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Comment by Spellman | Hacker News Reader

I have personally asked an individual why they don't trust snopes.

Their claim is that it's a Democrat rag towel and shill.

I then ask, then what fact-checker would you trust?

Their response: None of them.

Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth.

That is a non-trivial problem to resolve. If we can't even agree what basic facts are, there is no way to even have a discussion.

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I should also clarify that I'm not saying snopes is the end-all fact-checker. I would have been curious and explored any alternative, "non-liberal" fact-checker.

My point is that this individual has written off all fact-checking as an entire discipline. They are the final arbiter of truth. That fundamentally prohibits discussion of almost anything, or at least makes it extraordinarily labor intensive.

One might counter-argue, well, start with their beliefs and work outwards to illustrate contradictions and such. Very Kantian. Except that is 1) very labor intensive, and 2) doesn't cover all issues.

Well, is there a fact-checker that doesn't claim Trump's very unenthusiastic acceptance of war with Iraq when asked by surprise on the Howard Stern show means that Trump is somehow lying when he says he didn't support the war?

It's stuff like this, turning a single reluctant "I guess so" or "probably" or "it seems we should" into support, that make supposed fact-checkers suspect. Who will fact-check the fact checkers? The supposed fact-checkers were just another political weapon, tainted as could be.

Fact checkers are like certificate authorities. Once you lose credibility, you might as well close shop. You're done.

He said "I guess so" before the war started, and then started opposing it when others started opposing it. That's hardly the political courage he was attempting to convey here, especially when he says "I was against the Iraq war from the start"

I haven't seen the video yet, so this is just my interpretation.

Asking about Iraq war at the time was similar to asking "Should we try to stop ISIS?" now. I'd give 80% courage credits to whoever that dare saying "I'm not sure, I guess so".

All in all, unless Trump had access to more information than the general populace, it doesn't matter whether he opposed or supported it. We decidedly didn't have enough info to make a sound judgement, and the conclusion we made - be it correct or not - would merely be a metaphorical coin toss.

Read the wikileaks emails yourself. You've got eyes, you don't need to rely on New York Times editors to read it for you.

Generally those fact checking sites will link to sources. It's much easier to find sources through them then to go digging through the emails manually.

Did and done.

However, I fail to see why Wikileaks is considered a Fact-checker, or how this pertains to a belief that NO fact-checker is reliable. Are you claiming that Wikileaks is trustworthy and can replace a fact-checker, but isn't a fact-checker? Because that seems a bit circular and oxymoronic to me.

Perhaps if you provided an alternative fact-checker source? The person in my original post has written off all fact-checking period.

You missed the point and sentiment of his comment.

Wikileaks is not the fact checker in this case, you are.

You were being invited to look at the raw data and draw your own conclusions/truths from it, not somebody else's.

You are being invited to look at "raw data" which is actually filtered, has important information retained for collateral and insurance, and decides when to release things for "maximum impact". To consider this alternative somehow a totally unbiased and impossible to refute thing just because it was founded in the internet era is absurd. It is run by human beings, it is not simply a "upload files here and instantly distribute them" tool. They have their own inherent bias and it is dangerous to consider receiving information that detailed and classified to assume that nobody else dealing in classified information has anything to hide. Obviously people will look bad if you get to snoop through all their trash, but the neighbour was the one who actually let you snoop in their trash, and they won't let you look in their trash either.

I too don't trust "any of them". I don't trust news sites or channels at all anymore, because there aren't any that even _pretend_ to be impartial. The biggest loser by far in this election cycle is the media, especially on the left side of the spectrum. No one will trust them again in the foreseeable future. As someone joked on Reddit: "If Donald Trump walked on water, healed cripples and turned water into wine, the headline would be: "Trump can't swim, takes jobs from doctors, and is a raging alcoholic". That's essentially how Trump's supporters perceived the media towards the end of the campaign, and in my opinion, very deservedly so. They're shameless shills, pure and simple. For the record: I don't consider Breitbart or Fox News to be a valid news source either.

The problem these 'fact' checkers have become leftist doctrines... You just point to snopes or politifact and that is end of discussion? That's not how the world works. Wikileaks is a far more credible source than either of these. People need to do their own research if they want to form conclusions not just little to prepackaged conclusions.

I would argue that wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading. Reading emails out of context and without knowing if they've been altered is probably not the best way to get a full picture. The value add of media looking at them is they can also go and get other sources to add context or to corroborate what they are reading in the wikileaks releases. Sources which aren't available to everyone. It's also easy to be fooled into seeing things as nefarious which are in the end benign when given context.

Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I would find something in them to have him hanged.

... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them, only with ten thousand times the ammunition the Cardinal (apocryphally) asked for. The online mob has been accusing (eg) Podesta and his correspondents of all kinds of insane things - from corruption & arms dealing to satanism & child abduction - based on the flimsiest of cherry-picked quotes, even when the context (beyond the leaks, within them, even in the very same email sometimes) showed without doubt that their claims were obvious bunk.

And Assange merrily fed into that: drawing spurious connections on his twitter feed; linking/retweeting the fever dreams of naked partisans; and dragging out a single dump into an episodic drip-fed spectacle, all the better to whip his fans into an inquisitorial vigilante frenzy.

"wikileaks on it's own can also be very misleading"? I can't argue with that - except perhaps to say it's far too charitable.

There's a lot of stuff in wikileaks that merits investigation but the MSM never did their job. Just wholesale dismissal from comedianchors like John Oliver. Not surprising that the MSM were asleep at the wheel when it came to predicting the outcome, or that most of the country no longer trusts them.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media...

>... and now Wikileaks has invited the whole internet to come play Richelieu with them

But why do you think that the whole internet wants to play the part of Richelieu, everyone is allowed to choose the role they want and wikileaks does not hide the context of the emails, everyone is perfectly able to check the whole correspondence. If anything the mass media is hiding the context because of their format and time limits.

Wikileaks is being unbiased by claiming to be entirely unbiased on what they choose to release (yes, they CHOOSE what they want to release, what to save for insurance, etc.) yet not acknowledging the dangerous false equivalency of saying that this system implies there is no possible way that the other party would do the same things. Until we have equal information about both sides, this is dangerous. Wikileaks gets to be the unfair arbiter of truth while claiming total transparency that we know doesn't exist.

Oh I'm not saying that they could not be faked or altered. And to be honest when you have a supposedly accurate track record like this it's a perfect brewing storm for someone to come in and exploit it.

But dismissing them as Russian hacking didn't really give a lot of people the choice to make up for themselves. Yes I believe according to wikileaks that the DNC colluded with media and fact checking orgs and pushed their agenda too far. I read the information and made up my mind. So when someone points to Politifact again I'll do the same. Not saying they can't be saved but it's the idea of looking at it as doctrine from the start with a stamp of 'True' or 'False' that I don't like. Things are never that simple.

Wikileaks has it's own issues - the suggestions of Russian influence, the timing of their data releases, questions about Assages political bias against the US/Clintons etc.

"People need to do their own research if they want to form conclusions not just little to prepackaged conclusions." - I could not agree more.

Would you rather that Wikileaks kept the information for itself? Wouldn't that be just as much of an influence on the election?

Personally I think they should just leak it all rather than controlling the flow to suit their political agenda.

I'll agree with this.

The way I understand, they've been burned before by leaking all at the same time - there's an initial "shock", theneveryone forgets about it. If your purpose is generating the maximum amount of outrage and controversy (and, consequentially, change), it makes sense to publish things slowly.

Although I agree that the timing was probably connected with the US elections. But again, that's a good think - the only way organisations will change is if it will hurt them. Now both US parties know that they can easily be targets next time.

So is Wikileaks an organization interested in free information, or using "free information" for maximum political effect? If they are twisting the knife and trying to find out how to cause the maximum possible damage for one side only, then they are clearly not a neutral organization and obviously should be treated as such. If their goal is maximum political discourse, then they are obviously a political organization, not an information or "truth" organization.

Why do you think they wouldn't be causing damage for the other side, if they could? I mean, even if they had emails of the GOP, I doubt it would really hurt Trump in any way, it's not like he had their support anyways... Actually, it would probably help him!

I have personally seen people turn away from Fox News after an excess of anti-Trump coverage; though I guess by now Fox is prolific enough to reliably called Mainstream Media.

Snopes did put out a lot of articles this season where the claim of "false" seemed to hinge on some sort of hair-splitting rather than the core of the claim being inaccurate.

This is something that concerns me a lot as well. How do we rebuild this?

Well, for a start we'd need some form of fact checking that was actually about just the facts rather than political spin, and that's really hard to do once politics becomes involved. Even purely factual questions like whether someone said something or not become blurry.

For example, take the child rape trial Hillary Clinton was a defence attorney for, in which she claimed that an unspecified person had told her the victim "is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing" and "has in the past made false accusations" to justify putting her through a nasty court-ordered psychiatric exam. Is this the same as Hillary herself making the claims? The original viral version and the victim saw it this way. Snopes argued that this was a lie because the document showed that other people had made the claims, neglecting to mention that the interpretation and wording was Hillary's and the existence and honesty of these other people rested entirely on her word. Neither of these is inherently more truthful than the other, it's a question of which spin is politically convenient.

This is probably the most clear-cut example imaginable too, since it's about the contents of a court filing. Most of the world is a lot more factually unclear, visible only through a lens of conflicting evidence and multiple sources of information.

A couple thoughts:

- How do we get broad, bi/cross/multi-partisan support?

- Is there any precedence for news articles having citations/eligible for peer-review (post-published, of course) similar to scientific papers?

By meeting the other side, if at all possible in person but at least by video chat, show respect and genuinely care about their side.

Either that or find a common enemy, such as Mexico (after the civil war).

It's reasonable to not trust a media outlet until it's earned your trust. Until then, cross check with the source material, as more often than not, journalists spin and filter the information in their product.

By the way, Snopes is not a common forum and is edited by a very small team. It is a single point of failure and is easily biased. No one entity should be the gatekeeper of truth.

>Congratulations. We've reached a point, for this individual, where "facts" as decided in the common forum are suspect and the only thing they trust is themselves (and whatever non-Mainstream Media they listen to). We have reached a point where the only truth is what they decide is the truth. //

This is similar to the UK going in to the Brexit vote. Politicians that were promoting the break away from Europe were pushing hard the idea that "we don't need experts" and that listening to expert opinions was wrong (listening to experts like pro-Brexit economists who stated, in common with the anti-s, that Britain would be financially worse off leaving Europe).

It's like the media managed to spin the idea that all people who have rigorously studied something are not to be trusted. The biggest wtf is that it worked, writing a big fat lie in big fat letters on a bus trumps (heh!) countless professors of economics telling the people it's a lie.

The trap is to conclude that people are idiots, postmodernism is not really the reason either I feel. The reason IMO is that the media have become very very good at manipulating people's thought processes and feeding them a position with out resorting to having the person think through that position. Yay, we've won, the media can now make us all believe whatever they want.

But don't panic all those rich politicians and business people are sure to use their powers for good ... /s

Well, I mean, they ARE the same experts who told us deregulation of finance was a good idea.

Have you done any research at all on snopes? I just spent 5 minutes on google and found that one of snope's main "fact-checkers" is Kim Lacapria. She used to write for a blog called "The Inquisitor", a site known for posting bad news stories, similar to the right-wing Alex Jones programme. They have published fake quotes and stories without doing research: http://www.inquisitr.com/670091/retraction-and-apology-to-ro... http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/story-about-costco-pulling-d...

As for Kim, she describes herself as "...an openly left-leaning individual myself", if you ctrl+f for those words here: http://www.inquisitr.com/402558/scandal-envy-behind-petraeus...

As you can see, journalistic integrity is lacking from both sides of the political spectrum. Please do not get all high-and-mighty and think you're better than everyone else, because you would be falling into the same trap you mock others for. I hope in the future you will examine sources with a more objective view and keep an open mind, and not just believe whatever someone wants you to believe so they can make a quick buck off of your ignorance.

In fairness, I should mention that by "auto snopes" I mean "implement an auto-debunker" or even just "auto fair balance" which automatically adds "the other side" to anything linked on facebook.

I have no hat in the ring with respect to which side publishes the truth, I just think that if something is FALSE facebook could alter their UI to immediately debunk something.

Like the other quote of Trump saying "I'd run as a republican because they're the dumbest" could have a big "FALSE - he never said that" right underneath.

People who thought it was funny could still post it until their hearts were content - but nobody would be FOOLED

Thanks for clarifying that! I don't have any skin in this game either, and I agree it might be helpful to have an auto-bias feature, but it needs to be completely transparent and open so we can fact-check the fact-check checkers ourselves :) Someone must fact-check the fact checkers, and facebook should do their best to ensure this is possible with any system they decide to implement.

Come on. You've highlighted one staff member as having once mentioned having a personal political leaning (like most people do) and that she once worked at a blog with a tarnished reputation and spun that into implying Snopes is untrustworthy. I'm sure you could meet this extremely low bar of "proof" for practically any news organization.

If you really want to present a case of bias, find some real evidence. Specific articles with specific instances of false or misleading information. Otherwise, you're just sowing doubt by casting aspersions based on vague associations.

This post wasn't meant to be a thorough debunking of Kim and snopes. I actually think snopes does a mostly good job of producing accurate information. However, it does show in some cases, such as the Hillary Libya "We didn't lose one person" question from the debate. http://www.snopes.com/hillary-clinton-benghazi-msnbc/

Snopes and Kim claim "Hillary Clinton overlooked Benghazi victims when she said that "we didn't lose a single person in Libya" during a campaign event on MSNBC." is false. However, reading the article for her evidence, you can observe that Kim accepts Clinton lying by omission by saying the conversation was not about Benghazi.

Looking at this from a high level, Clinton is implying the the Benghazi attack is a completely unrelated event from the USA's war in Libya. However, these two events are both part of the Libyan intervention and it's disingenuous from Clinton to make such a claim because as a result of the Libyan intervention, Americans did die. Clinton is obviously playing a political game to play down the negative consequences of the Libyan intervention. I don't blame her for doing this, by the way. I would too if I wanted to be president.

Just because they didn't die in the initial confrontation doesn't mean "No Americans died." Snopes fails to point out the fact that Clinton does not include Benghazi in the overall Libyan confrontation. Let's say I am in a car accident with someone, and they are injured. If 6 months later, they have complications and die from the injuries I caused with the initial car accident, I am still responsible for the death of the individual.

Left wing bias: No Americans died in the initial confrontation with the Libyan government.

Right wing bias: Clinton killed Americans in Libya.

Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.

> Neutral bias: Clinton made a decision to support the invasion of Libya. As a result of the invasion, Americans died in Benghazi.

Even that statement could be twisted if you draw the conclusion that Clinton supported the invasion, people died, therefore she is partly responsible. And it's missing information about the "600 requests for additional security".

I do understand and agree with your point.

Perhaps the more important issue is that some voters have an overly simplistic world view. "Casualties from an attack on a diplomatic enclave in a volatile country" should be separate from "US Foreign policy had implications for the conflict in Libya".

Agreed, the unbiased statement could definitely use some more words to show it's an opinion that Clinton COULD be responsible for the result, but it's not black and white. It's just frustrating that people don't recognize that yes, snopes, in general, is a trustworthy source. However, snopes is a group of people, each with their own individual biases.

These biases can occasionally influence the content. To treat these sources as some kind of perfect "machine" that can just be unleashed onto facebook to automatically say "You're wrong, this is how it really happened." is a scary thought. Especially when the process and machine are blackbox and we don't have any way to verify which "facts" are being pushed, by whom, and for what reasons. And when you bring up the fact that there might be bias, you become one of _those_ people, like you're some kind of conspiracy nut for asking questions.

I think that happened this election. The polls all said "Clinton crushes Trump." Anyone that asked about the validity of those polls was mocked and laughed at and seen as some kind of rightwing conspiracy nut.

Well, turns out they were dead wrong and maybe if people recognized their unconscious bias, we wouldn't have a president Trump right now and people would have said "Holy $@&* these polls are wrong we need to change our strategy so we can win." I kept repeating to people, don't underestimate Trump, he's smarter than you give him credit for and he's a huge threat to Clinton. Nothing but jokes and mockery from the majority of democrats I talked to.

Trump was a massive supporter of going into Libya[1] and doing "something" about Gaddafi. These world leaders are stuck with the hard problem of satisfying dumb idiots at home who think that the US can wave a wand and stop people across the sea from killing each other because it sucks seeing the poor brown people kill each other, yet they are only doing so because we meddled in their affairs before, and yet we are proposing to solve it by meddling in their affairs more. The US, including Trump, asked for Libya, and now Clinton is on the hook because the US population is too misinformed to understand why Libya is on edge, why it was America's fault, and why there will be no easy solution because, again, until America stops doing this it won't stop.

This is the issue. Americans don't know what they want and are mad because they feel like they somehow have a special place in the world everyone else is "stealing" from them somehow. This attitude is "anti-American" because it is the unfortunate truth, and America just voted that the truth hurts but it would rather blame it on the immigrants and mexicans and muslims. This is scary. You cannot have the attitude that you somehow have a god-given "right" to jobs in your country, and that filthy immigrants are stealing them because they are bad people. Conservatives feel like the government is a credit card they can use to get more when they want it, no matter what the consequence for the rest of the world. This entitlement is a style of attitude and thinking that is guaranteed to cause global conflict, and is the inevitable end of a culture war between western thinking and other powers. Obama proposed to fix this by being basically an apologist and reparist for the rest of the world, but the rest of the world is so fucked up because of America's history of trying to decide what's best for it that it is starting to turn on America, and deciding it doesn't really need them any more. This stubborness is war-mongering and why it is better to have free trade and globalism rather than using literal direct conflict to solve perceived differences between countries.

[1]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...

Your comment is missing the link to the snopes article that's wrong.

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