Moon landing ? Fact. Trump being US president? Fact. France winning the 2018 World Cup? Fact.
So no, fact checkers do exist and are very important.
However, people do dispute facts, and anything someone disputes is no longer in the purview of the fact checker, by your definition.
It feels very wrong to reconsider what we believe is true, but that's just how it feels when we're wrong.
Fact-checkers as they exist right now are, with extremely few exceptions, exemplary. I would love to be proven wrong, but never have been.
Edit: I can accept an argument (at least in theory) of fact-checkers being selective on what to fact check, but that would still not be an argument against fact-checking, but rather a call for more of it.
Nobody - because fact-checking [of the type under discussion] is essentially an infotainment service, and people providing those services don't wish to draw attention to their competitors.
> Nobody - because fact-checking [of the type under discussion] is essentially an infotainment service, and people providing those services don't wish to draw attention to their competitors.
You are basically suggesting that no one has an interest in disproving something on the internet, which is probably the second thing people engaged with after porn.
No. I'm saying it's an internet standard commercial practice to not provide links sending people to your competitors, no matter what space you are in.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acnn.com+foxnews
I refute your supposition with extremely clear evidence that competitors have no problem mentioning each other, especially when it's in an attempt to refute something they said.
So that solves the commercial aspect. The fact (no pun intended) still stands that fact-checking services are even easier to falsify since their claims are generally binary.
The fact that we're having this discussion should prove that there's an abundance of interest in doing just that on the internet since we both likely have better things to do.
Neither of us are making any money; and, by now, nobody else is reading it.
No, it's examples disproving your claim that they wouldn't want to drive traffic to their competitors by discussing them.
Sidenote: I wouldn't call 150k hits on each website "occasional".
Sidenote 2: Why is linking a relevant factor? They're discussing their competitor. Fact-checking can be done in the same way without direct linking. If linking is relevant, then your qualifier fails regardless.
Since by above proof sites have no problem doing that under "trashing" conditions, there should be tons of fact-checking of fact-checkers, if they failed at their jobs, which was my original question. Why are there not mountains of these examples?
Or just disprove someone else's fact check without mentioning them, or contextualize it if it's unfair, etc.
I haven't even seen conflicting fact checks, is my point. This is approaching impossibility if fact-checkers are lying/biased.
My conclusion as a frequent (critical) reader of them is of course that it's very rare they get it wrong.
> Neither of us are making any money; and, by now, nobody else is reading it.
I'm not doing this for external readers. Like I said, I'd love to be proven wrong, that's how one learns. I'll argue something logically until someone disproves it, shows a faulty assumption, etc - or my thesis still stands. The only way to strengthen your argument is to try to break it, which is what I'm doing. I assume anyone else especially on this site is doing the same thing until indicated otherwise.
Papers looking at whether or not this is desirable tend not to come to that conclusion, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.84... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2019.16... (2020 meta-analysis) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2020.17...
I personally hold a belief that a fact-checking publisher has the same biases and profit-motives as any news publisher (or, as motive, political influence of the wealthy).
I don't find it useful to distinguish fact-checking as special and call for specific research on this, as if existing academic research can always be invalidated by a simple re-branding.
I don't know how well this will age, but for now, I think any company claiming to be able to automate fact-checking should be met with a high degree of skepticism.
Just for context, what I imagine in my head when I think of a "fact check" is something like this, basically a specialized or somewhat standardized / formulaic form of journalism:
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/england-banned-fox-news/
- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/18/joe-biden/...
- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/05/donald-tru...
I deliberately picked a couple of less obvious fact-checks than "is the earth round", because I wanted to highlight how even in politics, on questions where there is high potential for bias, there are cut and dry things which can be fact-checked, or at the very least 'contextualized'.
I'm sure none of this is perfect, but I am not super optimistic that automated content would be of this level of quality.
As inconvenient as it may be, truth is transitory and progress toward it is frequently made through invalidation. It's more prudent and useful to assume facts don't exist.
As for "fact-checkers", who fact-checks them? (Etc...) The notion of visiting a webpage authored by God-knows-who to check whether what's on another webpage authored by God-knows-who is correct or not is absurd.
And we haven't even gotten into subjectivity or nuance.