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Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

This is the third time I've seen something on this today.

So what's the plan then? Start a Facebook "Ministry of Truth"?

A lot of subreddits (r/politics for example) have tags like "Misleading title". Maybe something like that?

Many of my friends sincerely believe the fake news they have read on these sites, because nothing suggests that it might be fake. It's so sad. When I ask them for sources for "facts" like "Obama is a Muslim", they send me a list of news articles that "proves it". Fact checking sites are "the corrupt media" and "liberal bias".

btw, these aren't uninformed people. They watch the news, debate with friends and vote. It's the sincerity that they believe the news with that's so depressing.

/r/politics is a really bad example because it was completely taken over by pro-Hillary sentiment during the campaign. Then it all flipped back to neutral after the campaign.

It didn't really flip back to neutral. Go read the recent top poss.

It's a perfect example. Bias != Fake. Bias is fine. People are always going to share articles biased towards their views.

Sure, misleading title. We should also probably weight the score a little heavier so misleading news doesn't percolate to the top of people's news feeds. It's not filtering, it's just curating!

Weren't we angry at Facebook just a few months ago for doing just that?

Who gets to decide what's "relevant"? What's "misleading"?

How about integrating fact checking sites into their news feed, displayed prominently?

How about teaching children critical thinking skills? Much of my education in America was focused on blind obedience.

Politifact is an excellent resource for that.

They site all of their sources, so you can check for yourself, and decide whether or not you trust the sources.

Most of those sites are extremely biased. If you think that's a good idea it's because the bias leans towards what you agree with.

I don't think that's true. There seems to be a view that nobody can try to be objective and the objective doesn't exist. I'm a scientist by training and trade, and in my experience the real world is pretty damn objective. Something happened, or it didn't. Something is true or it's not. I used to say as a grad student that nature didn't care whether I graduated.

Granted it's not always easy to get good data, and it's not always obvious what's clearly true. But where possible, we should embrace it, and where it's hard, then we should have a clear discussion about what we can and cannot believe.

Fact checkers in my experience do a good job of that, they present a clear picture of what is known and what isn't, and they take that responsibility very seriously. If someone tends to make more false statements than someone else, that doesn't mean pointing that out is biased, it's just reporting the facts. Sometimes reality is biased.

After looking at many fact checkers and the job they do, I could not disagree more.

People do not speak in simple statements that can be either scientifically "verified" or "not verified". When talking, people often use hyperbole. They speak in approximate numbers (e.g. 20% instead of 17%, simply because it sounds better). Not to mention people often talk about socially complex subjects that cannot be, in ANY way, verified as simply "true" or "false" without interjecting the fact checkers own personal opinion into the mix.

Fact checkers have tried to solve these issues by having "truthiness" ratings. For example, Politifact has the ratings "True, Mostly True, Mostly False, False, Pants on Fire". However, this is obviously a scale that has no objective meaning. As a result, these ratings are applied inconsistently and with a heavy bias towards the fact-checkers own agenda (which, for Politifact, is heavily left-leaning).

How do you objectively decide whether a hyperbole is true or not? How do you objectively decide that numbers are too far off the actual scientific numbers? What rounding is too much? How do you objectively decide the truth of complex social issues and statements, and what data do you trust for determining these "objectively true answers"?

The answer is you can't, and you don't.

It might be hard to determine a false statement from a pants on fire statement, but just because it's not purely objective doesn't mean its not useful.

What would are some Politifacts that you think were wildly off base? Like statements that you believe to be true that are labeled "Pants on Fire".

That isn't what he was saying.

He is saying that the 'fact checking sites' are biased.

This is true. It's the old problem of "who guards the guards".

Snopes.com is supposed to be a fact checking site.

Snopes.com recently rated as 'mostly false' a notorious video of a Trump supporter being beaten up and suggested it was primarily about a traffic incident.

The guy who got beaten up actually offered his own testimony of what happened on camera later on. This is not mentioned in the 'fact check'. There is also the fact that his attackers are screaming at him that he is a Trump supporter and shouldn't be. They repeatedly shout "Don't vote Trump".

Then, just today, I see they have updated their rating to 'mixture' and added more text suggesting that the spread of the video is about racism. It's a pity I didn't take a screenshot from earlier.

This is the url: http://www.snopes.com/black-mob-beats-white-man-for-voting-t...

So no. I don't take the 'fact checking' websites seriously.

Imagine for instance a white nationalist walked into a store with a Mexican shopkeeper, got into an altercation because the Mexican "didn't give the right change" when purchasing an item there, and then followed that up by bringing his friends to trash the store.

On the store's CCTV there is audio recording showing racial slurs are used. Furthermore the shopkeeper says to reporter they attacked his store because he was Mexican and denies that he gave back the incorrect amount of change. He claims they were looking for a fight.

Then along comes snopes.com and they make an article claiming this was really about a shoplifting incident. Police sources say the white gang stole some items when they left.

That is what this is like. The fact checker is obviously biased.

That Snopes entry is a perfect example of promoting a bias without specifically lying:

"The clip has since been shared by white supremacist publication The Daily Stormer..."

Is that relevant to the beating? No. Is that relevant to the truth or falsity of what preceded the beating? No. It is simply there to inflame one side using "guilt by association". A similar example was that an endorsement of Trump by some racist organization was widely reported, even though nothing else they had ever said or (even allegedly) done had been considered newsworthy to that point. Had Trump sought such an endorsement, that would be relevant.

Ultimately, selective reporting can be just as powerful as false reporting... and there is far, far more false reporting than most realize (especially misreporting on legislation). People need to remember that media have no legal obligation to report truth (let alone the whole truth) and, unless they libel or slander a specific entity, suffer no consequences for stating flat lies. For-profit media's primary motivation is maximizing profit, and accuracy often does not maximize return or profit, especially in the short term.

I've only seen these sites being accused of being leftist, so shouldn't there be a market for a right-leaning one?

This right here is exactly the problem.

A nihilistic viewpoint that nothing at all is knowable, because every source of information is equally suspect.

This is kind of why we humans invented science, you know, so we might actually figure out some things about the world.

Randomly selected Politifact article:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/...

Not just their opinion, but how they arrived at that opinion. Links to Billboard's data on Jay-Z and Beyonce's concert attendance, and Trump's own claims about his crowds.

Reality doesn't always just come down to differing opinions. Many things are actually knowable, to anyone willing to investigate and entertain the possibility they are wrong.

Trump's statement could have been interpreted in two different ways. One, Politifact's interpretation, is that he draws bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at their concerts and another is that his rallies are bigger than Hillary's rallies where Beyonce/Jay-Z performed. I don't know if the second interpretation is true or not (as I haven't done the research), but the whichever one you choose to analyze shows your bias. Probably most Clinton-leaning folks would pick the first interpretation of Trump's statement and most Trump-leaning folks would pick the second. So from the perspective of a Trump supporter Politifact looks biased, but from your perspective they're an impartial fact checker.

The point is THEY CITE THEIR SOURCES and lay out their analysis showing you exactly how they came to their conclusions. So the end result is the reader is more informed than before.

Also, Politifact sanely sticks to the common sense meanings of English words. Your interpretation of "bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at Hillary's rallies" adds a qualifier beyond what was in the original quote.

Except that what Trump originally said was: "She's not getting any crowds so she gets Beyoncé and Jay Z, I like them, I like them and you know that they do, I get bigger crowds then they do. It's true. I get far bigger crowds," referring to a Clinton rally a couple of days earlier headlined by them. It was Politifact that edited out this reference to Clinton's rallies, starting their clip from his speech not just in the middle of a sentence but the middle of a word. They don't give readers an easy way to find the uncut version either - I'd have to find and dig through a video of the entire speech to link it here.

NBC's fact check provides better context despite being far shorter and not citing a single source: http://www.nbcnews.com/card/not-even-close-trump-said-he-dra... The stuff Politifact cited is easy to check even without the citations, but their omissions are much harder to spot.

Bias can appear both in what facts they decide to cover and in how they cover it. The first part is the one people usually ignore and the easiest to hide. You can just fact check one person on their every sentence and not fact check the opponent on their every sentence. You can also decide to only fact check mostly true or true statements for one person and mostly false or false statements for the other person. You'd be performing proper fact checking most of the time, but you'd be helping one person more than the other.

There already is a "Ministry of Truth", as you put it. The point of the article is that Facebook _already_ picks and chooses which shared items it promotes into your feed, so the news you get exposed to is already the product of human judgement. So, Facebook can't merely wash its hands of culpability in the propagation of fake news as the product of some "mathematically neutral algorithm". There's no such thing.

Not saying I agree 100%, but I think there's something there worth considering.

They have already taken up editorial roles.

It's entirely reasonable to demand that they do it responsibly.

The plan is to 'move on' from the internet and its novelties and use it like just another educational tool when you need to.

And what? We'll get back to newspapers?

One newpapers for the democrat & One newpapers for the republicans. People will be able to read only the one they relate better to, just as with the internet :D

One distinction with newspapers is that people pay subscriptions for newspapers. This changes the relationship between the consumers, the publishers, and the advertisers.

I didn't mean 'go back' to anything, rather unplug from the constant information highway because it's a farce.

+1 can't wait to get my friends and family back from their social media and infotainment addictions. The internet has so much potential to help human society.

Thank you Hacker News for being a place to notice this stuff

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