Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Now, The Guardian chose some headlines to illustrate this story with. Presumably the Guardian considers them good examples of "fake news". One of them is about the Clintons "stealing $200K worth of furniture" etc. Politifact has a surprisingly detailed page on this allegation. The result is, typically, gray. It wasn't $200K (suspiciously round number); closer to $190K. And the Clintons paid for or returned the "stolen" items; which either makes them "not stolen" or "stolen and returned".
But the whole claim of "theft" rests on the items' designation as national property, which may not have been clear at the time.
Given that this headline is an example of what the media (including Facebook) wants to shield the masses from - what then do they want the masses to hear? Is it (a) nothing, (b) inoculation/discrediting by labelling the meme as "fake news"; (c) a less sensationalized headlines?
The funny (or sad) part is that silencing dissenting opinions via means like this is the very definition of fascism, but the people so quick to yell "fake news!" now are the same ones who were calling their friends fascist on social media 2 months ago just for supporting a different presidential candidate than they were.
If you believe flagging false headlines like
“Michelle Obama DEMANDS Americans PAY UP To Give Her Mom A Cushy $160k Pension”
is fascism, and that advocating war-crimes and bringing back libel laws like Trump did is not, I don't know what to say.
There is a whole industry set up to profit from making fake news that they know is false: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-macedonias-fa...
If you think any attempt to reduce profiteering by knowingly generating fake news that gets millions of shares is fascism, I'm not sure what isn't.
I'm not sure if there has been any 'transition' from accusations of racism to fake news. The "birther" controversy, especially the way it treated by places like Brietbart was both racist and fake, I doubt that you dispute that. Trump retweeting Stormfront infographics that claim ridiculous stuff like 90% of white murder victims were killed by black people is both racist and fake. This is hardly a "liberal" or globalist position, even Fox news called out Trump on that.
Regardless of political orientation, objective facts do exist. I don't believe in censorship, but I think if a site wants to flag a post saying "reasons why the moon landing is a globalist conspiracy" as false, I'm not going to cry that it's literally fascism.
When they print headlines such as "Hurrah for the blackshirts" (1934) or "German Jews pouring into this country" (1939) it's easy to see their fascist history, but that continues today. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between Nazi cartoons and modern day DM cartoons.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/british-media-has-sunk-to-an-al...
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/offended-by-the-daily-ma...
A: the solution to unwanted speech is more speech. B: OK. A: Also pg is a lizard from planet Nibiru. B: That sounds like bullshi- A: OMG CENSORSHIP
Nobody is silencing dissenting opinions, they're disagreeing with them and questioning their validity. Don't dish out criticism if you can't take it.
It is a problem we have not faced in free societies but do now. It is the suppression of information and its replacement by propaganda with no connection to reality. It is the world of Putin's Russia, a world we in the west have not experienced.
And it is not necessarily driven from the top down although casting doubt on what constitutes a fact is core to the maintenance of power in a dictatorship.
There is pretense that changing Facebook's algorithm from favoring profitable self confirming nonsense to being balanced with factual posts is some an obscene from of censorship rather than a fix for a broken algorithm. This as absurd as claiming Google is censoring when it changes it's search to give results the user wants because no user wants to be fed inaccuracies by either Google or Facebook.
Incredibly we're now saying it's censorship just to adjust a ranking such that propagandist nonsense (that the user didn't want) is no longer quite the top result.
Indeed the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies because that is somehow censorship. And certainly no-one should promulgate those correction let alone use them. This is exactly the Kafkaesque logic that reveals the underling motivation is actually the exact opposite of free speech.
In other words, let me fact-check your fact-check.
You beg the question by claiming that only "self confirming nonsense" and "propagandist nonsense" will be hidden from the public, calling any position that sees cause for concern about censorship "a pretense." However, you offer no evidence for your claim that only these types of content will be affected. In fact, Snopes and many of the other fact-checkers have been shown to be politically biased themselves, and they certainly don't limit themselves to debunking propagandist nonsense. If we take their past performance as evidence of what is likely to happen moving forward, we will see, just for example a conservatives shut out of the public conversation for saying exactly the same thing a liberal is given a pass on. For claiming that nothing but truly egregious content could possibly ever be filtered, you receive 2 long noses.
Your claim that "the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies" is blatantly false and receives 3 more long noses. Pretending that the fact-checkers have never told politically motivated lies themselves—only corrections—gives 1 extra long nose. Your claim that the argument goes so far as to say that nobody should promulgate corrections to political lies is exactly the opposite of the truth, earning you 4 more long noses. The whole goal is to leave every lie open for correction, by anybody who is able to offer a compelling case and back it up such that people trust the correction.
The objection is against setting official truth-setters, because that divides people into two classes: 1. people who are allowed to think for themselves and check facts, and 2. everybody else, who must, for their own safety and well-being, have the first class filter what they read.
The reality is that Facebook - responding to consumer demand - is partnering up with several commercial fact-checking outfits, in addition to tweaking its algorithm to select from something other than sensational content that generates lots of reactions (not an easy problem). IF those research/fact-checking service suppliers don't do a good job, market theory suggests they'll be displaced by a competitor.
divides people into two classes: 1. people who are allowed to think for themselves and check facts, and 2. everybody else, who must, for their own safety and well-being, have the first class filter what they read.
How does some 'possibly fake' tag on a shared article on social media prevent anyone from thinking for themselves or checking facts? They can still do that by choosing to ignore the 'possibly fake' tag and clicking through to the source and researching it further. You're crafting a narrative here in which people in group 1 restrict the freedom of people in group 2, but that's not actually happening because in reality nobody is being forced or has to give up any options. I'm oddly reminded of the meat industry objecting to country-of-origin labels on the grounds that consumers don't need to know that stuff.
You adopted a very high handed tone to the poster above, saying that you would fact-check their fact-checking, but then you made multiple misrepresentations of that poster's argument, interspersed with groundless claims of your own.
The whole fake news narrative popped up over night to explain Trump winning at impossible odds.
Id say people were fine with filter bubbles truth be damned as long as the outgroup got smeared.
Its also disingenious to say its not hard to see how the fake tag could be abused. Oil companies have spent fortunes trying to get climate change labeled as fake, and look how successful it was.
There are definitely examples of fact checks of very similar claims being resolved very differently, and the further left person in question being the one given gentler treatment. I'm not sure how you'd effectively test the dataset to determine whether this is just statistical noise, though.
On the other hand - whether you can test it or not, the question at hand seems to be about perception of bias rather than actual bias. I wonder if an adversarial style system wherein, say, both supporters and detractors wrote up their best cases for why something was true/false and then the best arguments were presented as some sort of a ... duel? ... would provide better information. Crowdsource the arguments well enough and the classes go away at that level, and using the resulting information to filter might be rather more useful.
The only things I'm really sure of here, sadly, are that doing nothing doesn't seem to be working particularly well, but every time we attempt to do something we find that doing nothing looks increasingly like at least a local maximum.
The guardian article is a hit piece, and a poorly written one at that. It gives very little information and a lot of vague or indirect criticism. (Makes you think how much more effective hit pieces can be when the writer actually has something to work with: even this will probably convince a lot of people that critiques of snopes are invalid.)
On priors I'd expect there to be issues with the mail article, but the guardian doesn't tell me what they are.
For any other reputable news source I'd totally agree - but in this case, it's poor form to give the Daily Mail your ad revenue. This is not any regular newspaper: it is a mouthpiece for an organised hate campaign aimed at stirring up political tensions against immigrants, the disabled and out of work, and other 'undesirables' - which just also happens to be really good at writing social-media-friendly celebrity stories.
The reasons you gave don't rise to that level.
If the other critique I made—that they don't actually mention anything wrong with the mail article— wouldn't be the case, it wouldn't be as bad.
But the fact that they didn't make any substantive critiques of the article and didn't link it makes it a hit piece.
I think "I want to talk about their attitude to fake news, not further spread the salacious details of their only-sort-of-related coverage" is ... a reason.
I think saying basically that, and providing a link afterwards that one would hope readers would choose not to click, would've been a better approach from a broadsheet.
I happen to think that the founder of Snopes embezzling $98K and spending it on prostitutes is relevant, as it throws their entire journalistic credibility into question.
So the founder of Snopes may be financially dishonest and driven by sex thrills...but this doesn't invalidate their research on external questions. It's not like I looked to them for moral guidance about, well, anything.
On the surface, your argument is correct; the facts are the facts, and no amount of moral corruption will change that. Things get hairy when you remember that our world is anything other than black and white: facts can be distorted, misrepresented or ignored to deliver an entirely different message, even if they are still (technically) "factual".
This is why you don't want a known sleazebag for a reporter. Not only do they have a provably skewed moral compass that would let them deviate from pure "fact-based" reporting, there is also a safe assumption that they have other, worse skeletons in their closet which would mean they're susceptible to being blackmailed into deviating from pure "fact-based" reporting.
Communicating in a large internet forum is quite different than in small groups or in person. Among other things, it's much harder to communicate intent, so it's best to either (a) state intent explicitly or (b) edit the post so that it isn't so vulnerable to crossed signals.
I'll worry about that if/when it happens. I have no difficulty distinguishing between factual and editorial content, and I generally only consult Snopes after I've done some research of my own and drawn a preliminary conclusion.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dail...
It makes snopes look worse run than a college newspaper.
I also agree with the forbes article in that we need much much tranparency and openess from our fact checkers.
It was with incredible surprise therefore that I received David’s one-sentence response which read in its entirety “I'd be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects in general because I'm precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement from discussing details of my divorce.”
This absolutely astounded me. Here was the one of the world’s most respected fact checking organizations, soon to be an ultimate arbitrator of “truth” on Facebook, saying that it cannot respond to a fact checking request because of a secrecy agreement.
In short, when someone attempted to fact check the fact checker, the response was the equivalent of “its secret.”
It is impossible to understate how antithetical this is to the fact checking world, in which absolute openness and transparency are necessary prerequisites for trust. How can fact checking organizations like Snopes expect the public to place trust in them if when they themselves are called into question, their response is that they can’t respond.
What's so astonishing about it? A divorce settlement in which the parties agree not to talk about each other in public isn't scandalous, and it's not like these people are on the public payroll; rather, they provide a service, have built a good brand from the overall high reliability of that service (notwithstanding a lack of total perfection), and the market has been largely satisfied with the quality of the offering. Divorces happen and they're sometimes bitter and contentious. So what?
I don't really care how Snopes is run as long as it consistently provides a high quality of information, while being aware of variations in the quality of their output from time to time. I have certainly found it a more reliable source of information, on average, than the Daily Mail or indeed Forbes over a period going back to its founding.
But there are quite a few things, like the allegations of criminal activity (e.g. embezzlement) going on at Snopes that reasonable people might have questions about with respect to their fact-checking operations.
I neither know nor much care how their operation runs, and it's not my purpose to defend it. To be honest I've never especially liked the people who run it; their deconstructions of internet rumors are often snarky and shallow, and undermine their factual value with distracting tone issues - but that's how they choose to run their business. I'm just pointing to the fact of the site's general reliability as a fact-checking service over a long period.
http://kalevleetaru.com/vita.pdf
David Mikkelson's c.v.:
?
(disclaimer: I know Kalev slightly)
Just let that sink in for a moment: the Guardian is unable to dispute the Daily Mail on a factual level on this one. Instead they talk about everything and anything else rather than discuss the actual subject matter in the reports. "Nothing to see here, move along!" But even a stopped clock can be right twice a day. And this would hardly be the first real news broken by a tabloid.
We live in interesting times. I just hope they're not the "interesting times" from that fictitious Chinese curse.
The usual saying is, "When the law is on your side, argue the law; when the facts are on your side, argue the law; when neither is on your side, pound the table."
The variant I've heard is: "When the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; if both the facts and the law are against you, get a new client."
From New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/12/man-who-hates-libe...
> In the files of the Press Complaints Commission, you will find records of 687 complaints against the Mail which led either to a PCC adjudication or to a resolution negotiated, at least partially, after the PCC’s intervention. The number far exceeds that for any other British newspaper: the files show 394 complaints against the Sun, 221 against the Daily Telegraph, 115 against the Guardian. The complaints will serve as a charge sheet against the Mail and its editor.
> This year, [2014] the Mail reported that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax; that asylum-seekers had “targeted” Scotland; that disabled babies were being euthanised under the Liverpool Care Pathway; that a Kenyan asylum-seeker had committed murders in his home country; that 878,000 recipients of Employment Support Allowance had stopped claiming “rather than face a fresh medical”; that a Portsmouth primary school had denied pupils water on the hottest day of the year because it was Ramadan; that wolves would soon return to Britain; that nearly half the electricity produced by windfarms was discarded. All these reports were false.
Here's another example: A columnist accused a muslim family of being extremists. That was libel. She tweeted her apology at 2am.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/katie-hopkins-twitt...
I think the apology for incorrect claims should take as much space as the original claim. If you print a 92point headline on the front page that's libellous you should print the apology in 92 point on the front page.
EDIT: And about libel in England. You need to be able to prove what you say is true. In the context of "false news" that doesn't seem to burdensome for newspapers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
> Allowable defences are justification (i.e. the truth of the statement), fair comment (i.e., whether the statement was a view that a reasonable person could have held), and privilege (i.e., whether the statements were made in Parliament or in court, or whether they were fair reports of allegations in the public interest). An offer of amends is a barrier to litigation. A defamatory statement is presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove its truth. Furthermore, to collect compensatory damages, a public official or public figure must prove actual malice (knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth). A private individual must only prove negligence (not exercising due care) to collect compensatory damages. In order to collect punitive damages, all individuals must prove actual malice.
You're certainly right that the Daily Mail isn't someone I'd trust much, but this sort of thing ought to be verifiable--I mean, the courts themselves may well have public documents regarding cases put before them, etc.
Seems to me you're in such a hurry to have a trial that you've decided not to wait for a crime to take place.
No one is on trial here (unless there are still court proceedings I don't know of), but my point is more around how trying to refute something without discussing the allegations or any kind of evidence just makes it look like you're doing a cover-up, even if that's not your intent.
But there was a crime alleged here: embezzlement. Whether that was true or not I do not know, but it would seem like someone could check the legal documents. There might even be two (or more) crimes if any of these documents were sealed by the court.
I'm kind of surprised no one is interested in checking that out or discussing this for what is to be one of the biggest and most important fact-checking outfits on the planet with the upcoming Facebook deal.
It's a pity if they did scale up for altruistic reasons, but in the process ended up out of their depth - fact-checking news stories in a highly controversial and partisan environment seems like an entirely different kettle of fish than unravelling easily-debunked urban legends.
I'm sure being an Official Facebook Fact Checker is a job that pays quite well.
You have it exactly backwards. I've never seen anyone give a good reason why Snopes should be trusted. The Mikkelsons were self-appointed "authorities" from the beginning, with zero actual expertise or credentials in most of the areas they opine upon.
Edit: I should add that I view any organization that feels the need to use "truth", "fact", or similar in its name with an extremely jaundiced eye. It's reminiscent of Pravda and "Honest John's Used Cars". Organizations with actual earned credibility don't use names like that, as a rule.
Their impressive library of detailed articles in where they factually report on myths and conspiracy theories?
Why are you asking such a vague, open-ended question?
"The sky is blue because other stars reflect blue light onto our atmosphere." How would you rate that, given Snopes' scales?
Do you have any specific examples where there was a concise yet opinionated decision on any published articles from Snopes that don't rely on hard evidence for their conclusion?
Now they are into very fuzzy realms where they are going to have to fact check claims that are plausible. That's hard work. You have to actually... uhh... check the actual claims.
Nobody really fact checks anymore because it's damn expensive. Unless someone gives them a budget for real gumshoe work, Snopes will just end up applying a bunch of political bias filters and lazy heuristics. Facebook could get that with deep learning so I'm not sure why they'd be interested.
She now works as an admin for Snopes. Read the entire comment before kneejerk replying champ
Would you care to link that tenuous red flag to the investigate articles Scopes produces in some fashion?
So because David Mikkelson either divorced his wife and married his assistant, or divorced his wife and hired his mistress, you worry that he might be corruptible, given the right incentives. OK, although this kinda skates over the fact that their consequent unreliability would be obvious to others and thus reduce the market value of their service.
I'm not clear why you keep mentioning the fact that the other woman was a former porn star/professional escort. Are you trying to argue that sex workers are inherently untrustworthy people or something?
This whole attempt to control the discourse is doomed. There's no such thing as objectivity - ones understanding of the world is shaped by one's experiences and who one is, and that's true for institutions too.
Character matters for an editorial institution, as does form. Snopes built its reputation one way, and became something quite different. And yet they have been granted a role of high influence by Facebook and thus it's in the spirit of good journalism to look into the extent to which they deserve this influence, and the character of the people involved does matter.
One could say that the Mail also isn't a globalist paper and so that naturally sets their perspective against Snopes.
Obama being born in Kenya is objectively false.
Podesta running a child-trafficking ring in pizza places around Chicago is objectively false.
Moon landing and flat earth conspiracies are objectively false.
Thinking that Global warming is a hoax created by China is objectively false.
I hate to bring up the cliché of "post-truth" but when you say things like "there is no such thing as objectivity" it is difficult not to do so.
I'm not directing this at you in particular, but it's a common line of argument. Say Snopes write that the claim that Global Warming is a hoax is false, or that Obama isn't a secret Islamic radical. When they dispute something that many people believe in, the argument from a depressingly high number of people is not to scrutinise the facts that Snopes used and come up with flaws in their reasoning.
It is to vaguely accuse them of being "globalist", say that their argument is not valid because their founder did something, and that there is no objective truth.
Reality is complex, but the problem arises when people use this complexity to mean that any belief they hold, however unsubstantiated, cannot be falsified because everyone has an (((agenda))), which is defined as holding any view, on any subject, slightly different from their own.
Sure, I think Snopes should be looked into, like any institution with influence. But I am far more interested in journalism that extensively rebuts many of their arguments- and they have made a lot of arguments, rather than providing fodder for the inevitable future ad-hominem rebuttals.
1. It inhibits their ability to embellish stories and thus could effect revenue.
2. If you need to goto some trust worthy organisation to fact check. Why do you need to visit the publisher first?
It's unsettling how readily their audience accepts their claims that snopes et al are liberal rags. I've done some due diligence in the past on snopes, and afaik any bias is well within the margin of error from zero.
The narrative is that fact checking is a "globalist"-orchestrated move to suppress what they call the "independent media" in favor of the "MSM" (mainstream media).
I argue that whenever someone spends more time defaming their critics than defending their stances and claims, readers ought to run away. But following these news sources, it seems like most readers are completely trapped in an unfalsifiable narrative. It's really disheartening to think that our current best weapon against this sort of charlatinism is screening content thru fact-checkers. But I do think these platforms are obligated here, and indeed long overdue.
Tom Friedman makes a compelling argument about platforms' responsibilities here: 'Facebook et al want the NYT readership, the NYT page views, but none of the NYT overhead that comes with being accountable for the information they share. And that's bullshit.'