Ask HN: What fact-checking sites / sources do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What fact-checking sites / sources do you use?

11 pointsjacobedawson6 comments

My feed is filling up with Plandemic videos and conspiracy theories. I tend to use Snopes and Politifact alongside various study repos - what sources / sites do you use to combat dumb?

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I use https://www.factcheck.org

Also, you might want to check out this guide on how to identify credible sources: https://custom-writing.org/blog/signs-of-credible-sources

As for COVID-19 updates, I only trust the World Health Organization's website.

I've never read The Economist publishing something wrong about computer science and cybersecurity issues. My yardstick for measuring news source credibility is looking at how they report on AI, security, and CS in general. Do they make clearly incorrect statements about AI or hacking? Into the trash (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and other mainstream channels all failed this. They're not news, they're entertainment). Do they regularly give questionable interpretations of the state of tech? Keep at arms length (BBC, NPR).

The Economist is the only news media I've found which makes 100% correct statements about CS every time I've read it. I figure that they're approaching other issues with that same commitment to accuracy.

For COVID related updates I always go right to the source if there is one for the new update and evaluate from there, and if there is no source then disregard it. So, if there's an article about sars-cov-2 being scientifically proven to cause XYZ or whatever, see what the paper they're citing is, and from there you've got a few heuristics (is it already peer-reviewed, is it still a preprint in which case take it with a grain of salt, are there other studies that corraborate it, and so on). Otherwise, I just ignore/filter out pandemic news and videos, fact checking every random thing that pops up is way too energy and time intensive and there's no point letting yourself be influenced by the headlines/constant barrage of changing information. Especially for the conspiracy-type stuff (it came from a lab, it is a bioweapon, it was covered up), their truth is currently irrelevant. It doesn't matter if COVID came from a bat in a wet market or a lab accident since what matters now is dealing with it now that it's here, and all that finger-pointing is basically just political distraction. Far more productive to be up to date on vaccine efforts, drug efforts, what people are finding in terms of whether or not ventilators should be used, how the hospital system is coping, if there's a way to help through any of the local 3d printing groups, etc etc

Thanks - good, actionable advice there. The conspiracy theories I'm seeing shared in my feeds range from "Bill Gates did it", through to "there is no virus". Often I can't help taking the bait, and I try to share high-quality, peer-reviewed information when I can - the issue is that this pandemic has hit the perfect balancing act whereby the reasonable preventative actions are also exactly what a conspiracy theory would suggest :)

https://www.altnews.in/

I am a fan of knowherenews.com. They present an article, then two opposing view points of it.

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