Who decides which politics are wrong? If that isn't "every individual who is faced with the choice, on their own" then is it still politics, or is it more herd management?
There is a similar arms race in science: Charlatans use scientifically sounding language. So you tell people "to be real science, it needs to be published in a scientific journal". Then the charlatans create their own journals. So you tell people "to be real science, it needs to be supported by a meta-analysis". Then the charlanatans create their own meta-analysis. Etc.
It always takes some time to adapt, but if you tell people e.g. "always verify political statements at fact-checking websites", as soon as your idea becomes popular, politicians will create their own "fact-checking" websites. (Or take over the existing ones, whichever is easier.)
I have some heuristics that I use for myself to determine what information I trust... but if they became public and popular, it would be quite easy to subvert them.
You'd have to be pretty biased to call a literal quote unchanged by context a "mixture" of truth.
That's not the claim. That's an editorialized take about the claim, altered from the original and stated just-so (so it that contains a weakpoint, which you are now litigating—because that's what the weakpoint was crafted to enable); the "plight of younger people" comes from the editorial purporting to debunk it, not the source tweet.
The closest thing to a claim in the source tweet is that the original words were spoken and the person who said it is the one who was speaking.
They'll do real fact checks, but are very selective on what to fact check.
So a journalist from the state broadcasting service states on TV that "these soldiers will shoot at anything that moves".
She says that about what is known by everyone who has a clue to be some of the more restricive and professional soldiers that exist.
Will it be fact checked if I submit it?
No. I tried.
They'd rather publish a bunch of factual but funny and trivial fact checks than pointing out that a mainstream reporter is - at least in my opinion - lying through her teeth to make people hate a certain small nation.
The claim is that Trump got unemployment to a 50 year low. Snopes rules it "Mostly False".
The problem I have with that is that unemployment really was at a 50-year low. Snopes just wanted to deny Trump any credit for it so they throw up a lot of dust and smoke about whether the president deserves credit for it.
Compare that with this one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-created-more-jobs-tr...
In this case, the claim is that Obama created more jobs than Trump during adjacent 3-year periods. Snopes rules it true, full stop. They don't throw in any caveats about whether the president should get credit.
Whether a sitting president deserves credit for economic conditions is always a debatable point. Politicians will just hold whatever position is convenient for them and partisans will line up on their respective sides. I can't help but notice that Snopes lines up pretty predictably on one side of any political issue.
There’s nothing factually wrong with that article at all, but the entire article is loaded full of opinion and unnecessary adjectives. If someone posted that to Wikipedia they would get rejected for “lacks encyclopedic tone”.
And why does it matter? because if I try forwarding this to anyone who actually believes or sort-of-believes in the Clinton conspiracy theories, the first message they get from reading it is “I’m a democrat and I think this is the stupidest of stupid conspiracy theories and you’d have to be stupid to entertain it” and then they dismiss the whole article before they ever make it down to the useful case-by-case analysis.
If a fact checking website wants to be taken seriously by both sides, they need to refrain from attacking the people they are arguing against.
Preventing fake news and fact checking is not about attacking sound political opinions, but about making them possible.
This is an Achilles' Heel which is unfortunately now well known by the enemies of democracy. An article from last year[0] highlighted this quite well:
> The Kremlin specialises in offering alternative “narratives”: about who poisoned Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, for example. The goal is to confuse the public and to spread the idea that the truth is unknowable. It’s a form of epistemological warfare.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2020/jul/12/covering-...
If a doctor says "take this pill," do you huck it down or look it up and see if its something you actually wanted to eat?
People trust "authority" too much.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3gy_CLXho
Or you can read, e.g. Snopes' explanation that being convicted of making bombs to blow up a government building doesn't make one a "convicted terrorist" because there's no such crime as "terrorism."
the label terrorism is usually only successful in the most homogenos and brainwashed cultures, where all complexity and nuance is stripped away. it's great for propaganda or when you need to criminalize a whole society of people.
If you're referring to this Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/), the "mixed" ruling seems perfectly reasonable. Saying someone is a "convicted terrorist" is a fuzzy claim, because there is no such charge one can be convicted of. It's not like "convicted murderer".
That's how fact checking sites usually introduce bias--they don't actually lie about literal facts, they just have shifting standards about when things need to be absolutely literally true, when they can give false impressions, and what counts as "mostly" when something is mostly true or false or mixed.
It's weird that the group that is getting the most dangerous misinformation about Covid has a better idea of the risks of it. And this is one area in which fact checking has been prominent and possibly over-zealous. It can shut down conversations too quickly instead of letting people come to understanding.
I think it's at least partially because it's hard to advocate for a middle-of-the-road position, each side thinks you're an undercover partisan for the other. So it's hard to advocate for something like quit complaining about masks, they're not that great but they are helping, vaccines work and you should get them unless you have medical issues, but they're not 100%, some lockdowns probably cause more harm than help, some of the rules are either nonsense or enforced in silly ways that have nothing to do with Covid risk, and the virus is dangerous but the risk isn't evenly distributed across all populations, and even if it's not a big risk to you personally, you're being a real jerk if you go out a lot and help unknowingly spread it.
For the latter point, bombing government buildings is a central example of terrorism and nobody thinks there's a crime of "terrorism" when they hear "convicted terrorist." By the same standard, Snopes would have to say that the 9-11 hijackers were not terrorists. The slipperiness of the word is entirely a matter of people who want it to be about the goodness or badness of the person instead of achieving political goals by initiating violence.
As for Rosenberg, you're focusing on the terrorism and ignoring the convicted. She was not convicted of terrorism, or even of bombing buildings, but of explosives possession. The word "convicted" has to mean something. I believe that O.J. Simpson is a murderer, but calling him a "convicted murderer" would be false. If the claim was "convicted of felonies due to her involvement with a terrorist organization", there would be a much better case for "true."
p.s. the crimes she was convicted of did not include bombing government buildings, that part of the tweet is strictly false.
They could very well have picked a different tweet, it's not like they're forced to pick this and only this tweet.
Both weakman and motte and baileys are old rhetorical tricks, they're not very convincing.
In the absence of evidence for such a tweet, why should I consider the Snopes fact check a 'weakman'?
As for minutiae, that's the whole point of fact checking, to care about minutiae and not whether a statement just generally feels right. It's not about whether Rosenberg is or was a good person, it's about whether the specific claim made about her was unequivocally true.
So why should anyone attempt to prove that Snopes is following this rule when I have yet to see any evidence that this is, in fact, how Snopes operates, when even if we assume it is their standard, they don't appear to be following it very consistently?
That's a very odd burden of proof--asking me to prove that they follow a rule you just made up--don't you think?
If the claim that was flying around the Internet at the time was that Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist, that's the appropriate one to address.
I certainly don't claim that Snopes is perfect, or that their choices never exhibit political bias or bad judgment. But I think this case is an odd one to pick as the key evidence that Snopes is untrustworthy.
This is intentional manipulation, they already know that most people read headlines (which are frequently the least accurate part of any story) and ratings fill a similar role.
Worse, they'll later compile the ratings into statistics and spread the misrepresentations further, all while claiming that technically in paragraph 7 they did admit the thing, which is why that's called a motte and bailey strategy.
Not that I think similar process was possible in fact checking...
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
"Eschew flamebait."