Fact Checking is a new word for censorship.
Google says in the blog they push Fact Checked articles up the results list (and by implication push unchecked ones down).
If that's what they're doing their must be a reference article the "fact checking" article is pointing to. So I'd much rather have tags on the reference article pointing to the "fact checking" articles and tags on the "fact checking" articles pointing back to the reference article.
Why? Facts about a particular story are often reproduced by many sites. It's reasonable to run a check on those facts without specifically targeting a site. Snopes (which they use as an example) does this regularly.
So in this case would Google mark these news organizations, most of them reputable as far as it's possible to be today, as fact checks even though they apparently hadn't bothered to read the full transcript?
What if the event is hidden?
For example, the New Year's assaults in Cologne that the German government allegedly attempted to cover up.[1] That failed, but such efforts do sometimes succeed.
1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/120...
The nerve of giant corporations in our corporatist world!
The nerve!
It was fairly obvious when the media started talking about "fake news online" that the endgame was censoring the Internet.
Robust freedom of speech doesn't mean that idiots get to have an equal voice. In fact, I think it depends on idiots quickly getting ignored, even in vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways.
Who decides who gets ignored in "vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways"?
Until then, it's whoever makes better news aggregators.
Popular? Then you're deciding truth by popularity.
The alternative is to ban sorting news articles at all.
There's also the fun problem where the sorting and other display choices of a news aggregator are speech. Why should that speech be suppressed?
And how will a system like this handle news or reports about events that challenge our world view?
Not everything takes the form of Trump saying random outrageous stuff that is easily verified/rejected.
Also, you may say that "Fact checked" is just an additional data point to judge whether to trust an information source, but you know as well as I do that lazy people (most people) will start thinking that "Fact checked" means truth and "Not fact checked" means lies. Even more so on Facebook.
I think, in the long run, these systems will be detrimental to peoples' ability to judge any information themselves. This is a problem for democracy.
I remember sitting in a library years ago as two goofballs met each other for the first time and immediately extended each other more credibility than they gave to the institutions they proceeded to ramble about. It was fascinating to watch.
Anyway, the part regarding Facebook still stands, and we are moving in that general direction I believe.
Articles are being tagged with things like
'Fact Check', 'Opinion' and 'In depth'
It's very difficult to collude with 120 organizations dedicated to fact checking.
The actual problem is when 120 organizations disagree 50/50 about the truth, you're basically left with a consensus problem and you have to decide who's side is more trustworthy, which is a problem we had before with deciding which news organizations were trustworthy. All this is doing is moving the ball from the old guard to the new and rebranding it, because the population loves shiny new things. Or maybe the old guard is just fronting.
There also probably won't be published data about when fact checking organizations are wrong, so nothing is stopping a decently financed group from becoming an authority in this new system and then staying around for a good while. There's also no metric for success and thresholds of when badly managed fact checking organizations should be culled from the herd.
Will fact checking organizations have the balls to publish facts that put themselves in a terrible light and then self-terminate? What about the reputations of the people in that organization who move on to new organizations? Are they sufficiently punished for abusing the system?
That is what is disturbing about this: that anyone can stand up and throw the fact checking badge around. It's not state-level censorship yet (IMO).
Fact Checking isn't censorship. It is a process whereby someone with good reputation for factual accuracy, gauges the extent to which an article is based on accurate facts.