Does anyone else find this concerning? Even the smallest bias held by fact-checkers can dramatically skew things towards one side e.g. only "fact-check" articles that favour one side.
Positioning anyone to be an information filter is wrong.
Full stop.
This is totalitarianism 101. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. Freedom isn't predicated on moral superiority - it is the polar opposite. Freedom is exactly for those who are "wrong".
I cannot imagine a more dangerous position for Facebook to take.
Separately from morality, I would argue it negatively impact Facebook's survivability. If your _social_ platform cannot be trusted to honestly deliver it's only product, they will surely die.
If your argument is that censorship prevents genocide, i would point tou to nazi germany, or soviet russia.
Somebody says "the speed of light is 300,000 km/s" and you go to a fact checker and you get:
> "TRUE: The speed of light is approximately 300,000 km/s."
Then you go to another one and you get:
> "FALSE: the speed of light is actually 299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum and has a medium-dependent value through air, water or another medium ... "
Then you get into an argument with someone where the distinction matters and they cite the first one, or get into one where it doesn't and they cite the second one.
Google has over 150 organizations that are allowed to "fact check" through their API: https://www.blog.google/products/search/fact-check-now-avail...
>Within the affluent democracy, the affluent discussion prevails, and within the established framework, it is tolerant to a large extent. All points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right, the white and the Negro, the crusaders for armament and for disarmament. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure toleration of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. Therefore, all contesting opinions must be submitted to 'the people' for its deliberation and choice. But I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this. basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.
(From Repressive Tolerance, 1965)
- the superiority of American mass motorization
- the environment
- the drug epidemic
- the economic sustainability of a housing-investment-centered economy
So on and so forth. Democracy is great because it allows some level of correction if elites are horribly misguided, even if it can be too late. But you don't see misguided policies rapidly killing millions of domestic innocents because of a lack of feedback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign And we certainly have not come up with workable alternatives that work better.
Most of science at one point thought the world was flat.
The flatness that some in Abrahamic traditions clung to was partially motivated by apparent conflict with scripture, such as explaining the stoppage of the sun miracle.
No, we do that because a marketplace of subjective ideas is a good thing.
The most obvious case would be climate change. Regularly, climate skeptics are given the same amount of airtime as climate scientists, despite the fact that the evidence and opinion is overwhelmingly in support of climate change being a real problem.
A realistic panel would be 98 climate scientists on one side, and two climate skeptics on the other.
By giving someone with far less evidence equal airtime and respect, it lends credence to that point of view despite it being so poorly supported by facts.
This is most definitely not a good thing.
"The atmosphere is a lot like a fish tank full of water. If you put food coloring in that fish tank, it turns slightly red. The more food coloring you put in that tank, the more red it gets. If you take a flashlight and try and shine light through one side of the fishtank and out the other side, the food coloring blocks some of the light. The more food coloring you put in, the more light it blocks... and turns to heat. Try it. You'll make the water warmer.
"That water is like our atmosphere. That food coloring is like CO2. And that flashlight is like our sun."
It's not difficult to convincingly and simply explain the evidence for man-made climate change. Evenly matched debaters would predictably win and lose if they were told to argue for or against climate change. The reason why climate scientists fail to convince TV viewers about climate change is that they are scientists: they spend more time practicing science than practicing persuading laypeople in terms that they will understand. Going up against demagogues, they have zero chance.
The game isn't bad. It works incredibly well most of the time for most of the problems we have encountered. It doesn't work so well when one side is incredibly bad at convincing common people and is not willing to change argument tactics, or when both sides are making completely subjective arguments.
If you think people don't listen to new ideas or change their minds, do you think people should only be allowed to hear what you think is true, so that they don't hear wrong ideas to begin with?
I suspect that the fact that you were taking chemistry in college means you were already in a very different state to receive new ideas compared with your average TV news viewer who is currently skeptical of climate change, and that difference is really important.
I’m not saying let’s throw up our hands, but people like Gore and Billy Nye are trying outreach, and it isn’t because they are bad at articulating ideas that this is still a problem.
people like Gore and Billy Nye are trying outreach
I still can’t convince many of my left leaning friends we should be using nuclear power despite the clear risks we face from climate change.
Is this actually a thing? As far as I can tell what actually happens is that outlets like Fox News just pretend climate change doesn't exist. They don't host a panel on it with climate skeptics, they just avoid discussing it at all, or center discussions around ad hominem attacks on the character or financial/political incentives of anyone who proposes doing anything about it.
Granted it's hard for them to discuss anything at all now that cable news airtime is 89% commercials.
That the current soup of deliberate misinformation happens to be played more by the loony right than the loony left is an artefact of those misinformers.