed to register a downvote. So I unvoted and tried again. Same thing. Anyway, assuming HN mods do not have some switch that turns every vote into a downvote on particular comments. I think it’s fine to space out the upvote/downvote buttons. Users shouldn’t be losing minutes of their life trying to convince themselves that their vote was properly registered.
If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion, then your votes get disabled and/or inverted. I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm. Some call it an echo chamber, others call it "consensus". There will always be a contrived justification.
> If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion, then your votes get disabled and/or inverted.
Um, what? I don't believe that for a second - that sounds crazy. Is there evidence for this? I'm willing to be educated. Er, fact-check please. (And the strange phrasing "I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm" sounds like Dang didn't 'confirm' it.)
So, that's a "no" - there's no evidence. (I looked at your recent comment history, came across this[0] which I consider completely deranged, so I'm not too interested in doing what you say. Chomsky & Herman's seeing no atrocities in Cambodia, and you seeing them everywhere in Australia, seem some kind of dual.)
I deliberately post against the consensus on HN, and what you see is the result. I invite you to email Dang as I have, but I will not post the transcript of what began as a private conversation.
It's a war for mindshare and the culture we live in. And the way that's done is with marketing and appearances. Seeing something down voted has a very clear effect, like seeing a product rated with bad reviews.
> The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened.
Are you implying that restricting someone's breathing by kneeling on them would somehow be less bad if that person was already complaining of breathing difficulty?
Of course not. But it makes the whole thing a lot less clear cut in the absence of other information. Would he have died anyways if someone wasn’t kneeling in him due to drugs or other causes? Should they have believed him more or less that he couldn’t breathe when he was on the ground?
I’m not saying it at all excuses their actions, just that the media was pushing a narrative by not including that.
When it first happened the media framed it with the racially inflammatory headline:
"White cop shoots and kills unarmed black teen"
All technically true information. But what really happened (according to forensic evidence and credible testimony) could also be framed as "Convenience store robber attacks police officer and was killed in the process". It's hard to tell exactly what happened since we only have a few facts and the rest is witness testimony, but it seems the media definitely pre-determined that the framing of the story should be that the cop was the "bad guy" and the victim was the "good guy" and that the whole thing should have a racism angle.
Yes, that's another example of squeezing a complicated situation into a soundbite that can be easily understood by those who are terrified by the complexity of the real world.
> I've dealt with someone with eBPD who was unable to get through a 45 minute therapy session without contradicting themselves. They also habitually selectively report facts to distort reality... Here's an example with details changed: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." Reality, Joe was in the passenger seat, and the driver hit a deer that jumped out in front of them. On confrontation: "I never said Joe drove drunk!"
Your framing implies the normative claim that convenience store robbers should be shot and killed. This is hotly contested on moral grounds, but on purely material grounds it is hard to justify that claim at all.
If the teen attacked the cop there is a self defense claim, albeit that doesn't stand if the use of force is greater than the threat (eg shooting someone if you think they're unarmed)
Does that also warrant shooting and killing? Why do those who take the oath to protect and serve have a seemingly paradoxical right to extinguish life?
The framing does not imply that at all. The framing is "Convenience store robber attacks police officer and was killed in the process". The justification for the shooting is clearly that the robber attacked the police officer, not that he robbed a convenience store.
There was a great example in Germany recently. A Hamas terrorist killed one Israeli and wounded multiple others and was shot himself by Israeli security forces. German State TV opened with "Israel: one Palestinian killed".
BTW, Reagan was a master at reframing difficult questions into a joke, thereby disarming their payload. I remember the Democrats at the time complaining in bitter frustration at how adroitly the "Teflon President" did this.
Not to take away from the joke, but it was a televised debate and Reagan was responding to a question from the moderator, one he probably had an inkling was coming -- not an "argument" from Mondale.
Like I said, I was young at the time. Still, one would expect any candidate to offer multiple arguments for voters to consider. If this simple joke really "sank Mondale's campaign" as claimed above, one would wonder just what form that alleged campaign might have taken. It could be that other factors led to the 49-state drubbing, which factors would have decided the matter even in the absence of a particular canned response to a softball from the moderator.
It's not just my opinion that that joke was the turning point. Although Mondale was clearly outmatched by Reagan, that incident pretty much encapsulated why.
Why are these stories so important to us? Upthread we learn that this debate was as staged as any of Hillary's. Anything planned in advance can't have been an actual turning point. USA popular discourse was shockingly dumb in the 1980s, so it's possible that Jodie Foster had already clinched Reagan's reelection a couple of months after his inauguration.
I think going up against Reagan, who had enormous popular support due to being thought to have presided over a strong economy and progress in foreign policy vs. the USSR, did most of the work in sinking Mondale's campaign.
Reagan wasn't popular by default. He was popular because he was a master at debate, charming people, and framing himself as President.
For example, Jimmy Carter never looked Presidential. For one, he encouraged people to call him "Jimmy" rather than "James". For another, he'd wear a sweater when giving speeches to the public.
People liked that Reagan wore a sharp suit and acted (yes, acted) the role of President.
BTW, Obama, Trump, and Biden all were very careful to present themselves while campaigning as Presidential. They all wore sharp, well tailored suits, and took pains to stand up straight. I bet they all got coaching in body language.
US presidents’ suits tend to be generously cut (if not a full “sack” suit) rather than very well tailored. Viewed in this light Trumps suits seem to have been flattering if unstylish.
Your setup was WRT political bias, but your meme example was WRT the tedious manner in which they report conclusions.
I've not experienced the political bias. Can you link some examples?
We have a serious disinformation problem. In my experience, Snopes seems to be overwhelmingly accurate and to do much more good than harm on balance. The fact that they tediously present the facts before drawing a conclusion (per your meme) actually helps to mitigate any perception of bias.
Those aren't identical claims; "Canadian homes set thermostats to 0 in the winter of 1800" and "Canadian homes had no heating in the winter of 1800" are not saying the same thing.
One says there was on balance no desire for federal tax income, the other says there was no way to have federal tax income whether or not it was desired.
But, assuming we're taking these as identical claims (and they are not necessarily), I still don't think that necessarily reflects bias in any case. These were two separate fact checks about two claims worded slightly differently, spaced 3 years apart. They were performed by two different organizations, and also likely performed by different people.
That they landed only a degree apart (mostly true vs half true) seems pretty consistent. Certainly doesn't seem like any kind of egregious bias.
Your comment (and the child comments replying to it) would be much stronger if you could point to actual examples of this happening rather than imagined examples.
Personally, I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Are they anywhere similar to this cricket/baseball example you've given, or are they far less egregious?
> Snopes rates the claim that Senator Joe Biden said "we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." as false,
Snopes rates the claim "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud." as false.
A mistaken and false admission is still an admission. And he did make such an admission.
I believe, and I suspect most reasonable people would believe, that this was a gaffe and that the President did not mean what he said. It is an admission that should be given very little weight. But it remains an admission nonetheless, and it is a lie for Snopes to claim otherwise.
"admit, intransitive verb: To grant to be real, valid, or true; acknowledge or concede. To disclose or confess (guilt or an error, for example). synonym: acknowledge."
It can't be both an admission of something real, and a gaffe.
If he said "I am a dog" it would be a lie, not an admission that he's a dog (because he simply isn't). Describing an anti-fraud organisation as a fraud organisation is either correct and an admission of a coverup, or false and a mistake and not an admission of anything.
No. A statement can relate to truth-or-falsity independent of its own truth or falsity.
Example: You falsely accuse me of robbing a bank. I admit I robbed the bank, due to a threat against my family. Later, my defense counsel discovers evidence of the threat.
The admission is still an admission. It grants that the accusation is true, even though it isn't. The evidence pertaining to why the admission is false is also fair game to explain why not to give any weight to the admission, but it nonetheless remains an admission.
Same here. The public discourse should absolutely correct the record and establish what the President meant. He should probably issue a clarifying statement. But it doesn't change the fact that he made a statement that, by its own words if not by its probable intent, conceded the truth of an accusation.
I wouldn't even call it a gaffe, merely poorly worded.
An X organization can be an organization to accomplish X, or it can be an organization to combat the problem of X. A reasonable person will look at whether X is generally considered positive or negative to decide between these, but a quote-miner won't care.
Its an admission to having an organization focussed on voter fraud. It's not an admission that that organization promotes or organizes voting fraudulently
You're ascribing more precision to the statement than is there
I'm ascribing no precision to it whatsoever. You're putting the cart before the horse. Before you can argue about what a piece of evidence means, it first has to be evidence. An admission is a type of evidence, given by an individual against their own interest.
The fact that there are all kinds of arguments about this evidence not meaning what it is claimed to mean - arguments I wholeheartedly agree with - does not change the fact that it is a statement Joe Biden made that is negative for Joe Biden. This particular admission is extremely weak, clearly ambiguous, and frankly demonstrates that his opponents are grasping at straws. But there's still no getting around the very basic fact that it is an admission.
Surely this is like claiming the Fire Dept are obviously arsonists, otherwise it would have been named the Extinguishing Dept? Or that the 9/11 Commission obviously commissioned 9/11. We have a "Serious Organised Crime Agency" which is more akin to the FBI than the Mafia.
What you're describing as a gaffe is a very intentional misrepresentation.
Speaking of fact checks, that’s literally not what the page you linked says. Instead, they are rating the claim that “In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud.”
But you're absolutely wrong. As in my other comment, a "voter fraud organization" "perpetrates" voter fraud as much as a "breast cancer organization" "perpetrates" breast cancer.
This is the in-your-face, obvious, and common meaning of what he said. Why are you pretending otherwise?
What they debunked was a twitter post that claimed Biden admitted to voter fraud. They didn’t claim that he did not say that sentence. They even posted a full transcript. Did you actually read this before posting it?
While Snopes could take on the mantle of hyperliteralism, this would be a pretty paralyzing extension of scope. Would they need to fact-check articles that referenced a PD's "homicide divisions", clarifying that their charter is to investigate homicide instead of perpetrate it? Would they be able to countenance references to a supermarket without clarifying that Safeway has not invented a type of market that can fly and has X-ray vision?
There are undoubtedly people whose language skills are poor enough to think that "voter fraud organization" here means "organization to commit voter fraud" instead of "organization to combat voter fraud". I'm not a fan of Snopes at all, but I don't think it's unreasonable that they exclude the tiny segment of the population in need of remedial literacy classes from their target audience.
Can we agree to be adults here? It’s clear to any reasonable person what he meant.
It is bad faith arguments like the one you are making that has made political discourse so toxic in this country.
It's so obvious to me that the quote means "an organization that combats voter fraud" that I honestly can't believe you're arguing in good faith. And I don't even like Biden.
If he had said instead "breast cancer organization", would you start claiming that he's trying to cause more breast cancer in the world? Obviously not, because that's absurd.
That's incredible mental gymnastics. This is like a straw man version of what leftists say the average fox news viewer is like. If this is parody, then congratulations on fooling me.
How ‘fact-checking’ can be used as censorship
https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0...
- covers how Trump's vaccine prediction was 'fact-checked' as false, how the Wuhan leak report was 'fact-checked' and also heavily censored as false, how the reports of Biden's memory boopers were 'fact-checked' as false.
Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...
This article is a very good demonstration of the problem with fact checking, thanks for sharing.
> Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...
I imagine I could find more if I wanted to as well, but it probably kicks off a more interesting discussion if we focus on real examples instead of imagined hypotheticals. I was just trying to drive the discussion in that direction.
investortimes:
I think this is a weird semantic argument. Yes, there are fines that need to be paid by water management companies if they do not reduce the amount of water per capita each person uses, and I think investortimes is correct in saying that the cost will probably be somehow passed on to consumers. But that is still not the same thing as saying how it is illegal. The prices will just go up a lot more, and I imagine some kind of usage based pricing will come into effect to make sure the goals are reached. But calling that illegal is like saying it is illegal to run a mining rig in your home because you will be charged a lot for electricity and a power company might force you to reduce the amount of power you are using. So I believe mostly false is still correct.
This was one of those times I couldn't believe the media took the bait.
1. Trump wants media to report on Hillary deleting her emails.
2. Trump claims Hillary literally acid washed her emails.
3. Media jumps in (they can't help themselves). "Haha Trump is so dumb he thinks Hillary literally acid washed her emails. What really happened is she used software called BleachBit..."
4. Everyone knows how Hillary deleted her emails.
> I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position.
There's a still a problem of scale that fact checkers are attempting to solve. Much like any other outlets of information (news organizations, your neighbor, fact checkers, etc) it is left to the individual to evaluate whether the totality of output from that individual / organization is factually correct. I don't think the answer is to dissuade "fact checkers" similar to that I don't think we should be removing "news organizations" (even biased ones, which they often are), but the need to educate rational thinking skills to be able to evaluate who and how to trust summarized and often opinionated information.
> Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to?
Even if there were a pile of egregious examples, the conclusion should be to put reduced weight (or none) on the authors of those examples, and not necessarily the idea of fact checking, considering there could be others that more often communicate the nuance of the situation.
(There's also a problem of how fact-checking conclusions are _applied_ into other contexts of course..)
I went to a fact-checking conference. During the keynote, the speaker (a previous Wikipedia foundation CEO) used a graph from a study to drive home a specific point. It sounded way too perfect, and I got suspicious.
After the talk I looked up the study, found the graph, and below it the research wrote "Do not interpreted the above graph as X! For reasons Y, this would be false. The graph illustrate Z, with the caveats of ...".
I contacted the conference holders about the obvious issue of using the graph to prove X, and they forwarded it to the speaker. Nothing happened. This in turn drove home a different point for me. Fact checkers don't care about facts if those facts don't fit in the social context that they are being used.
Sure, not all of the output of the "fact checker" article mill has been awful. I think Trump was a bad guy who lied a lot (and Obama, and Bush, and on and on).
I find it really obnoxious when these articles are really quite ideological and opinionated, but still use the verbage of "checking the facts". The thing I most take issue with is if something is "mostly false" because a public figure looked at an issue in a way that you don't think is the best way for society to look at an issue. That is an opinion, and to call it "fact checking" is pure ideology.
And that is not to say that opinions are trivial or personal observations, less important than facts. There's a lot of bullshit in politics, and you'd be absolutely right and doing a service to call it all out as bullshit, and give your reasoning.
I think Trump was in a different league from past presidents, maybe not because of the magnitude of the lies (all of them have fairly big military lies involving life and death), but the frequency was astounding… I do not know how someone even functions like he does.
You can say the same about any big politician. The real difference was Trump’s immature demeanor, but make no mistake that Democrats are just as big of liars as Republicans.
Your garden-variety politician lies to further an agenda and it's usually clear what the agenda is in retrospect. Trump lied constantly for no discernible purpose, which either makes him a genius or an idiot depending on how highly you think of his abilities.
The weird thing about Trump’s lies was they weren’t really calculated to decieve people they were more like BS talking points as if we were in some pre-information age where whoever was the biggest bully won the argument.
The weird thing is he liked to fib a lot, as if he were talking to the construction crew talking shop. It was a lot of little things that didn't need making things up or exaggerating, yet he did. On the other hand Bush would lie about big things and didn't lie about the small things so much as just brush things off.
My personal favorite was something like "No, Trump was not telling the Truth, Clinton did not submerge her servers in acid." prior to the 2016 election. That is when I knew the guy would never get a fair shake, no matter what he did.
He said she "acid washed 33000 emails". BTW, he was still saying that years later. From a May 2019 Tweet of his [1].
> Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a most powerful demand notice for them from Congress?
This was October 9, 2016. I have no love for the man, but like I said, we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him.
Gosh, she did not use a corrosive chemical! SHEESH!
Watching grown adults freak out about that was just ... I know that history is full of otherwise reasonable people working themselves into a froth about something, and going from there to do whatever terrible things, but to watch it happen over such trivial items was chilling.
What do you think would be a fair way for the media to handle the "acid wash" claims?
He doesn't seem to have been talking about BleachBit, because he said in his ABC interview on 2016-09-05
> I mean, she had her emails — 33,000 emails — acid washed. The most sophisticated person never heard about acid washing. Acid washing is a very expensive process and that’s to really get rid of them.
and at a couple campaign events the next day
> But why do you acid wash, or bleach, the emails? Nobody even heard of it before. Very expensive
and
> How about the 33,000 missing e-mails that were acid washed — acid washed. And Rudy was telling me, nobody does it because it’s such an expensive process.
BeachBit is free software. There is nothing "expensive" about obtaining it, installing it, or using it. So what the heck was he trying to get at?
Do you honestly believe that Trump thought that Clinton or her proxies had subjected hardware or "emails" to bleach, acid, or any kind of corrosive or oxidizing agent?
That is my question. Do you sincerely believe he thought that was what had happened?
The guy who thought maybe you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach? The same guy who was convinced he won the 2020 election on the logic that “it’s impossible Biden would get more votes than me”. Yes, I sincerely do believe Trump is that stupid.
> The guy who thought maybe you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach?
You have been misinformed. You should watch the video. I watched the video back when it happened and it was blatantly obvious he wasn't saying you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach. Unfortunately I can't find the video now but here's an article that lines up with my recollection of the events[1]:
> The former President did not instruct people to drink bleach, but he did suggest that the use of disinfectants as a treatment should be researched.
> Disinfectant knocks it out in a minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By injection, inside, or almost as cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs. it would be interesting to check that,
While the BBC[0] transcribes
> And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that.
In popular relation 'injection' was rendered as 'swallow', which is indeed technically inaccurate. However 'suggested that the use of disinfectants as a treatment should researched' is a very, very generous interpretation of that sequence of words, and not the message that anyone watching that event walked away with.
When I watched the press conference, I did think Trump was suggesting we should spend research money on injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19. I am not a biologist, but as I understand this is very naieve; at a high enough dose to kill the virus it would also kill the patient. I facepalmed, imagining billions of dollars spent on this on the president's whim; I am glad it didn't happen that way.
Trump later said he was being sarcastic, which makes even less sense to me than anything he said or was accused of saying.
> And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that.
'The president said to swallow bleach' is an uncharitable and inaccurate summary of that line, but so is 'he never said that or anything like that'. At an absolute minimum he spit-balled an idea about internal application of 'disinfectant' live on national television. His manner of self-presentation was more than bleak enough without any additional interpretative efforts.
Hey look, you fact checked me and nobody got hurt and a misunderstanding was cleared up. Thanks for proving fact checking is a good thing. Indeed, genius Trump only suggested injecting bleach, not swallowing it.
>What he said is he suggested to study it. Which is fine. He never "suggested" injecting it or drinking it.
No, it absolutely is not fine for the President to spitball dangerous ideas like that on live national television. Even Trump later said he was being "sarcastic". Is that an appropriate moment to be sarcastic? Did he sound sarcastic at the time?
I don't understand your reflexive defense of Trump. There's a million things to hang the guy for, this isn't like Obama and his tan suit or his dijon mustard.
I came to the conclusion after reading books written by the people who worked with him, or who interviewed him or his staff. People who worked with Trump on a daily basis in the White House, hoping to keep the American experiment going.
So I suggest you read some books, that will put your “facts” in a larger context that makes them so you don’t miss the forest for the trees. Trump is a bad person who belongs nowhere near any levers of power except in charge of his grifting operations to sucker “patriots” off their money to pay off his debts.
I’ll give Trump this, though. He’s not as crazy as a lot of his followers and fellow grifters. His recent Candace Owens interview where he promoted the vaccine was comedy gold. Trump isn’t dumb enough to think the vaccine doesn’t work.
Trump's a moron, famous for his verbal diarrhea, this is nothing new. He seemed to have heard the name BleachBit, conflated it with bleach, which in his mind was a harsh chemical like acid, which then became acid wash. There are many such examples of his meandering thought patterns, it's definitely in character.
The Clinton camp and their supporters in the media were the ones being disingenuous, and seizing on the chemical angle to deny malfeasance. Versions of "she didn't wash the server with acid", or the infamous "wipe, like with a cloth?" comments do not debunk the core claim, that data was deleted, and the Clinton political machine are savvy and cynical enough operators to know this.
This is a common tactic of left wing media. They use rhetorical tricks to mislead the audiences. Lab leak has been tarred as conspiracy theory because of political and financial gains through very dubious rhetorical tricks.
Claim: Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network.
Verdict: mixture
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
(she was sentenced to 58 years and pardoned by Bill Clinton after serving 16)
That is an interesting one. Snopes gave it mixed because technically she was never convicted of terrorism by any court, thus isn't actually a "convicted terrorist". In this case a mixed verdict does seem fair as the lack of nuance in the claim doesn't match the reality of the situation.
There is, for sure, a definition of terrorism (by Alex P. Schmid) agreed upon by academics. It has 12 subchecks though; not simple (unfortunately circumstances require it to be complex as-is). If I were to fact-check this (say as journalist) I would reach out to academics, asking them their take on the matter by presenting them facts (and, perhaps, uncertainties).
Apart from that, usually, when it comes to democratic countries with a working objective justice system, I would say we can trust verdicts unless proven otherwise. A presidential pardon could be such, I don't know. I do know the case of Scooter Libby, where presidential pardon was unjustified (Valerie Plame case) but as an outsider of USA I don't know if that is common, and how common (I can imagine its an abused political tool).
Is a presidential pardon considered a verdict and part of the justice system?
I've always assumed that it's merely removing the punishment (which is what the executive branch deals with), but has no influence on the legal status, i.e. if you're convicted of fraud, sent to prison and get a pardon, you're still a convicted fraudster, but you're released from prison.
I don't know, it seems like it overrules the verdict (which only the president can do) but I am not sure. Its worth noting that initially, Libby specifically wasn't pardoned but his sentence was commuted.
> After a failed appeal, President Bush commuted Libby's sentence of 30 months in federal prison, leaving the other parts of his sentence intact. As a consequence of his conviction in United States v. Libby, Libby's license to practice law was suspended until being reinstated in 2016. President Donald Trump fully pardoned Libby on April 13, 2018. [1]
Which is rare:
> After Libby was denied bail during his appeal process on July 2, 2007, Bush commuted Libby's 30-month federal prison sentence, calling it "excessive", but he did not change the other parts of the sentence and their conditions. That presidential commutation left in place the felony conviction, the $250,000 fine, and the terms of probation. Some have criticized the move, as presidential commutations are rarely issued, but when granted they have generally occurred after the convicted person has already served a substantial portion of his or her sentence: "We can't find any cases, certainly in the last half-century, where the president commuted a sentence before it had even started to be served," said former Justice Department pardon attorney Margaret Colgate Love. [..] [1]
There's 2 movies which involve the Plame affair, Fair Game and Vice. Both well worth it, though its more a side thing in Vice while its the main subject in Fair Game.
Fact-checking is absurd. It's a phenomenon that hints at greater problems, solving none. It's offloading critical judgment skills and knowledge (as informed as ony may be, and as broad and shallow one needs to distinguish most misleading or false argumentations, it's been a long time since the "last person to know everything"!), and offloading it to people that don't know better, and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization. Snopes got made fun of a lot in the past, some of their conclusions are abstract and get down to semantics instead of actual facts. At some point the average person should know better. It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages.
I regret not finding some of the compilation images, but I found one such example of.. questionable lines of thought.
> It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages.
So everyone has to thoroughly investigate everything, become experts in all fields, and never rely on those with more education and experience. Thanks, I hate it.
That's a scary prospect, but not what I meant. If they went away, or weren't plastered on any controversial news piece, it's not as if one's judgment and trust of sources would be worthless. What are the qualifications for the average fact-check reporter? I know it's hard to say these things when one of the most profitable and fundamental abilities since the beginning of propaganda has been manipulating the populace and its judgment, but we ought to do better!
> .. solving none. It's offloading critical judgment skills and knowledge .. and offloading it to people that don't know better
Are fact checkers any different than people who contribute to Wikipedia? It serves a purpose, but does come with a lot of disadvantages.
> .. and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization.
Isn't this the case already? Without "fact checkers" you still have the current population of people spinning stories and framing them in their own desired ways. I don't see how fact checkers are necessarily making the situation worse in that manner.
> It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages.
You still have the problem of scale that you need to solve. There are a lot of controversies now-a-days. I imagine this proposed individual (or even a current, motivated individual) does not have time to investigate some of the more nuanced disputes.
People ask for examples. This is an interesting one where Snopes admits they were wrong, and honorably changes their rating from MOSTLY FALSE to.. Mixture?
Today I learned that Snopes isn't archived by the Wayback Machine. In August of this year Snopes admitted that founder David Mikkelson plagiarized portions of his articles, and as a result are now allowing Wayback Machine to store archives (reversing Mikkelson's policy).
> Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning
This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most people are staggeringly unintelligent. They suffer from such a deficit of basic critical thinking skills that they need to squeeze all the complexity of the world into a model in which experts have figured out The Absolute Truth and anyone wio disagrees needs to be brutally crushed, or in the modern world, simply silenced. (The similarity to the notions of scripture and heresy is 0% a coincidence).
The problem is that this model inevitably undermines its own foundations: the faith that a Science deity hands down truth on clay tablets is only sustained by a process of knowledge-generation that requires a full engagement with the nuance, uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to trying to understand reality.
The simpletons for whom Believe in Science is a dogma are always going to be an obstacle to the process by which those with adult-level cognition _actually create the level of certainty we do have in societal knowledge_.
It's encouraging to see that the (obvious) contradictions of a centrally "fact-checked" social media ecosystem are already revealing themselves in ridiculous examples like this. But I'm probably too cynical to be convinced that we won't just blow through to a new equilibrium where an important conduit for communication has a content filter on it that boils down to "don't think things about sensitive topics that a layman would find 'weird' " .
I find it ironic that we are subject to the power of a bunch of people who probably couldn't even read or write proficiently, let alone understanding the basic science.
When I first heard about this plan to "face check" articles on Facebook, I was actually floored because it's just such an obviously bad idea. There is always going to be a point where reasonable people disagree about what is correct and what isn't or what should be fact-checked and what shouldn't.
And you're not even dealing with reasonable people.
Even if you limit it to the most egregious cases that just shifts the problem. What's egregious and what isn't?
I actually believe it was well-intentioned. Just... completely misguided. You know what they say: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Second thought: it's weird to me how many conservatives and conspiracy theorists (it's interesting that there's so much crossover between these two groups) are so keen to dismantle Section 230 when they benefit the most. In an effort for platforms to remain neutral, this nonsense is allowed to exist. If platforms were responsible for this "content", it'd be shut down so fast.
But here's a good thing to keep in mind: from a narcissist an accusation is actually a confession. Trump is a textbook narcissist. Go back and look at his accusations through that filter.
I think it can be implemented well: there will always be a point where reasonable people agree about what is correct.
That point is obviously very, very conservative (lower case 'c'). Reasonable people can all agree that Covid is a thing that exists, for example.
I don't mind Facebook fact-checking against flat-earthers, "it's just a flu bro", or "Bill Gates put 5g microchips in vaccines". Reasonable people from any place would agree those are counter-factual.
But I tend to get banned from subreddits as an anti-vaxxer because, for example, I say my first 2 shots were Pfizer and I refuse to get Moderna for my third one (Moderna is the only one my government currently permits my age group to get). There are facts for and against this position for reasonable people to weigh. It's still often a ban on social-media for spreading anti-vax misinformation though.
There are always casualties to policies of "fact checking". You have witnessed yourself being one. I think it would have been nice to have some better policy or conversation in place for what happens when you become the one erroneously fact-checked, because instead what's happening now is it just happens in the shadows and by the time it happens to you it's too late and you're stuck with this system that actually just works counter-intuitively to the issues that are the most important to you.
It's sort of like the slow eroding of freedoms and transition to fascism that people seem to be fine with because "protect us against COVID" which we're all fine with it until that policy is flipped on them and happens to impact them.
> It's sort of like the slow eroding of freedoms and transition to fascism that people seem to be fine with because "protect us against COVID"
Oh, come the heck on. I don't know how a reasonable person should be expected to take this seriously. We've been forcing people to vaccinate for a good long time now and I don't think I'm living in a fascist dystopia. Correct me if I'm wrong! Should I buy some jackboots so I can fit into my new reality?
>Even if you limit it to the most egregious cases that just shifts the problem. What's egregious and what isn't?
It implicitly shifts the undertone of everything that isn't fact-checked on the platform from neutral to true. This is not a bug but a feature, as it provides the plausible deniability by blurring the line between "no tag since we can't fact-check everything, duh" and "no tag because we tacitly agree with the narrative presented here even if it is untrue".
"Fact checking" is one of the best scams in the past couple of years. In this case I scare quote it because it really is that specific phrase that I am referring to, not the process or the people. Somehow, labeling something a "fact check" gave whatever was so labeled immense authority and gravitas, merely by virtue of being a "fact check". It also proved it was Platonically Non-Partisan, because Fact Checking is just intrinsically non-partisan, because it's a Fact Check. Do you not trust the Facts?
It was a good gig, but political partisans can't help but spend all the gravitas and authority they can find as quickly as possible, and what you see here is the account drying up. It'll take a while longer to complete that process but I don't expect people to have any more trust in "fact checks" than anything else in 5 years.
"Fact checks" are nothing special. Political partisans have been "fact checking" each other forever, complete with misrepresentation, failures to even read the thing they're fact checking, all the usual errors. They just didn't call it a "fact check". Merely labeling something a "fact check" changes nothing, and quite obviously did not impose any sort of higher standard on the so-called "checkers" either. Nor does Facebook have any authority or capability in any sense of the term to bless any particular "fact checker" with them being anything more that Facebook's official opinion. (In this, their argument in their lawsuit is completely correct.)
Of course, that causes problems. If Facebook indeed somehow has direct access to the Fountain of Truth, they can perhaps be justified in decorating the speech of other people with the Truth from this fountain. If, on the other hand, they're just opinions, that raises a whole host of questions. Why do they feel like they can decorate other people's speech with their own opinions? On what basis do they declare these "facts"? How amazing it is that Facebook, a corporation whose purpose is to serve ads and incidentally provide a service to people to gather information for those ads, are also medical experts, political experts, and experts of all sorts of other things. What accountability will Facebook have when it turns out their opinions, which again I remind you include very strong medical opinions, are wrong? (Don't get too caught up on Coronavirus specifically; having started making medical decisions we can believe they will continue to do so. Even if you believe they have the perfectly correct balance of Truth today, there is no reason to believe that will continue indefinitely. And with their leverage, they have the capability to multiply the consequences of error hugely, perhaps more than anyone else.)
If they are not lofty, impartial experts graciously spending their money to guide the masses to the Truth, then they almost immediately collapse into something more like arrogant jerks who bully their particular biases onto people with the threat of kicking them off the world's largest platform if they don't conform.
One imagines that Facebook would not prefer to be seen that way. They've really bet rather a lot on the Fact Check mythos.
One day, humans in the future will look in awe that a role such as Fact Checker was viewed with anything less than contempt.
They will also remark on how odd it was that a small little dot in Northern California felt themselves capable of this task, and simultaneously did not understand why they were unpopular with everyone but themselves.
Colion Noir has a similar tale [0] with fact checkers at politifact, and gives timelines of emails, etc that is pretty interesting. He is all about guns, and of course, the person that 'investigates' him is completely against guns. He was also doxed by politifact. The overall process seems disturbing.
See if you can spot the difference in these two headlines:
"A Study That the CDC Used To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
Which one makes it seem like some evidence used should be discarded?
And which one makes it seem like Mask Mandates have been proven to be a Junk Science?
See that word "The" in the headline the author used? That sure makes it sound like the single source of evidence was wrong, and so therefore the conclusion is wrong.
If you want to be really safe, and not clickbaity, you could even go for,
"Mask Mandates May Be Effective, But One Study the CDC Used Had Deeply Flawed Methodology."
That's only four characters longer than the original one:
"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
Facebook is worried about public perception if they host false information.
The financial incentives are all wrong, and people make money with click bait headlines, so we're going to watch companies like Facebook wrestle with this, and sometimes make what we consider to be "the wrong call."
While I’m a moderate Democrat, and no libertarian, [1] I have a lot of respect for Robby Suave, the author of this piece.
He has been very good about pointing out the abuses of the radical left destroying people’s lives for things like wearing a costume at a 2018 Halloween party which the radical left woke mob decides is politically incorrect in 2020. [2] In addition, he has supported due process during the #MeToo “believe all women” moral panic when many on the radical left wanted to get rid of presumption of innocence and due process. [3]
[1] Certain problems require big government to solve: Police, military, roads, and, yes, health care
I don't know the guy but he looks very preoccupied with facebook drama, with inflammatory titles, and mounting scandal on top of a scandal. There are people who would rather see the liberal left burn alive than convince a few people not to vote for them for this boring reason 1, and this boring reason 2 and...
It's fun to troll online, but respect... I wouldn't ask for it, I don't think he should either :D
Without more context, I have to assume you’re talking about the articles he wrote which I linked to in the grandparent.
I am not sure how pointing out it was unfair to get a woman in her mid-50s fired because she wore a costume in 2018 the Washington Post retroactively decided was politically incorrect in 2020 is “trolling”. More like, standing up for fairness, compassion, and justice.
I was referring to my own post. That person trolls like I do. I wouldnt ask for respect, I wouldnt give him any: he's exacerbating drama rather than solving the problem with the CDC, simply by using emotions rather than rational proposals.
Something I respect surprisingly is the wapo article https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/blackface... full of various points of views, explaining the issue clearly, taking no special position itself, even going to tell that person felt so bad about her idea of a joke or the reactions to it she left in tear, causing compassion for her in me...
So maybe it's trolling to say the wapo calls an old incident politically incorrect ? :p As an amateur troll myself I get why she found it funny to fight fire with fire and why some people just cant go that many levels of irony and it's hard to sometimes face the reactions to your own trolling. The Wapo itself seems completely innocent of any position and I appreciate the further attempt to paint it as such as good trolling, when they were trying to untroll the debate. Just like wearing a blackface to criticise defending blackfaces.
I'm interested in the eventual outcome of this case:
> "This case presents a simple question: do Facebook and its vendors defame a user who posts factually accurate content, when they publicly announce that the content failed a 'fact-check' and is 'partly false,' and by attributing to the user a false claim that he never made?" wrote Stossel's attorneys in the lawsuit. "The answer, of course, is yes."
The mental gymnastics to contort labelling of posts as defamation is so laughable. There's nothing defaming about "we had X group review this post and they found it was False." It doesn't matter if X group was incorrect in their assessment- what matters is that statement ("group reviewed and their finding was --") is purely true.
That's not defamation of character (which would be "this poster is lying"), it's a true statement about an opinion that was reached ("fact checkers consider this article False information"). It's a subtle, but critical distinction. They don't have a case, IMO.
If you want to get to subtle and critical distinctions, a straightforward reading of the above is: "this is false information. the fact that it is false was checked by independent fact-checkers."
A reasonable reading is that facebook labels the information as false and that that was *confirmed* by fact-checkers.
If they mean to say: "fact checkers labeled this as false and so we are hiding this information" then they should say so plainly, no?
- did the title had to be THAT inflammatory (did it have to say "JUNK", did it have to make the link to the CDC reaction to it rather than the main point)
- was Facebook the right place to share such important insight, rather than a research paper, or even a letter to the CDC
- is it the right reaction, in a sensitive period with sensitive misinformation, to further inflame the whole thing saying that not only masks are junks for schools (at least his title makes you think so on facebook), that now it's even fact checkers that are wrong...
I don't know why this guy can't solve problems and just create new ones, but damn he's wasting a lot of people's time and produce very little value outside of more anger, more doubt and more division :D
1- All posts are competing for attention. You live in a society where if you don't get someones attention right away, you're speaking to a wall.
2- The CDC is overworked, behind on response, has a clear agenda, and would likely not do anything. Often making a public outcry or outrage is the best way to reach this bigger slower beaurocratic agencies. Unless you're saying you know someone on the inside and could actually contribute to having a discussion with the right person? Or are you just saying you're good at providing "solutions" without any ability to actually help?
3- Sounds like you are making an opinion that the OP made the wrong reaction, that is your opinion, not something based on fact. Opinions about right/wrong are by their definition opinions, not fact, to be paraded as talking points by "fact" checkers.
His discussion did not waste my time. I for one like to be challenged. But if you don't like going to a place where you have your opinions challenged or strengthened, then maybe you should go to a place with opinions more like yours. I would argue you complaining about someone posting an opinion article online and calling it divisive, is the mere definition of an attack that is divisive. Your post reads divisive and passive-aggressive angry to me (you literally read the entire post and then complained about it wasting time).
I dont disagree with your point entirely: it's important to discuss perspectives. But I disagree he's challenging opinions, he's triggering emotions.
It's not wrong when it's on the latest movie, but maybe he could understand he's talking about health policies for children at school, maybe that could be done with care to avoid blanket statements at risk of deviating the debate from: should they or not wear the damn thing, to: is the CDC a bunch of elitist incompetents wasting our tax money, something I think is uncalled for.
And imagine the damage if he manages to convince there are no fact, that fact checking is impossible and that anyone is entitled to publishing wide reaching random idiocies under the blanket of a sacro saint right to be an idiot :D
No, fact checkers existed for decades before social media. Even before the internet.
I've worked in newsrooms as recently as the 1990's where there were fact checkers. Usually nice people with many very large, expensive books to double-check things.
But when the media companies became beholden to Wall Street instead of the public, the fact checking departments were the first people cut in the name of "maximizing shareholder value."
That was followed by consultants ( * cough * Broadcast Image Group * cough * ) who constantly pushed for more and more "breaking news" hype and convinced news managers that it was more important to be first than to be right. The public ate it up and it became a feedback loop.
Your post is an Ad hominem style based of reasoning to shut down discussing any of the actual uncomfortable truths behind the post. You used antivaxxer as an ugly label to ignore discussing any of the points.
What to believe nothing just live by my intuition which says ignore all for profit biased media and only believe in long term science..years and years of data.. cause an example the CDC in December recommending against the Johnson and Johnson shot which they previously recommended in early 2021 ..omg ..they are still trying to figure this all out out. My intuition says China knows a lot to all and Covid will further accelerate them to becoming the super power of the world... the world just sits by and let's it happen..has helped them get there too. Ughh
720 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadMaybe one should just go back to the age old saying: 'Don't believe everything you read on the internet.' Given that even these so-called 'independent fact-checkers' can also be wrong.
Who checks the 80+ so-called fact-checkers? Or the 'trusted news initiative' [0], which Meta (Facebook) is part of?
[0] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...
I'm sceptical that the population that was "tricked" back then wouldn't be just as easily swayed nowadays. Political affiliation is largely an emotional matter to a great mass of people, and rationality has a limited role in it.
Sure, there was domestic pushback too, but the "trusted" news sources actually countered that pushback by not questioning the government line and bolstered the whole WMD fear mongering. The NYT actually apologized for it after the fact to try to save their reputation.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...
The NYT, et al also refused to publish the Snowden revelations until they absolutely had to (after the guardian pushed it). Same with the Clinton/Lewinsky thing. They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop either, which, like it or not, is "fit to print." There were also quite a few anti-Assange articles if I recall.
Do you think the fact checkers have ever taken down anything that was total bullshit and potentially harmful? Probably, right?
So some things could go wrong, but hopefully many more things go right. I also hope the process isn't static and evolves after failures like this one.
I think way, way more things go wrong than right with "fact checking".
Aren’t the people who take things down censors (not fact checkers)?
Basically, let everyone choose their own risk tolerance, and accept that we can't control this. Very slowly, after years of trying to fight the inevitable, liberal states are understanding this. But they are still pretending that a force-field surrounds you the moment you start eating food or drinking which makes masks not required at that moment, which is obviously absurd.
Here in SF the force field comes into effect the instant you sit down at your table and only dissipates when you stand up to leave... but God help you if, after a 90 minute maskless meal, you don't put your mask back on for the 15 second walk to the door.
Theses are 7-day metrics for positive cases. - California: 59,487 - Florida: 179,586 - Massachusetts: 49,628 - New York: 93,309
If you're talking about deaths/1M pop, California (1905) is much lower than Florida (2905) whilst Massachusetts is fractionally higher (2922) but New York (3068) is dramatically higher, yes.
If you're not talking about deaths/1M pop, which rate are you looking at?
https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
But assuming these are valid numbers: by this metric, both California (214) and Mass. (206) are doing better than Florida (235) which again contradicts the claim. Or am I reading these numbers wrongly?
It takes a lot to violate ones trust, but once its there, you don't get it back overnight. I speculate we are at the cusp of no return- the only way I can see new trust in any big US govt organization is well what history tells us. Destruction and recreation.
https://reason.com/about/
Political: Unverified; Sensationalist: Unverified
(Edit: small "l" libertarian does not equal political party or affiliation)
And a quote from the article: For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question. Any public official—including and especially Walensky—who purports to follow the science should toss this one in the trash.
They weren’t simply technically correct — they were being quite cautious about clarifying that only this study is under question.
> Given that Reason is a political rag, and I doubt very much their intent was to further scientific discussion on the issue
That’s exactly the kind of thing “fact checkers” shouldn’t be factoring in. What Reason says elsewhere should have little to no bearing on what they say here, beyond a question of less or more scrutiny.
This isn’t an issue so much of malice, but the inherent political bias provided by these self-declared independent arbiters of truth. It’s a nonsensical setup.
He doesn't. That's made-up BS. The CDC is a large scientific organization that has built up a lot of credibility over decades. I trust it far more than any single off-the-cuff writer like this guy. And unless there is very strong evidence, I don't accept the claim at face value that CDC acted, or generally acts, on the basis of a single study.
You and I don't know how heavily this study weighed in their deliberations, and we especially don't know it to a degree of certainty to say "THE STUDY THAT CONVINCED THE CDC."
I have as much evidence for my bad faith statement as you do for yours.
In communicating with the public, they happened to cite #21, because explaining all 21 would take too long and be confusing for you, and be distracting.
Refuting the specific evidence in #21 does not directly refute the other 20, and does not make the conclusion "Junk Science" as the headline apparently unintentionally implied. And the headline had no business saying "The study," when they have no idea how many studies the CDC internally considered.
Boss: "Okay".
a few days later
Boss: "Y is not true, we should re-evaluate X since Y is what convinced us"
This would be a totally fair exchange and 100% correct. It does not matter if there are 5 other things that prompted me to bring this up to my boss. I hung my hat on Y being true and that's how I presented it. It's what convinced us. It shouldn't be a big deal for me, as an adult and a professional, to say "yep, I messed up. here's the other reasons to still do X."
Which is why they have 100x more credibility than some uncredentialed anti-masker with an axe to grind.
I'm glad we're both on the same page.
Then there are bad faith discussions about the CDC's credibility.
Are you aware that repeatedly exposing someone to false information leads them to believe it?
If you start from the belief that the CDC is credible, you can use phrases like, "The CDC made a mistake in relying on this study."
If you start from the belief that the CDC is not credible, you would can use phrases like "CDC / Junk Science."
You could, as another commented on this thread, say "If the CDC intentionally chose to lie to the public about their reason for a decision, that's really really bad."
There's is ZERO EVIDENCE that they intentionally lied.
That's like me saying, "If user lghh was involved in dog fighting, that's really really bad."
I have no evidence of it, and it gives people a bad impression of you.
The CDC has well-earned credibility, and the people who are questioning the CDC most effectively in the public circle (Fox News, Infowars, Joe Rogan) should have lost any credibility they had long, long ago. But questioning the CDC is profitable. People are exploiting fears to make money.
So, if you want to engage in good faith discussions, that's awesome. But maybe, just maybe, avoid phrases like "The study (implying there was only one) that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in schools is JUNK SCIENCE!"
You: "I just ran up the stairs, so that blood pressure reading is junk science."
Doctor: "Oh, okay then, yeah, then you are unique in all of mankind that you no longer need to worry about a healthy diet and exercise."
It is totally reasonable to ask for the other evidence they used to support mask mandates for kids, yes, for sure. It's not reasonable to even imply mask mandates for kids are junk science. Not yet.
Should we continue our dialog with the CDC? Yes.
Was the CDC intentionally basing its decisions on Junk Science? No.
Was this one study the one that "convinced" the CDC? Some people in this thread (including the author) seem certain it was. I believe their certainty is ridiculous.
I think we're talking past each other.
> It's not reasonable to even imply mask mandates for kids are junk science. Not yet.
Nobody did this. I didn't. The posted links didn't. This never happened. Can you point out what you read that made you think this was anyone's point? In fact, the linked article specifically says this isn't the case.
I am stating my belief that the article headline did exactly that:
"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
That reads to me as click bait, which gives the impression, "Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
I can state that because the headline has the phrase, "Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science" at the end of it, and people are lazy readers.
I'm also stating my belief that the author has NO WAY of knowing how many studies the CDC used to convince them to support Mask Mandates in Schools, so it's wildly inappropriate for the author to use the word "THE." They should have instead said "A."
It strictly does not do that and neither does the article beyond the headline. We'll agree to disagree.
I even gave you a reason why they would: people are lazy readers. Do you deny that?
The phrase at the end of the sentence is what people will pay attention to. Do you deny that?
I'm informing you: there are people who will get the wrong impression from that headline. Apparently among them, Facebook Fact Checkers.
Did The Atlantic conclusively report that that was the only data evaluated by CDC? No, of course not. Does The Atlantic even know? I doubt it.
Quite cautious would have been, "A Study That the CDC Used," which connotes that the evidence was considered. Rather than "The Study That Convinced the CDC," which connotes that without this evidence, the CDC would have been convinced NOT to have mask mandates.
They had a click bait title, and Facebook temporarily pumped the brakes on spreading the story.
Maybe this all depends on the scope of what Meta is trying to do. Think of a blog dedicated to lies about the shape of the Earth. Let's say most of their content wouldn't pass muster, but they post one truthful article a week about which team won that week's football games, just to get published on other platforms. Now, people can click to honestly see who won the game, but all over the page are headlines full of lies that link to stories that would otherwise not be allowed on other platforms. Is this other content on the page included in teh fact check? I don't think Meta is open about that...
It was both _technically_ correct and also correct on its face. I will say that the article is a bit of a rehash of the quoted The Atlantic article, but that should be even more reason that its fact-checked removal is dubious. They even have very similar titles, so it's not like Reason's title is particularly inflammatory. Is The Atlantic also a political rag?
What’s important is that the fact checkers accept corrections and recognize that they are fallible too.
It’s ok that I ran over your dog while driving blindfolded - I owned up to it after all.
Fact checking has no benefits other than imposing the biases of the fact checkers. Sometimes imposing those biases is “good”, sometimes it’s “bad”. But let’s call a spade a spade - this isn’t fact checking. This is bias imposition.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
If what is being spread can’t stand up to questioning, then it’s merits need to be questioned even further.
Have you read 1984 or alike? Maybe do so at times.
The BS online surely is bad, but did you know, that you can just buy a MD in certain parts of the world?
So, we are in the middle of a question: which countries MD's do we recognize to speak censor free?
(and who are "we" btw.)
And well, governemnts do have some record of power abuse and missinformation, too. Even the democratic ones. And they take ages to get along and make contracts.
So lots of golden firewalled nations then, but less vaxxer bs online? I am not sure, if this is a good trade.
But considering medical boards can strip them of their MD, maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false statements.
Or a chilling effect of unpopular opinions and facts.
And a much harder climate to find out, what is a fact at all, if you have to be scared, that some government commitee strips you of your right to publish, if they do not like your results.
If I've learned anything in the past 2 years it's that sometimes even random information (Twitter shitposters) is better than deliberately misleading fake information (e.g. early-pandemic WHO announcements).
I've much more confidence in myself (and my own ability to evaluate information) than in any member of any government (or any "expert" credentialed by said government).
Anyways this is severely flawed and mistaken because what they're doing today is censoring everyone with or without an MD that their "black box algorithm" disagrees with. You propose keeping up stale information (which IMO amounts to killing people through misinformation not the reverse) and those with the stance to dumb down all information to the safest common denominator are making the social media experience worse for everyone else.
And no, responding to an article's facts and questioning those facts is NOT censorship. We see that claim all too often these days, and it's absurd.
In the pandemic, speech about public health was censored less than treatment advice or drug facts would have been. Tens of thousands died as a result. A disastrous experiment in granting a freedom that no one responsible needs or wants.
Instead of censorship like you're advocating for (an approach that absolutely will not work within the framework of the US constitution), we usually solve this by exclusively allowing the organized medical societies to have and show medical credentials. Those who fraudulently claim to have these credentials are viciously prosecuted. The fraudsters are free to push whatever medical advice they like, provided that they do not mislead others into thinking that they are credentialed.
Disclaimer: I'm fully vaxxed and am happy with the way the FDA is run. My only dog in this conversation is censorship.
Of course Facebook has a legal right to censor anything they want for any reason, or no reason at all.
Everybody talks about snake oil salesmen in the 19th century, but do you know what doctors were hawking back then? You can find plenty of examples of garbage products not because of the lack of regulation but because of the lack of contemporary science. Even medical professionals at the time didn't know any better -- or else anyone could have asked their doctor about Snake Oil(TM) and known not to try it.
Today nobody is going to believe that you can cure a disease with "Indian blood" or any of that nonsense, because the information on its harms or ineffectiveness is widely available and not seriously in contention.
The problem comes when you get to the medical information which is still in contention today. That's when censorship is the most harmful because when something is still actively unfolding and it's poorly understood with limited data, there is no basis for anyone to authoritatively declare something to be definitively true. And if the thing authorities are telling everyone is false, censoring the people challenging them is the harm.
Until the "fact check" gets used by platforms to declare a possibly-true statement "misinformation" and censor it, which has happened repeatedly.
Nice username :)
I’m not a right winger, conservative, or whatever. I’m more “leftist” than the average person, so I’m assuming I’m more “leftist” than the average fact checker. That doesn’t mean I’m absent of biases towards things that are not true.
The fact checkers are not using the scientific method or any sort of standard based one evidence to make their determinations. They’re using politically aligned news sources and their own opinions.
I’ve not yet seen any news by CNN or MSNBC or any other “reputable” news source be fact checked even though I know they regularly mislead and lie (maybe they have been and I’ve missed it - would love to see that). I’ve seen obvious bullshit by conservative media outlets be fact checked. And I’ve seen cases like this article where actual facts are superseded by political opinion.
I’m not advocating for avoiding a truth bias, but that’s not what’s present. We can act all high and mighty and pretend like the left is guided by science, but it isn’t. We’re guided by what our side says is true and don’t question it and don’t look at the science. When someone actually looks at the science and negates what our side says, we fact-check it and say it’s misinformation.
I wish I had an alternative to social media.
That's like a drug addict saying, "I wish I had an alternative to heroin."
The cure is to detox and move on. Nobody "needs" social media.
This is usually the place where the pedant HN crowd (many employed by social media companies) like to imagine a bunch of hypothetical edge cases and pretend that the .0001% situations where social media is useful somehow outweighs the massive harm that social media has done over the last decade plus.
This is your brain. This is your brain on social media. Any questions?
Imposing your biases is a neutral action that can have good or bad results. But it’s not in defense of the truth.
I don't see how you can just say it's "imposing your biases" to fact check things. The fact checking may be influenced by your biases, but "vaccines are safe and effective" isn't a bias. It's the truth.
Also note that the fact checker errors are not random uncorrelated errors. Fact checks are performed through a political lens. The subconscious question is asked, how will this affect <policy agenda>? If something is factually correct but could lead to <bad outcome> then the fact checkers will consider that when choosing how to check the claim.
For instance, in the article that was censored was about faults in the study that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in schools. The fact checkers read that as a claim that masking does not help limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in schools, which is not what the article was about.
Fact checking can certainly only be done in a transparent process with democratic legitimization.
Anyway the idea to take on the responsibility for fact-checking seems kinda awful if I were a corporation I'd try to hand that over to someone else, there is going to be a lot of trouble in that area in the future.
Maybe we shouldn't have ran this experiment instead?
I'd imagine if Facebook wanted to clamp down on Coronavirus-related "misinformation", they'd do a sentiment analysis on any phrase with CDC, FDA, etc. and if the sentiment was negative or "bad", then it'd automatically get flagged.
If there is a human in the loop, I doubt they are reading the full article, or have any meaningful expertise. Probably just reading the headline, and clicking approve.
Facebook, for example, makes the claim that their fact checks are just opinion in trying to defend themselves in a lawsuit.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/facebook-bizarrely-claims-its-...
We wouldn't say anything about a restaurant or bar owner kicking out patrons because they offend other patrons or staff. Why is FB any different?
Make the social media platforms interoperable, and force them to charge the costs directly to consumers (so that the platforms could compete on price/quality) and people will run away from it like rats from a sinking ship.
My honest opinion is that most people who cry "censorship" don't care about truth or actual freedom. They just want their shit to go to the widest audience possible. I'll change my opinion when more of the "censorship" crowd acknowledges that while they strongly disagree, FB (or any other website) has every legal and moral right to "censor" them, because that's also what freedom is about. You can't be for freedom only when it favors you.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem
Keep in mind, I'm using the scare quoted version of censorship because all of my examples are censorship by definition. But no reasonable person would find anything objectionable in them, let alone "inherently evil".
I can't (and won't) stop you from saying whatever you want. But I don't have to let you be on my property to say it. I respect your freedom to say what you want. Please respect my freedom to enforce codes of conduct on my property.
This phrase is key. The public square is supposed to be 100% censorship free. Facebook stole the public square from us, and is now censoring it as if it were legitimately private property.
How? Do they control the Internet or the Web somehow? You and I are talking on a non-FB property right now.
And even if it were true, I point you back to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726412
All of this "censorship" scare-mongering has the potential to turn into a slippery slope that could seriously erode property rights online. Fix the actual problem, rather than whatever's most convenient for you at the moment.
You can then prioritize opinions by their reward if correct vs risk of being incorrect. Even if you're incorrect, it's better to be incorrect saying mask are useful, than being incorrect saying mask are useless. The probability of masks worsening the situation is lower (but not null) than the probability of masks improving it.
I don't see the problem with that, it's like saying "veterans fought for our freedom and deserve our respect" instead of "veterans used tax money to oppress foreigners and enforce national policies abroad at the detriment of most people involved, and they did that for money not for the country". There are opinions better not shared by official message to lead the country towards some sort of coherent path no ?
> I don't see the problem with that
You're unironically advocating for us to do one of the more evil things that China does.
It's not evil, it's maybe short sighted and selfish, or who knows, the only way to transition to something better eventually. But "evil", resist these emotional adjectives, you make Chinese people just handwave any attempt at rational evolution.
As masks are supposed to lower outbreaks - focusing on outbreaks makes sense to me.
However, you seem to have stopped reading the Atlantic article after sentence you took out of context. "The authors defined an outbreak as being two or more COVID-19 cases among students or staff members at a school within a 14-day period that are epidemiologically linked. “The measure of two cases in a school is problematic,” Louise-Anne McNutt, a former Epidemic Intelligence Service officer for the CDC and an epidemiologist at the State University of New York at Albany, told me. “It doesn’t tell us that transmission occurred in school.” She pointed to the fact that, according to Maricopa County guidelines, students are considered “close contacts” of an infected student—and thus subject to potential testing and quarantine—only if they (or that infected student) were unmasked. As a result, students in Maricopa schools with mask mandates may have been less likely than students in schools without mandates to get tested following an initial exposure. This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."
No, it's in the Atlantic article specifically linked in the Reason.com article. I'd suggest reading that since the entire thing is based off of it.
>In fact, it would have made no difference tracking cases because of school district's policy of testing only 'unmasked' individuals.
You may want to reread this part...
This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-market-fit-unbundling-t...
Your "biggest problem" is not based on fact.
Your "biggest problem" is not based on fact.
You said "have been nothing close to 'full' for many months of the last year."
A reasonable interpretation of your words is that there was at least one month last year where the hospitals in your area were "close to 'full'."
How long does a hospital need to be "close to 'full'" for the people who work there to feel "overwhelmed"?
Is there any evidence supporting vaccine requirements being a larger source of nurse attrition than burnout?
Where did he say that these people don't believe in medicine? In fact, being a Doctor or Nurse by definition means believing in medicine and protecting the patient is your job. More so than some random hacker news stranger.
Refusing to take a vaccine that appears to be safe and reasonably effective despite being in a pandemic and in a field of work that both increases your risk of exposure and increases the potential damage caused by said exposure (spreading the disease around people who might be already weakened by other medical conditions) suggests they don't.
> Ad Hominem attacking the author
Could you elaborate? I don't see anything in my comment that's attacking the author directly rather than their claims which I totally disagree with.
it really is just information parroting/parading, and anyone defending it, is OK with it because its supporting their own "interpretation of the facts". It's wild how polarized we are, but not really, because these things are just further supporting the echo chamber of opinions one side already had.
CITATION NEEDED
Are you talking about the 53 Allina employees (out of 27,000) who were fired?
https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/allina-says-it-par...
The 0.2%? That's what you think did it?
And the National Guard - is this what you're referring to?
> The Minnesota National Guard will deploy 400 members to reinforce nursing staffs at long-term care facilities
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/11/22/...
They were deployeed to long-term care. Not ICU.
If you want to make the argument that it was losing staff to vaccine mandates that resulted in hospitals being overwhelmed, I think you have a big hill to climb to make a credible argument.
Did x member of y political organization get arrested for hitting some in the head with a baseball bat?
FALSE.
[big block of text]
X member of y political organization was arrested for hitting someone in the head with a cricket bat.
[big block of text]
In my experience, Snopes would have rated that "Mostly true" or "Mixture". Do you have examples where they've given a clearly misleading rating?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-p...
There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form:
"X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say that's wrong."
i.e. "fact-checking" a prediction about something that will happen in the future. Unless you're clairvoyant, that isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't happened yet! So any rating at all is misleading.
I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse will happen. But they do it for economic and social and political issues. They just shouldn't, at all.
"Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some category that has magically different standards or incentives than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart, skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and motivations of every other news outlet.
There are many important predictions to be made about medium term outcomes (say, in the 5-25 year range).
If someone says "We will never develop grid-level energy storage because elves cannot fly, therefore renewable energy is hopeless", we don't have to wait one second to investigate and (in)validate this claim.
If someone says "Sea level will drop by 3m within 15 years because today's cows are farting less", we do no thave to wait 15 years to investigate and (in)validate this.
If someone says "Astronomical body N28291k will hit the earth at 13:45 on Dec 2nd 2037", we do not need to wait until 2037 to investigate and validate the claim.
If someone says "The cost of coal will decrease by 20% over the next 10 years", when all known reserves of coal are more difficult to access than historical ones and when demand for coal appears to be dropping, we do not need to wait 10 years to investigate and (in)validate this.
imagine telling someone ten years ago that oil prices would go negative, which they did last year.
and apart from all of this, for every example you can give me of an obvious black-and-white issue where you really could fact-check it 10 years in advance, there will be 99 others where it's really not so clear-cut, but partisans want there to be fact-checker approved talking points for their side. and the market will fill this demand. for subjects outside your domain-expertise, good luck telling the difference.
One of the points of fact-checking is to point out to "yeah, it's unlikely" to people who would not otherwise know.
Lots of claims are made about stuff, in particular climate change and energy supplies, that completely fall into the "yeah, it's unlikely" zone, and yet most ordinary readers and viewers would not know this.
It's always going to be in the interest of someone to say "this might happen by the year XXXX". There's generally no shortage of black-swan boosterism. Having someone step who actually knows the field step in and point out that yes, it might happen but it almost certainly will not is of incredible value.
Your response reminds me of the situation in the current satirical movie "Don't Look Up", where because the probability of an asteroid colliding with earth is only 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president decides it's OK to "sit tight and assess". I mean, sure it could miss, and *"yeah, it's unlikely but...."
Saying some prediction about the future is unlikely to be correct is not fact-checking. That's the whole point. Predictions aren't facts. Unlikely predictions aren't false facts. They're unlikely predictions.
> because the probability of an asteroid colliding with earth is only 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president decides it's OK to "sit tight and assess".
Saying that it is a good idea to act on predictions that are overwhelmingly likely is not the same as saying that those predictions are facts.
If you want to improve other people's critical thinking skills, you need to make sure yours are good. Calling predictions facts and acting as if they're the same thing is not good critical thinking.
Our culture has become filled with a certain kind of noise in which people who frequently don't know what they are talking about make predictions about the future. I don't really care what you want to call a counter-balancing trend to that - I would agree that "fact-checking" for things that are clearly predictions is likely not the best term, but it's not the worst either, since frequently the process of pointing out just how ridiculous the predictions are will involve using actual facts. So in that context, "fact checking" does not mean "check that the facts claimed are correct", it means "check the facts underlying the prediction".
But call it what it should be called or not, it's still a valuable act.
Focusing on "fact-checking" in general, let alone expanding it to include "prediction checking", worsens the huge amount of noise in our culture of supposedly authoritative pronouncements being made that turn out to be wrong. The Facebook "fact check" that is the subject of the article we are discussing is a case in point. If Facebook weren't so fixated on trying to remove "noise" through "fact checking", they wouldn't be going overboard all the time and removing things that aren't noise at all, but useful dissent.
Also, the very term "fact checking", as it is being used in our culture now, is a Russell conjugation (someone else brought up Russell conjugations elsewhere in this thread). Facebook is "fact checking" (actually their outsourced third parties who remain anonymous and unaccountable are doing it, but let that pass); those who support Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "helping to spread authoritative information"; those who question Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "questioning authority" (even if they cite actual facts).
In short, while I agree that our culture is filled with noise, I don't think all the noise is from individuals who don't know what they're talking about; I think a lot of it is from organizations who don't like to have their power and authority questioned.
However, that doesn't mean that the concept of "fact checking" is inherently problematic. It could be that there is no way in our current culture of doing anything remotely like what "fact checking" probably needs to be. To me, that's still not an argument against the concept, even if it is necessary to accept for now, the actual execution issues force us all to be profoundly skeptical about it.
Perhaps not, but I think there are wrinkles in it that you might not be considering.
First, if "fact checking" just means "consulting other sources of information to see if they say the same thing", then you have to deal with the question of the credibility of those other sources of information. No source of information is always right. Nor is any "fact checker" always right in judging the relative credibility of sources of information. Ultimately, unless you have your own personal knowledge of some fact, any "fact checking" is going to come down to which sources you trust and which sources you don't. Those are always judgment calls and there will always be some degree of residual skepticism, so citing "fact checks" as if they were authoritative is problematic.
Second, if you try to go beyond that and actually do things like independent experiments to check claims (for example, when scientists try to replicate experiments or studies), then you're not really checking on previous facts, you're creating new facts, which you are then going to use to judge the validity of previous claims. But those previous claims were not factual claims but theoretical ones (for example, doing study B to help in judging the claim "study A shows that treatment X is effective against illness Y"). And again, these kinds of comparisons are judgment calls (sure, sometimes you uncover strong evidence that, for example, the data in study A was fabricated, but study B alone won't tell you that).
> t could be that there is no way in our current culture of doing anything remotely like what "fact checking" probably needs to be.
The critical problem I see with the Facebook case is that their "fact checking" results in something more than just publishing whatever Facebook's ultimate judgment is on some website (as, for example, Snopes and other "fact checking" sites do). Facebook's "fact checking" has other consequences, such as blocking access to things people have posted. And since our current culture seems to be fixated on using "fact checking" in this way, not just to arrive at judgments which are then published as speech, for the reader to take or leave, but to take actions that amount to filtering, restricting, or blocking other speech, yes, I think our current culture is not really capable of doing the limited kind of things that "fact checking" properly done would consist of.
Making statements like "these kinds of comparisons are judgement calls" is precisely what I'd consider to be a part of any good "fact checking".
> Ultimately, unless you have your own personal knowledge of some fact, any "fact checking" is going to come down to which sources you trust and which sources you don't. Those are always judgment calls and there will always be some degree of residual skepticism, so citing "fact checks" as if they were authoritative is problematic.
If you follow through on this as far as possible, you vanish in a cloud of solipsism. If it is not possible to establish some ground rules for epistemological truth, then really things have just completely fallen apart (which, indeed, to some extent they have).
But the very fact that judgment calls are involved means that it isn't "fact checking"; it's not just reporting facts and giving obvious "true" or "false" labels to statements.
> If you follow through on this as far as possible, you vanish in a cloud of solipsism.
Oh, please. Saying that other people might not be trustworthy as sources of information is not at all the same as saying that other people don't exist.
> If it is not possible to establish some ground rules for epistemological truth
The problem isn't "epistemological truth". The problem is that people have many reasons for not telling the truth, either because they have incentives to deliberately lie or because they have incentives to fool themselves.
In theory the idea of "just tell the truth as best you know it", independently of any incentives to do otherwise, sounds good. But in practice it never works out that way. The present time is not exceptional for the low level of trustworthiness of information; it's exceptional for how widespread the consequences of that are. Our culture has a belief that if only everyone would just listen to the "right" authorities, everything would work out fine. The idea that there are no "right authorities" at all and never have been--that every adult human being needs to have their own set of critical thinking skills, and that if some piece of knowledge is important to you, you have to make the effort to verify it for yourself, and that there is no way to avoid this by any form of social organization--is not one that our culture wants to consider. With what results, we see.
Every time a prediction is made in connection to a fact-check, the prediction should be falsified 100% immediately. You are right, we don't have to wait.
In my experience, people with poor critical reading skills don't read. Instead they just regurgitate what they heard on FOX, which is that fact check websites are a liberal scam.
The same thing happens on the left with the New York Times. Laziness is a trait orthogonal to political party.
New York Times standards are much higher than Fox. Are they perfect? No. But generally they are far less likely to lie to you.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...
People with poor critical reading skills will probably just accept (or, if it conflicts with the preexisting world view, reject) the original claim as true without referencing a “fact check” at all.
Future predictions are not fact checkable. You can argue likelihoods, present contrary evidence or whatnot but predictions are not facts, they are predictions.
A good predictor gives odds to every outcome. That is not something a fact checker can respond to well.
That's because if he doesn't use mathematical modelling and data he's only ever accidentally correct. There's no such thing as good predictor. If you don't use knowledge (and the only real knowledge comes from scientific process) you can't get your predictions better than chance.
It's a combination of brief luck and "predicting" the obvious.
With interesting personality you can make a good career out of predicting that dice roll will result in >1. You'll by wrong in less than 20% of cases.
Being good predictor is getting popular while you are on the roll. There's nothing else going there.
All predictions that don't have a form of scientific paper with clear mathematical model and ample data are just making stuff up and should be labelled as BS in all media.
World doesn't need prophets.
You need to not only get multiple analysis, but normalize them, give them confidence scores and then interpret them - and you may interpret them differently than their authors. You may entirely discard some.
How do you get a confidence score? Sure sometimes we can analyze the history of an analysis such as with political polling where we have someone like Rasmussen who has done it for a long long time... but you still need to account for changes in their own process. If Rasmussen gets a new head data scientist tomorrow, does that alter our confidence level?
"Just use math!" is about the same as saying "Just don't be wrong!". Math is a tool, not a magic 8 ball.
My point was more that Snopes tends to indicate when something isn't clear-cut.
https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008
The claim was that fact checkers write misleading verdicts with political biases, one example is sufficient enough to verify that claim.
It has the rating "Labeled Satire" not "disputed".
Seems like a pretty thin line between satire and reality these days.
https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_ca49020f-5d05-5649-b1c...
Remember that time with Donald Trump quoted "The Babylon Bee"?(BTW, The Bee is CLEARLY Christian Satire) That was pretty good stuff.
A day later, The Bee had an article "Trump declares Babylon Bee the most trusted news in America"
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/
[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/
[3] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-ch...
> Did COVID-19 Originate in Market 400 Meters From CCP Lab Studying Coronaviruses?
False. The wuhan lab for coronaviruses is actually 15km away.
Hi, I've been revisiting an old thread from way back in April of 2020, and you are the only person that replied to me that appears to still be active on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22958528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22965328
I'm @maxharris9 on Twitter, and I would like to see what every person that replied to me has to say now.
She chuckled, but she didn't laugh. False?
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/clintons-1975-rape-case/
Well she did laugh. True?
Binary opposites for this detail, depending on which you are citing.
A chuckle is a quiet or inward laugh. All chuckles are laughs but not all laughs are chuckles.
They say some of the same things. The conclusions are different, despite the material to the fact. This is an example, as requested.
In one instance, PolitiFact requested NewsBusters to prove a chart on illegal immigration they posted was true, with the implied threat of labeling it false. When NewsBusters complied within the 14 hour window given, proving their claims true, PolitiFact did.. nothing. No post telling NewsBuster's claim was proven true.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/p...
Snopes has fact-checked claims that Donald Trump said Earth is flat (false) but not whether Earth is flat, and they won't fact-check that any time soon.
If your position on free speech changes depending on who is doing the moderating, you don't have a position on free speech.
Um, what? I don't believe that for a second - that sounds crazy. Is there evidence for this? I'm willing to be educated. Er, fact-check please. (And the strange phrasing "I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm" sounds like Dang didn't 'confirm' it.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28834724
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c9d2cf6e6e840c133b9376...
Russell Conjugation is also a powerful tool they often use.
I am firm. [Positive empathy]
You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy]
He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy]
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181
Mostly gets folk to double-think that it's their perspective that chooses their description.
Can we see some examples of this actually happening? Have you seen this before?
The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened.
The Kenosha stuff was quite obviously at least possibly self defense when the whole incident was shown.
Both of those may or may not have affected the court cases, but the riots that happened? People’s opinion on them?
Oh, just thought of a better one - Nicholas Sandmann. There’s a full 180.
Are you implying that restricting someone's breathing by kneeling on them would somehow be less bad if that person was already complaining of breathing difficulty?
I’m not saying it at all excuses their actions, just that the media was pushing a narrative by not including that.
BLM "mostly peaceful" protest vs riot
When it first happened the media framed it with the racially inflammatory headline:
"White cop shoots and kills unarmed black teen"
All technically true information. But what really happened (according to forensic evidence and credible testimony) could also be framed as "Convenience store robber attacks police officer and was killed in the process". It's hard to tell exactly what happened since we only have a few facts and the rest is witness testimony, but it seems the media definitely pre-determined that the framing of the story should be that the cop was the "bad guy" and the victim was the "good guy" and that the whole thing should have a racism angle.
https://youtu.be/YkiQwVT8ij8
> I've dealt with someone with eBPD who was unable to get through a 45 minute therapy session without contradicting themselves. They also habitually selectively report facts to distort reality... Here's an example with details changed: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." Reality, Joe was in the passenger seat, and the driver hit a deer that jumped out in front of them. On confrontation: "I never said Joe drove drunk!"
It shows how the media will abuse framing even with such a trivial event.
"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience"
The reframe sank Mondale's campaign.
BTW, Reagan was a master at reframing difficult questions into a joke, thereby disarming their payload. I remember the Democrats at the time complaining in bitter frustration at how adroitly the "Teflon President" did this.
For example, Jimmy Carter never looked Presidential. For one, he encouraged people to call him "Jimmy" rather than "James". For another, he'd wear a sweater when giving speeches to the public.
People liked that Reagan wore a sharp suit and acted (yes, acted) the role of President.
(In reality both are moderates that resisted enormous pressure from their respective parties.)
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-mccain-...
[2] https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/579766-joe-...
I've not experienced the political bias. Can you link some examples?
We have a serious disinformation problem. In my experience, Snopes seems to be overwhelmingly accurate and to do much more good than harm on balance. The fact that they tediously present the facts before drawing a conclusion (per your meme) actually helps to mitigate any perception of bias.
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6fed2339071d503d32e531...
One says there was on balance no desire for federal tax income, the other says there was no way to have federal tax income whether or not it was desired.
But, assuming we're taking these as identical claims (and they are not necessarily), I still don't think that necessarily reflects bias in any case. These were two separate fact checks about two claims worded slightly differently, spaced 3 years apart. They were performed by two different organizations, and also likely performed by different people.
That they landed only a degree apart (mostly true vs half true) seems pretty consistent. Certainly doesn't seem like any kind of egregious bias.
Personally, I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Are they anywhere similar to this cricket/baseball example you've given, or are they far less egregious?
Snopes rates the claim "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud." as false.
These are different claims, aren't they?
I believe, and I suspect most reasonable people would believe, that this was a gaffe and that the President did not mean what he said. It is an admission that should be given very little weight. But it remains an admission nonetheless, and it is a lie for Snopes to claim otherwise.
It can't be both an admission of something real, and a gaffe.
If he said "I am a dog" it would be a lie, not an admission that he's a dog (because he simply isn't). Describing an anti-fraud organisation as a fraud organisation is either correct and an admission of a coverup, or false and a mistake and not an admission of anything.
Example: You falsely accuse me of robbing a bank. I admit I robbed the bank, due to a threat against my family. Later, my defense counsel discovers evidence of the threat.
The admission is still an admission. It grants that the accusation is true, even though it isn't. The evidence pertaining to why the admission is false is also fair game to explain why not to give any weight to the admission, but it nonetheless remains an admission.
Same here. The public discourse should absolutely correct the record and establish what the President meant. He should probably issue a clarifying statement. But it doesn't change the fact that he made a statement that, by its own words if not by its probable intent, conceded the truth of an accusation.
An X organization can be an organization to accomplish X, or it can be an organization to combat the problem of X. A reasonable person will look at whether X is generally considered positive or negative to decide between these, but a quote-miner won't care.
You're ascribing more precision to the statement than is there
The fact that there are all kinds of arguments about this evidence not meaning what it is claimed to mean - arguments I wholeheartedly agree with - does not change the fact that it is a statement Joe Biden made that is negative for Joe Biden. This particular admission is extremely weak, clearly ambiguous, and frankly demonstrates that his opponents are grasping at straws. But there's still no getting around the very basic fact that it is an admission.
What you're describing as a gaffe is a very intentional misrepresentation.
This is obviously just bias on their part
This is the in-your-face, obvious, and common meaning of what he said. Why are you pretending otherwise?
There are undoubtedly people whose language skills are poor enough to think that "voter fraud organization" here means "organization to commit voter fraud" instead of "organization to combat voter fraud". I'm not a fan of Snopes at all, but I don't think it's unreasonable that they exclude the tiny segment of the population in need of remedial literacy classes from their target audience.
If he had said instead "breast cancer organization", would you start claiming that he's trying to cause more breast cancer in the world? Obviously not, because that's absurd.
How ‘fact-checking’ can be used as censorship https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0... - covers how Trump's vaccine prediction was 'fact-checked' as false, how the Wuhan leak report was 'fact-checked' and also heavily censored as false, how the reports of Biden's memory boopers were 'fact-checked' as false.
Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...
https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-example-...
https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-the-f...
> Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...
I imagine I could find more if I wanted to as well, but it probably kicks off a more interesting discussion if we focus on real examples instead of imagined hypotheticals. I was just trying to drive the discussion in that direction.
investortimes: I think this is a weird semantic argument. Yes, there are fines that need to be paid by water management companies if they do not reduce the amount of water per capita each person uses, and I think investortimes is correct in saying that the cost will probably be somehow passed on to consumers. But that is still not the same thing as saying how it is illegal. The prices will just go up a lot more, and I imagine some kind of usage based pricing will come into effect to make sure the goals are reached. But calling that illegal is like saying it is illegal to run a mining rig in your home because you will be charged a lot for electricity and a power company might force you to reduce the amount of power you are using. So I believe mostly false is still correct.
also inb4 tldr
"Trump said Clinton "acid washed" her private email server. She didn't. She used an app called Bleachbit, not a corrosive chemical."
Media follies ought not be conflated with fact-checking in abstract.
There's a still a problem of scale that fact checkers are attempting to solve. Much like any other outlets of information (news organizations, your neighbor, fact checkers, etc) it is left to the individual to evaluate whether the totality of output from that individual / organization is factually correct. I don't think the answer is to dissuade "fact checkers" similar to that I don't think we should be removing "news organizations" (even biased ones, which they often are), but the need to educate rational thinking skills to be able to evaluate who and how to trust summarized and often opinionated information.
> Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to?
Even if there were a pile of egregious examples, the conclusion should be to put reduced weight (or none) on the authors of those examples, and not necessarily the idea of fact checking, considering there could be others that more often communicate the nuance of the situation.
(There's also a problem of how fact-checking conclusions are _applied_ into other contexts of course..)
I went to a fact-checking conference. During the keynote, the speaker (a previous Wikipedia foundation CEO) used a graph from a study to drive home a specific point. It sounded way too perfect, and I got suspicious.
After the talk I looked up the study, found the graph, and below it the research wrote "Do not interpreted the above graph as X! For reasons Y, this would be false. The graph illustrate Z, with the caveats of ...".
I contacted the conference holders about the obvious issue of using the graph to prove X, and they forwarded it to the speaker. Nothing happened. This in turn drove home a different point for me. Fact checkers don't care about facts if those facts don't fit in the social context that they are being used.
I’m always thinking “tune in at 11, where we find out who asked!”
They are also guilty of massive plagiarism, and heavy revision of articles without any notice. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-pla...
But the other fact checkers aren't much better. The Washington Post (in particular Kessler himself) are some of the worst in my opinion.
I find it really obnoxious when these articles are really quite ideological and opinionated, but still use the verbage of "checking the facts". The thing I most take issue with is if something is "mostly false" because a public figure looked at an issue in a way that you don't think is the best way for society to look at an issue. That is an opinion, and to call it "fact checking" is pure ideology.
And that is not to say that opinions are trivial or personal observations, less important than facts. There's a lot of bullshit in politics, and you'd be absolutely right and doing a service to call it all out as bullshit, and give your reasoning.
That is beyond charitable. Many would say it's part of his nature.
> Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a most powerful demand notice for them from Congress?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190824131756/https://twitter.c...
"The Claim Trump says Clinton 'acid washed' her email server.
The Truth Clinton's team used an app called BleachBit; she did not use a corrosive chemical."
https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465
This was October 9, 2016. I have no love for the man, but like I said, we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him. Gosh, she did not use a corrosive chemical! SHEESH!
Never forget:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magaz...
disclaimer: I am European, I have no skin in the game here
He doesn't seem to have been talking about BleachBit, because he said in his ABC interview on 2016-09-05
> I mean, she had her emails — 33,000 emails — acid washed. The most sophisticated person never heard about acid washing. Acid washing is a very expensive process and that’s to really get rid of them.
and at a couple campaign events the next day
> But why do you acid wash, or bleach, the emails? Nobody even heard of it before. Very expensive
and
> How about the 33,000 missing e-mails that were acid washed — acid washed. And Rudy was telling me, nobody does it because it’s such an expensive process.
BeachBit is free software. There is nothing "expensive" about obtaining it, installing it, or using it. So what the heck was he trying to get at?
That is my question. Do you sincerely believe he thought that was what had happened?
You have been misinformed. You should watch the video. I watched the video back when it happened and it was blatantly obvious he wasn't saying you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach. Unfortunately I can't find the video now but here's an article that lines up with my recollection of the events[1]:
> The former President did not instruct people to drink bleach, but he did suggest that the use of disinfectants as a treatment should be researched.
[1]: https://www.logically.ai/factchecks/library/677338a2
> Disinfectant knocks it out in a minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By injection, inside, or almost as cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs. it would be interesting to check that,
While the BBC[0] transcribes
> And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that.
In popular relation 'injection' was rendered as 'swallow', which is indeed technically inaccurate. However 'suggested that the use of disinfectants as a treatment should researched' is a very, very generous interpretation of that sequence of words, and not the message that anyone watching that event walked away with.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177
Trump later said he was being sarcastic, which makes even less sense to me than anything he said or was accused of saying.
He never said that or anything like that and we don't know what he was thinking.
You are spreading fakes. In a thread about fakes.
> I sincerely do believe Trump is that stupid.
When left-wing media does the fact-checking, Trump indeed looks bleak.
> And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that.
'The president said to swallow bleach' is an uncharitable and inaccurate summary of that line, but so is 'he never said that or anything like that'. At an absolute minimum he spit-balled an idea about internal application of 'disinfectant' live on national television. His manner of self-presentation was more than bleak enough without any additional interpretative efforts.
This statement is still grossly misleading at best.
(Especially because this lies about "drinking bleach" was actually spread by Joe Biden and repeated numerous times in left-leaning media.)
What he said is he suggested to study it. Which is fine. He never "suggested" injecting it or drinking it.
> nobody got hurt
American democracy got hurt. People belief in system is reduced.
No, it absolutely is not fine for the President to spitball dangerous ideas like that on live national television. Even Trump later said he was being "sarcastic". Is that an appropriate moment to be sarcastic? Did he sound sarcastic at the time?
I don't understand your reflexive defense of Trump. There's a million things to hang the guy for, this isn't like Obama and his tan suit or his dijon mustard.
Maybe. This is topic for another discussion. For now it would be appropriate for you to admit you were wrong. Factually incorrect.
> I don't understand your reflexive defense of Trump.
I don’t defend Trump. I defend facts.
> There's a million things to hang the guy for
Perhaps you came to this conclusion after trusting fake news.
So I suggest you read some books, that will put your “facts” in a larger context that makes them so you don’t miss the forest for the trees. Trump is a bad person who belongs nowhere near any levers of power except in charge of his grifting operations to sucker “patriots” off their money to pay off his debts.
I’ll give Trump this, though. He’s not as crazy as a lot of his followers and fellow grifters. His recent Candace Owens interview where he promoted the vaccine was comedy gold. Trump isn’t dumb enough to think the vaccine doesn’t work.
The Clinton camp and their supporters in the media were the ones being disingenuous, and seizing on the chemical angle to deny malfeasance. Versions of "she didn't wash the server with acid", or the infamous "wipe, like with a cloth?" comments do not debunk the core claim, that data was deleted, and the Clinton political machine are savvy and cynical enough operators to know this.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/
[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/
Verdict: mixture
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
(she was sentenced to 58 years and pardoned by Bill Clinton after serving 16)
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
Apart from that, usually, when it comes to democratic countries with a working objective justice system, I would say we can trust verdicts unless proven otherwise. A presidential pardon could be such, I don't know. I do know the case of Scooter Libby, where presidential pardon was unjustified (Valerie Plame case) but as an outsider of USA I don't know if that is common, and how common (I can imagine its an abused political tool).
I've always assumed that it's merely removing the punishment (which is what the executive branch deals with), but has no influence on the legal status, i.e. if you're convicted of fraud, sent to prison and get a pardon, you're still a convicted fraudster, but you're released from prison.
> After a failed appeal, President Bush commuted Libby's sentence of 30 months in federal prison, leaving the other parts of his sentence intact. As a consequence of his conviction in United States v. Libby, Libby's license to practice law was suspended until being reinstated in 2016. President Donald Trump fully pardoned Libby on April 13, 2018. [1]
Which is rare:
> After Libby was denied bail during his appeal process on July 2, 2007, Bush commuted Libby's 30-month federal prison sentence, calling it "excessive", but he did not change the other parts of the sentence and their conditions. That presidential commutation left in place the felony conviction, the $250,000 fine, and the terms of probation. Some have criticized the move, as presidential commutations are rarely issued, but when granted they have generally occurred after the convicted person has already served a substantial portion of his or her sentence: "We can't find any cases, certainly in the last half-century, where the president commuted a sentence before it had even started to be served," said former Justice Department pardon attorney Margaret Colgate Love. [..] [1]
There's 2 movies which involve the Plame affair, Fair Game and Vice. Both well worth it, though its more a side thing in Vice while its the main subject in Fair Game.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby
I regret not finding some of the compilation images, but I found one such example of.. questionable lines of thought.
https://archive.is/KrSEn
So everyone has to thoroughly investigate everything, become experts in all fields, and never rely on those with more education and experience. Thanks, I hate it.
Are fact checkers any different than people who contribute to Wikipedia? It serves a purpose, but does come with a lot of disadvantages.
> .. and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization.
Isn't this the case already? Without "fact checkers" you still have the current population of people spinning stories and framing them in their own desired ways. I don't see how fact checkers are necessarily making the situation worse in that manner.
> It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages.
You still have the problem of scale that you need to solve. There are a lot of controversies now-a-days. I imagine this proposed individual (or even a current, motivated individual) does not have time to investigate some of the more nuanced disputes.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrant-girl-never-separ...
https://archive.fo/UKPBQ
Today I learned that Snopes isn't archived by the Wayback Machine. In August of this year Snopes admitted that founder David Mikkelson plagiarized portions of his articles, and as a result are now allowing Wayback Machine to store archives (reversing Mikkelson's policy).
This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most people are staggeringly unintelligent. They suffer from such a deficit of basic critical thinking skills that they need to squeeze all the complexity of the world into a model in which experts have figured out The Absolute Truth and anyone wio disagrees needs to be brutally crushed, or in the modern world, simply silenced. (The similarity to the notions of scripture and heresy is 0% a coincidence).
The problem is that this model inevitably undermines its own foundations: the faith that a Science deity hands down truth on clay tablets is only sustained by a process of knowledge-generation that requires a full engagement with the nuance, uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to trying to understand reality.
The simpletons for whom Believe in Science is a dogma are always going to be an obstacle to the process by which those with adult-level cognition _actually create the level of certainty we do have in societal knowledge_.
It's encouraging to see that the (obvious) contradictions of a centrally "fact-checked" social media ecosystem are already revealing themselves in ridiculous examples like this. But I'm probably too cynical to be convinced that we won't just blow through to a new equilibrium where an important conduit for communication has a content filter on it that boils down to "don't think things about sensitive topics that a layman would find 'weird' " .
That said I stopped following them when the websaite was taken over by ads and whitespace.
And you're not even dealing with reasonable people.
Even if you limit it to the most egregious cases that just shifts the problem. What's egregious and what isn't?
I actually believe it was well-intentioned. Just... completely misguided. You know what they say: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Second thought: it's weird to me how many conservatives and conspiracy theorists (it's interesting that there's so much crossover between these two groups) are so keen to dismantle Section 230 when they benefit the most. In an effort for platforms to remain neutral, this nonsense is allowed to exist. If platforms were responsible for this "content", it'd be shut down so fast.
But here's a good thing to keep in mind: from a narcissist an accusation is actually a confession. Trump is a textbook narcissist. Go back and look at his accusations through that filter.
That point is obviously very, very conservative (lower case 'c'). Reasonable people can all agree that Covid is a thing that exists, for example.
I don't mind Facebook fact-checking against flat-earthers, "it's just a flu bro", or "Bill Gates put 5g microchips in vaccines". Reasonable people from any place would agree those are counter-factual.
But I tend to get banned from subreddits as an anti-vaxxer because, for example, I say my first 2 shots were Pfizer and I refuse to get Moderna for my third one (Moderna is the only one my government currently permits my age group to get). There are facts for and against this position for reasonable people to weigh. It's still often a ban on social-media for spreading anti-vax misinformation though.
It's sort of like the slow eroding of freedoms and transition to fascism that people seem to be fine with because "protect us against COVID" which we're all fine with it until that policy is flipped on them and happens to impact them.
We are not conservative about fact checking and I gave an example of how I have been a casualty of this.
Oh, come the heck on. I don't know how a reasonable person should be expected to take this seriously. We've been forcing people to vaccinate for a good long time now and I don't think I'm living in a fascist dystopia. Correct me if I'm wrong! Should I buy some jackboots so I can fit into my new reality?
It implicitly shifts the undertone of everything that isn't fact-checked on the platform from neutral to true. This is not a bug but a feature, as it provides the plausible deniability by blurring the line between "no tag since we can't fact-check everything, duh" and "no tag because we tacitly agree with the narrative presented here even if it is untrue".
It was a good gig, but political partisans can't help but spend all the gravitas and authority they can find as quickly as possible, and what you see here is the account drying up. It'll take a while longer to complete that process but I don't expect people to have any more trust in "fact checks" than anything else in 5 years.
"Fact checks" are nothing special. Political partisans have been "fact checking" each other forever, complete with misrepresentation, failures to even read the thing they're fact checking, all the usual errors. They just didn't call it a "fact check". Merely labeling something a "fact check" changes nothing, and quite obviously did not impose any sort of higher standard on the so-called "checkers" either. Nor does Facebook have any authority or capability in any sense of the term to bless any particular "fact checker" with them being anything more that Facebook's official opinion. (In this, their argument in their lawsuit is completely correct.)
Of course, that causes problems. If Facebook indeed somehow has direct access to the Fountain of Truth, they can perhaps be justified in decorating the speech of other people with the Truth from this fountain. If, on the other hand, they're just opinions, that raises a whole host of questions. Why do they feel like they can decorate other people's speech with their own opinions? On what basis do they declare these "facts"? How amazing it is that Facebook, a corporation whose purpose is to serve ads and incidentally provide a service to people to gather information for those ads, are also medical experts, political experts, and experts of all sorts of other things. What accountability will Facebook have when it turns out their opinions, which again I remind you include very strong medical opinions, are wrong? (Don't get too caught up on Coronavirus specifically; having started making medical decisions we can believe they will continue to do so. Even if you believe they have the perfectly correct balance of Truth today, there is no reason to believe that will continue indefinitely. And with their leverage, they have the capability to multiply the consequences of error hugely, perhaps more than anyone else.)
If they are not lofty, impartial experts graciously spending their money to guide the masses to the Truth, then they almost immediately collapse into something more like arrogant jerks who bully their particular biases onto people with the threat of kicking them off the world's largest platform if they don't conform.
One imagines that Facebook would not prefer to be seen that way. They've really bet rather a lot on the Fact Check mythos.
They will also remark on how odd it was that a small little dot in Northern California felt themselves capable of this task, and simultaneously did not understand why they were unpopular with everyone but themselves.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ASAxY0Roo
"A Study That the CDC Used To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
Which one makes it seem like some evidence used should be discarded?
And which one makes it seem like Mask Mandates have been proven to be a Junk Science?
See that word "The" in the headline the author used? That sure makes it sound like the single source of evidence was wrong, and so therefore the conclusion is wrong.
If you want to be really safe, and not clickbaity, you could even go for,
"Mask Mandates May Be Effective, But One Study the CDC Used Had Deeply Flawed Methodology."
That's only four characters longer than the original one:
"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."
Facebook is worried about public perception if they host false information.
The financial incentives are all wrong, and people make money with click bait headlines, so we're going to watch companies like Facebook wrestle with this, and sometimes make what we consider to be "the wrong call."
He has been very good about pointing out the abuses of the radical left destroying people’s lives for things like wearing a costume at a 2018 Halloween party which the radical left woke mob decides is politically incorrect in 2020. [2] In addition, he has supported due process during the #MeToo “believe all women” moral panic when many on the radical left wanted to get rid of presumption of innocence and due process. [3]
[1] Certain problems require big government to solve: Police, military, roads, and, yes, health care
[2] https://reason.com/2020/06/18/washington-post-blackface-hall...
[3] e.g. https://reason.com/2017/11/16/dear-prudence-meets-due-proces...
It's fun to troll online, but respect... I wouldn't ask for it, I don't think he should either :D
Without more context, I have to assume you’re talking about the articles he wrote which I linked to in the grandparent.
I am not sure how pointing out it was unfair to get a woman in her mid-50s fired because she wore a costume in 2018 the Washington Post retroactively decided was politically incorrect in 2020 is “trolling”. More like, standing up for fairness, compassion, and justice.
Something I respect surprisingly is the wapo article https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/blackface... full of various points of views, explaining the issue clearly, taking no special position itself, even going to tell that person felt so bad about her idea of a joke or the reactions to it she left in tear, causing compassion for her in me...
So maybe it's trolling to say the wapo calls an old incident politically incorrect ? :p As an amateur troll myself I get why she found it funny to fight fire with fire and why some people just cant go that many levels of irony and it's hard to sometimes face the reactions to your own trolling. The Wapo itself seems completely innocent of any position and I appreciate the further attempt to paint it as such as good trolling, when they were trying to untroll the debate. Just like wearing a blackface to criticise defending blackfaces.
> "This case presents a simple question: do Facebook and its vendors defame a user who posts factually accurate content, when they publicly announce that the content failed a 'fact-check' and is 'partly false,' and by attributing to the user a false claim that he never made?" wrote Stossel's attorneys in the lawsuit. "The answer, of course, is yes."
I hope there is no settlement if it proceeds.
That's not defamation of character (which would be "this poster is lying"), it's a true statement about an opinion that was reached ("fact checkers consider this article False information"). It's a subtle, but critical distinction. They don't have a case, IMO.
> False information
next paragraph:
> Checked by independent fact-checkers
If you want to get to subtle and critical distinctions, a straightforward reading of the above is: "this is false information. the fact that it is false was checked by independent fact-checkers."
A reasonable reading is that facebook labels the information as false and that that was *confirmed* by fact-checkers.
If they mean to say: "fact checkers labeled this as false and so we are hiding this information" then they should say so plainly, no?
- did the title had to be THAT inflammatory (did it have to say "JUNK", did it have to make the link to the CDC reaction to it rather than the main point)
- was Facebook the right place to share such important insight, rather than a research paper, or even a letter to the CDC
- is it the right reaction, in a sensitive period with sensitive misinformation, to further inflame the whole thing saying that not only masks are junks for schools (at least his title makes you think so on facebook), that now it's even fact checkers that are wrong...
I don't know why this guy can't solve problems and just create new ones, but damn he's wasting a lot of people's time and produce very little value outside of more anger, more doubt and more division :D
1- All posts are competing for attention. You live in a society where if you don't get someones attention right away, you're speaking to a wall.
2- The CDC is overworked, behind on response, has a clear agenda, and would likely not do anything. Often making a public outcry or outrage is the best way to reach this bigger slower beaurocratic agencies. Unless you're saying you know someone on the inside and could actually contribute to having a discussion with the right person? Or are you just saying you're good at providing "solutions" without any ability to actually help?
3- Sounds like you are making an opinion that the OP made the wrong reaction, that is your opinion, not something based on fact. Opinions about right/wrong are by their definition opinions, not fact, to be paraded as talking points by "fact" checkers.
His discussion did not waste my time. I for one like to be challenged. But if you don't like going to a place where you have your opinions challenged or strengthened, then maybe you should go to a place with opinions more like yours. I would argue you complaining about someone posting an opinion article online and calling it divisive, is the mere definition of an attack that is divisive. Your post reads divisive and passive-aggressive angry to me (you literally read the entire post and then complained about it wasting time).
It's not wrong when it's on the latest movie, but maybe he could understand he's talking about health policies for children at school, maybe that could be done with care to avoid blanket statements at risk of deviating the debate from: should they or not wear the damn thing, to: is the CDC a bunch of elitist incompetents wasting our tax money, something I think is uncalled for.
And imagine the damage if he manages to convince there are no fact, that fact checking is impossible and that anyone is entitled to publishing wide reaching random idiocies under the blanket of a sacro saint right to be an idiot :D
So fact checkers were invented.
Now fact-checkers are exposed as being partisan, and sometimes outright lying (see BMJ vs FB fact-checking fiasco).
So we need to go deeper, we need to invent something new, above fact checkers, which will be trusted again.
What could such a thing be?
I think we need a fact checker for the fact checkers. I propose we let the fact checkers fact check themselves.
No, fact checkers existed for decades before social media. Even before the internet.
I've worked in newsrooms as recently as the 1990's where there were fact checkers. Usually nice people with many very large, expensive books to double-check things.
But when the media companies became beholden to Wall Street instead of the public, the fact checking departments were the first people cut in the name of "maximizing shareholder value."
That was followed by consultants ( * cough * Broadcast Image Group * cough * ) who constantly pushed for more and more "breaking news" hype and convinced news managers that it was more important to be first than to be right. The public ate it up and it became a feedback loop.
I could go on, but this isn't the place for it.
Teach us to fish.
Does this exist? At least a methodology that doesn't mean I need to study the subject area deeply?
Let's not forget the fact that those teams are also severely understaffed.
And yet for some reason people demand more and more censorship and blame Facebook for "not doing enough". How come?