Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg
bmj.com
bmj.com
If the fact checking process is limited to verification based on other information that is currently available, and if the fact checking process cannot distinguish between factual information and the opinions people hold as a result of that information, the outcome will be an inevitable echo chamber that reinforces currently dominant views or whatever preexisting biases are present.
In short, fact checking is hard and there is a reason why reputable publishing outlets have their own internal fact verification processes before something gets published (including safeguards and retractions, because they make mistakes too), and why news is separated out from opinion-editorial pages... even if it is in style to add opinions (read: “perspective”) to every article.
We all have heard about "the same lies being repeat over and over". Well, if these lies are indeed all kinda the same, then it should be relatively easy to (1) gather a proper, extensive set of facts that disprove the lies and then (2) hire an army of war hamsters to introduce these facts into discussion - following the guidelines from (1).
Right now this approach doesn't work very well, because as soon as you start attacking anyone with facts and logic, you simply get banned from the community. But I'm sure changing this is within the power of the social media.
Or - this thought scares me the most - FB actually doesn't care about facts?
I challenge you to find a point in human history where "journalists" weren't putting their fingers on the scale. Look at the journalistic antics of someone like Benjamin Franklin for instance.
[1] https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/13/facebook-quietly-admits...
This means most newsrooms can't afford as many editors and fact-checkers, can't dedicate journalists to complex subject areas, can't afford to have journalists spending weeks or months on particularly complicated and deep stories, etc.
They surely knew what the consequences would be of starving newsrooms of income, yet went ahead anyway and didn't bother to even think of let alone implement alternative models to preserve valuable news.
It's a rather typical SV hubris, isn't it?
Let's not talk about Covid, but climate change (which interestingly never attracted the Facebook et al fact checkers even though it is a much more existential crisis for humanity). There are many sites that debunk the arguments like "it was warmer in the middle ages", "warming can be attributed to sun activities", realclimate.org is a great resource for instance. Still the same arguments get brought up every time, and the facts simply get ignored.
First, those reading the myths will immediately see the refusal. They don't need to search through multiple websites. They don't have to go through the layers of meaningless arguments. Here's bullshit in the post - here's refusal in the reply. Easy-peasy.
Second, with this everyone knows that once he posts some burp - someone will call him out. And nobody - not even a group moderator - will be able to come to the rescue.
The most important thing to combat misinformation is to build trust. Anyone trying to combat misinformation while disparaging their tribal outgroup is playing politics, not combating misinformation.
In your post you call people you need to convince that you’re trustworthy “enemies”. There’s no way that will ever work.
On the other hand most people are lazy and often it's about "some <yet another evil theory> explained right here" vs. "an alternative (and probably much better) explanation of the same thing on some smarty-pants website". Well, people just don't go to that somewhere else and ignore it. Out of site - out of mind.
If you see an inconvenient reply under every message of your local prophet, you may not get convinced right away, but the seeds of doubt will be sown.
I remember scrolling through the flat-earhers forum once and I was amazed how short all the arguments have been. The conversation was usually like:
- Look, the Earth is really flat, I've measured the visible height of such-and-such mountain from such-and-such place and it's way higher than should've been.
- Man, you got the distance wrong. Look at google map, you're off by X hundred miles. Try doing your calculations with the correct numbers
- Fuck off, I've got better things to do in my life than replying your stupid messages
QED
Completely tone-deaf, and therefore extremely off-putting. I would not be surprised if an effort like that completely backfires.
Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years, You are making the claim of their extinct in the next 50 years. The burden of proof is on you to prove that.
If you make the claim that Earth will stop spinning tomorrow, you have to produce the proof, not me
That is an incredible lazy, naive and dumb take on effects of Climate Change. Human ingenuity and technology and accumulated capital of nearly $200 Trillion can easily scale mitigating solutions when it really comes to it.
Unfortunately, Policy makers never take into account the dynamic, complex systems and use linear graphs done by low-paid interns to predict economic and human systems.
Anti-disinformation campaigns are probably more effective with a decentralized component.
I think it's important to realize that it's not a question of facts vs. "facts." In my experience there are grievances which can, until they are heard, make a person relatively impervious to facts and traditional debate.
Also extremely off-putting and counter-productive. Who is writing the comment? Me or Facebook? Why am I writing this comment, when the glorious Algorithm could just auto-generate a response for me?
And of course the insertable "facts" were irrelevant to the discussion, and were just re-iterations of the mainstream position.
Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff.
The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in the media churning BS articles is the people who works in the fact checkers, and most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu.
The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table.
This specially evident when they talk about something you really know about.
Of course, because fact-checkers happen to be lefty because of the, let's call, overton-window cycle, then the left choses to ignore this problems and just says it's the right-wingers that chose to ignore facts and yadda yadda.
While this is going on, right-wing, and many times right-wing extremist views, become the new punk and many yougsters are flocking to provide new blood to said ideologies.
It's all just so tiresome.
But I think I disagree a bit with your annoyance with agenda setting and journalist incestuous relationship with ideology or politics.
Look I dont know how you're taught in Spain but in France we gave up neutral journalism centuries ago. Each newspaper is clearly categorized and we learn as children, around 7 IIRC all the links (le monde socialist, le figaro gaulist trending christian, l'humanité communist, and so on and there are many more subtle variations too French to list here) and learn to read them all, sometimes with clenched fist, but no truth has ever been reveled by a single perspective: embrace the chaos and join perspective to build a multi facet view.
It's something I despair to see in China where politicians, journalist and the mass try to identify a pure source of truth. But no communist think like another, so even their way will never work.
Let them all fight, balance out the arguments, take a decision in the voting booth and stop dreaming of a universal truth given to you from greater mind: even a genius in his lab building a life saving cure will forget to listen to the victims of the sacrifices he requires for the greater good, and that voice must be heard too.
Fight for MORE ideology and agenda in media in exchange for editorial transparency about it, so you're clear who they propose you to vote for when they present an argument, and you'll be free. Any other way, and it goes with fact checking semi anonymous facebook crap, is doomed to muddy this clarity. That s what facebook must do: what is the political party or alignment behind each piece, and you're done (or almost: also need to learn to read and understand all perspectives, the hardest part in the US it seems).
- Nuanced opinions and good information is rarely free, be it in monetary terms, be it in the invested time, relationships, etc. Thus, if you're not planning to give up most of your time for any topic, you better find good proxies. And currently the press provides more noise than signal. This is problematic.
- If you know anything about Spain is that it's basically Game of Thrones made a country. There's so much internal conflict that it even gets translated INSIDE of the newspapers and TV. You can't take any editorial line for granted, because it's more tied to a group of people seeking power than any background ideology or anything similar. So your balance different views style it's not really that practical in Spain.
In fact I can tell you about an Issue where I'm invested that it's awful across the board: Housing policy.
I don't mean to misrepresent the parent's argument, but I think they would demand the same solution of editorial transparency towards the groups of people seeking power you mention. That said, I might be coming from a place of ignorance here.
As long as their leaders and famous journalists are clear they're a perspective and not "the truth", I m fine with the communists fighting the nationalists in their respective newspapers even if I disagree with what I read. At least I know what and why they think these things and I can sometimes accept an argument if only to build an iterative counter argument myself.
The difference I saw with facebook even in France, is that it's all blurred. I cant cross the Figaro with the Monde to figure two of the sides of an issue, now I receive some neutral looking information with a vague source. It struck me when a colleague started repeating an horrendous story and we investigated together to realize she was sourcing it from a facebook post by our "the onion" equivalent !!! She couldnt see the source because it's too blurry in between her grandma rants and some cnn-style generic information.
It doesnt change that in the US I see with worry that even when lines are clear, the debate is heated. Also because there's no spectrum but just two solutions to any issue: democrat and republican. What was hailed as a miracle in democracy (just 2 fuzzy groups of dispationate interest) is starting to look like a weakness (to the death identity conflicts pushed by their respective extremes) while with 13 parties in elections in France, you can express nuances.
The chained duck? (I prefer mine au confit, not enchainé.)
What GP meant about Spain being similar to GoT, is that there’s a lot of shifting alliances and moving pieces in the background.
You might think channel A has ties to party B, and thus you can asume that they are softening the blow if they’re reporting bad news about B, but Spain has more than two parties (for now), and maybe channel A is actually exaggerating because it would put party C in a good position to sway votes from the opposition while not taking votes from yourself.
As an US equivalent if a third political party had a 10-15% of the votes, you’d see Fox reporting in a way that tried to sway democrats to the third party.
Since in Spain the way seats in congress are allocated benefits parties with bigger percentages, this strategy is possible.
The same happens in the IRS Equivalent, and other institutions, like autonomous comminites (~ US States).
I mean, I'm talking about real plots here, like managing media influence, trying to put people in jail, and all the ingredients for a Netflix series.
It's basically impossible to keep track of it, even for a politics nerd like me.
You should NEVER read an article to learn about an absolute reality, but to understand the arguments on a complex issue by a small group of stakeholders, by no mean guardians of reality interpretation.
If you accept that sad fact of life, that we cant know who's right on anything not spawned directly from physical reality (and even then...), then you can embrace journalistic diversity and read several.
I can give you an example close to me in China: there is a debate to have on Tiananmen: the reaction by the communist was certainly aggressive, but there are nuances. The movement failed to accept several compromises because it grew so big nobody could be delegated to represent it officially and they got stuck on successive waves of negociation that could have ended with progress. The army itself struggled and had to recall a first wave who fraternized with the movement to then lie to a second wave who thought they were crushing a rebellion they misunderstood, which probably made the massacre more violent than it could have been. I think the communists were trapped just as much as the movement into an impasse that led to a massacre they didnt enjoy having to commit. They're not evil per se in that regard: they could not see at the time any alternative.
That's my perspective, it's probably hard to read, but I built this complex opinion by reading beyond my comfort zone. I could be wrong and must continue to listen, but you see how this probably cant appear if you just read one side ? And where China is wrong imo is they refuse to discuss it openly in those terms. If a French immigrant raised in the fear of communism can accept to tolerate their side, what are they so scared of ? Throw perspectives at people and they ll figure someth out.
As a nerd in a building trying to build things to save lives from disease (“cure” is too strong a word), there are explicit ethics reviews my work has to go through, with an almost bizarre frequency, so I disagree with this statement specifically. Otherwise, I enjoyed your comment.
Is it Don't have opinion diversity? Control what people hear and believe? Don't allow (what you consider to be) lies? There are so many responses to each of these.
Who would be the regulator? How would the regulator be chosen? How would information be determined to be misinformation? When something truthful is named misinformation, what happens? When a political group accuses this regulator of suppression, what then? When your political opposition gains control of the regulator, what then? How would this regulator also comply with the US Constitution, particular its free speech guarantees?
One thing though, do french people actually read several different newspapers on different sides? My preconceived notion is that they still just pick one to get their main source of news, even though they might be aware of the others.
And a second thought. If we can agree that there is sometimes truth to be found in what happened, what convinces you that summing up falsehoods from the left and falsehoods from the right will equate to the truth? (I've heard from some people that they "read all sides" but I haven't noticed their perspective being better in any obvious ways)
For example: vaccines don't have side effects, don't worry about it, and we need to get everyone vaccinated so we should force them (left) VS vaccines are alright but seems like they're dangerous and fuck the government so they shouldn't force people to do that (right). The sum of the two doesn't really teach you the truth, but highlights the direct contradictions while giving you the impression that you have to pick one side of another (the US is super bipartisan, not like France which at least has several different parties with different opinions).
The truth here is: vaccines reduce likelihood of bad symptoms, gestation time and viral load, which in turn reduces chances of spreading and therefore chance of mutation which is a feared unknown (hello Omicron), some vaccines do seem to cause issues with younger folks (20-29 years old can get myocarditis) so we should be careful, but all in all, we don't have a better way to fix this situation than getting a lot of folks vaccinated.
How do you know someone is a leftist? He will show you his fascist nature.
It's the same thing in Romania, they strongly monitor and criticise those politicians and public figures who are not europhiles while pretty much ignoring those politicians who are for stronger EU integration and for more power for international institutions and their viewpoints inside of Romania.
Are the partisan fact-checkers in Spain at least competent enough to write grammatical, parsable sentences and titles?
From the BMJ OP: > It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”
Like the BMJ apparently, I first read this with a comma or mdash after 'Disqualifying' -- hence a broken sentence. With more thought, perhaps the inferrable punctuation intended 'Disqualifying-And-Ingored' -- in which case they might or might not be fact-checking a straw-man claim.
A negligible point perhaps, but the one fact-check I recall Dr. John Cambell on YT examining also included a broken sentence. (Small sample size, I know.)
To me, this speaks to the qualifications and processes of the fact-checkers under debate here, attempting as they are to adjudicate in scientific debates.
Attempting as they apparently are to define truth.
(Or perhaps Meta does A/B testing by breaking sentences in search of more engagement.)
Another thing that affects perceived formality is that "you" in English is both singular and plural and out-of-respect You.
If you've ever done any translation between English and a foreign language, you'd notice that the appetite for such gymnastics is much less. (I think that's part of why there are so many English loanwords in other languages too, but I have no data to back it up)
Yup, that's how I parsed it.
I had to re-read it to find why someone might think it was nonsensical.
Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which I understand may in some ways be your larger point) and consumers of journalism today. Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. I don’t believe it is fair to say this doesn’t require expertise.
It's right in line with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[1].
> Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus.
This is a jump from objecting to "is" statements to making an "ought" statement. It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism", which I have the impression is a good chunk of why trust in the news is down.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
I’m sorry this is the impression you were given because my intention was the exact opposite.
Given the state of American journalism, it is if anything overly kind.
And yet I think it’s pretty obvious journalism is not about truth anymore. Gawker might be dead, but the Gawker style of “journalism” is well alive.
You don’t even need to dig that deep to see something is rotten, the two biggest news channels in the US spend the day saying the opposite of one another.
> The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table.
I am sad to note that the situation in the US is exactly the same. Though the majority of "fact-checkers" and all major social networks are on single side of the said wars.
Especially with covid it seems like social media has decided to counter propaganda rather than misinformation. I can see why, but I think it is wrong. Especially if the argument is 'this is false'.
To me, this shows once again that content moderation against misinformation does not fit with private parties.
That's what, at their best, most of the media are doing. Presenting well-researched, balanced, truthful stories, carefully selected to promote their own ideology. Forget journalism - this even happens in peer-reviewed science:
Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
I think we need to work against the latter. I don't think censoring good-faith articles that are often abused is the way to do that.
I think BMJ has a pretty convincing reputation. So how can ANY fact checker flag an article from them without really good arguments?
Debates are all and good, but at some point, a decision has to be reached. Especially for a problem like the current pandemic, this unfortunately involves calls for every individual to radically change their behaviour. That fits the definition of "agenda" pretty well.
So if any "any communication that is calculated to further an agenda" is forbidden, how would you fight the pandemic?
I don't think this is correct. In my experience, most online "fact checkers" seem to get it right the great majority of the time.
Can you point to some examples you are thinking of?
Zuck ofc really likes to feed on things. Getting rid of information is okay as long as it doesn't gets in the way of his feeding. FB fact checking is both expensive and crap but still light years ahead of amazon reviews.
I don’t know about you but I don’t like being gas lighted.
I do not believe fact checks. They have zero credibility.
Fully agree that Snopes comes off very much in her support here - however, at least they still seem to do their job and describe her actual actions in due detail in the article - even if this leads to a completely ridiculous outcome ("Can bombing a government building really be called terrorism? Hmm, difficult to say...")
This seems better than the OP's fact checker, which just presents the story as "fully debunked" without actually doing so.
https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/
Note they didn't say with scientific humility "we do not know if that scenario actually happened, more data is needed, it's too early to make the conclusion". They say "it's ridiculous and debunked" and rate it "pants on fire" (i.e. an obvious outrageous lie). They act as if they are the ultimate authority with absolute knowledge of the facts and expertise to make such calls - while they don't have neither the facts nor the expertise. And this happens again and again.
The conspiracy theories these people were pushing as a lab release had themes of gerontocide, eugenics, mind control by 5G, microchipping, general anti-vaxx beliefs most blaming Bill Gates as a sort of Bond villain.
All of these are still being pushed.
Do we have more plausible sources an accident happened? Yes. Was it reasonable to blame China for biowarfare against the whole world including itself, or to accuse Bill Gates for planning to exterminate half the population? No.
You are misrepresenting that article.
Do you believe covid is a bioweapon?
Which is silly. At least I can talk about fact checkers in my country: they give you a write-up of all the sources and reasoning they pursued to ascertain the truth of some thing, then add their own evaluation in a scale of true, mostly true, false, pants on fire. How can people say they're biased when they give you a 100% transparent detail of how they came to their conclusion?
Also, it's funny when people say that multi-billion dollar media corporations are biased... towards the left x)
> Claim Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network.
Rating: Mixture
About this rating
What's True Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
----
Almost all media organizations are encouraged to publish hate-inducing headlines and clickbait, so in principle fact checking could help people. Stuff like the above Snopes bit is pure partisan comedy that does nothing but undermine the entire idea, though.
The way a political 'side' can so swiftly (and hypocritically) move into authoritarianism because of self-belief in their moral authority is sad, if unsurprising. Much as religion has justified many atrocities through time for 'good,' people seem terrible at critical thinking once they feel 'right.'
From the article:
>An emerging theme in both controversies is that there is a fatal chink in the armor of even the most rigorous fact-checking process—that it is especially vulnerable to a naked betrayal of trust by an author or source. There is only so much a fact-checker can do if someone is intent on telling lies, particularly when the stakes are so low [...]
In fact, this is one of the easiest scenarios for a fact checker to handle correctly.
The source is a reputable, top-tier peer-reviewed publication. Even an inexperienced (but competent) fact checker could check run literature searches on the journal, reviewers and authors. This would reveal that they’re working at reputable institutions, and have been for decades.
That's why the fact check report doesn't mention any specific factual inaccuracies. Context matters, missing context is a problem.
EDIT: see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597047
Even though the medical journal article accurately shows problems with this specific aspect of the medical/clinical review of the vaccine, the vaccine is proving effective in combating the transmission and severity of the covid virus. Many of the people currently going to the hospital for covid are unvaccinated. This is placing a heavy burden on the hospitals and preventing other people from getting the care they need.
People are fighting over specific facts because they are trying to influence the broader narrative/discourse going on in society about covid, vaccinations, lockdowns, etc.
Comments in this thread are discussing facebook, journalists and fact-checkers, and their roles in influencing public opinion and social discourse.
It’s not hard to keep a list of journals and assign them a reputation score. Commercial services do exactly this.
But even the best journals screw up, especially in their blog posts!
Remember the “fact-check” wasn’t for the peer reviewed article itself, but a blog post promoting it.
Even if the BMJ has a high reputation score, not all of its blogs should share that. It might be run by the social media team - not the editorial staff.
Slightly on a tangent, but it is worth mentioning.
I used to be a regular part of both English and a regional language version of <very overhyped SV darling Q&A site which still survives and many wonder how and why>.
There were moderators on this site. And moderation was overseen by "Community Managers" who are humanities majors and MBAs. They not only let very wrong answers on scientific, mathematical, and technical matters stay on their platform until and unless reported by someone with good credentials, they also picked up "top writers" from people who wrote weirdly wrong things like Python being a database, or Quantum Mechanics determining the radii of solar systems.
It was embarassingly funny to watch. The arts major, MBA community managers did not know jack about programming or physics, yet, they are supposed to choose "top writers".
This also points the flaws in the thought that professional factcheckers should exist and they can be trusted with every topic.
They simply won't know enough. Ever.
A knowledgeable SWE won't work for a Q&A site's moderation or a renowned biologist for Facebook factchecking. They would rather work at a high-paying tech job and a tenure track professorship or big pharma, respectively.
The scientific world in general is a community where research about things comes in, people digest it, and come to a consensus. This includes some contradictory things or things that turn out to be faulty conclusions. This does not make them "fact check verified false". It is a stream of information that is weighed and honed over time with further research or questioning.
Now I agree people are very bad (even "smart" people) at ditching their inherent tribal nature to weigh data that supports their bias more highly. The echo chambers of partisans on social media will assign an impossible burden of proof against evidence that challenges their thought on something and have no burden of proof on the converse. But that does not mean that we can then make it binary of "true" or "untrue" to stop this. "Fact-checks" feel good, but it is clear now they are being extended to not just the realm of demonstrably false information and more into the opinion and inconclusive realm.
The moment Facebook chooses what to display, they own the content.
And it just so happens that what Facebook chooses to display, chooses to recommend, are the lies, more often than not.
As an aside, chronological sort key has been available in the previous designs, and the URL still works
www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
It has its limits of usefulness, though - some group admins moderate new posts in bulk once a day (if that), so depending on the time of visit you might be swamped with dozens of posts from the same group.
You might be getting confused by the concept of a common carrier. Facebook is not a common carrier. It might be possible to amend the common carrier law to cover Facebook, but in the current political climate that seems unlikely.
47USC230(c)(1) "(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
And definitions-- 47 USC 230(f)(3) The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.
Of course, CDA also excuses Facebook from making tilted or faulty moderation decisions in good faith.
Why do we assume our own governments will also be immune from the same temptations?
As just one example, take Hunter Biden's laptop before the election. This got memory-holed so fast, half of America doesn't know it exists, and 2/3rds of the rest believe the 50+ intelligence agents who immediately said, with no proof, it's Russian disinformation. This was epitomized by the reporter who said, -even if the laptop is true-, the press must treat it as disinformation.
One doesn't know what one doesn't know.
The press cover people getting accused of crimes all the time. The press does not say "this person committed that crime." The press reports on arraignments, events at trial, verdicts, and reactions from relevant parties like legal experts.
Infamously, they published a largely spurious article which claimed that UK govt cuts had killed hundreds of thousands of people, they failed to make clear several aspects of the data that didn't support their conclusion which ofc was that doctors should get more money, they also failed to mention that one of the authors ran a company selling stuff to the NHS that was linked to the conclusions or that the lead author of the paper had no statistical training.
Unfortunately, life is like this. Doctors would prefer that people just listen to them, they are very serious people after all, we should believe everything they say. Most fact-checking services in the UK have a ludicrously political bent, they pick whatever facts and sources support their argument. In practice, they are just attempting to stop all debate about a topic. Life is messy, people will have different opinions even if they acknowledge the same facts, proof is often messy and unclear (if you look at some of the forecasts for Covid this year, just ludicrously wrong and all errors in the same direction...we need criticism, we need debate...afaik, only one publication has actually highlighted all these forecasters who dominate the media making consistently bad forecasts...where are the fact-checkers now? Too busy hunting down shadows on Twitter.). Deal with life as it is, not life as you wish it was (again, doctors in the UK are more guilty than anyone in civil society of this error, their lobbying/political power is immense, their view is: might makes right).
I am fine with that. But they shouldn't call it a "fact-check" when the only thing they can connect the dots with are opinions, not facts.
> and why news is separated out from opinion-editorial pages... even if it is in style to add opinions
The problem I have with so-called "fact checkers" is that when it comes down to put the money where their mouth is, that is in court, they argue that they are not factual but rather opinion pieces, as Facebook recently argued in court: https://nypost.com/2021/12/14/facebook-admits-the-truth-fact... (I couldn't find a more politically neutral source, sorry)
> The fact check was correct in this instance though?
> https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis...
> The conclusions in the original BMJ article make zero sense when actually scrutinized.
> https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
Please read both URLs before commenting in depth.
Not really sure what a good solution to this is, other than to "fact check" people's posts on facebook, as well as the links they share. So maybe this link can be shared without the fact checked stamp among epidemiologists on facebook, but Bob's anti-vaxx group may get fact check labels when they try to summarize what is in the article.
says who?
"Intended for healthcare professionals" - it literally says so above the page header.
Edit: maybe fact checking systems need to label certain things as "This is a publication from a narrow domain venue intended for professionals. Specialized domain knowledge may be required to derive correct conclusions." instead of fact checking only the first few paragraphs using common journalistic standards because "users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail[...]".
That this BMJ article is correct and this particular part of the trial was botched by the contractor who covered it up, and the BMJ is unsatisfied with the level of follow-up by the FDA.
That the other trial sites were well managed and valid, that the results at this trial site do not overturn the overall results, and that the FDI found it unnecessary to investigate further.
> Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.
The questions are all whether this one company had poor practices. It mixes comments regarding the larger trial of Pfizer with this isolated company trial. At times it's hard to tell if they're referencing Pfizer or Ventavia (as "company"). An investigation found nothing remarkable at other sites managed by other contractors, but then even that is questioned because this small company wasn't investigated.
I'm not actually sure what part of this medical journal _is_ factual.
The BMJ might be right, but also have constructed an article that will be wildly misunderstood... and not sensible content for facebook.
Also, as the article points out, investigations were performed at other contractors. Wild speculation, but that could be that Pfizer didn't even need a full 44k and they just ignored 1k? (For example, they concluded the trial with 41k getting a second dose.)
Without this vigilance how do you distinguish between ivermectin studies that showed a positive effect and vaccine studies? Some of ivermectin studies but not all were discovered to be total frauds. At some point when you see too many problems you just have to distrust them by default until proved otherwise.
In fact, I think that there is possibility that the Pfizer vaccine trial results turned out quite different from effectiveness in real life in part due to issues like this.
> An FDA review memorandum released in August this year states that across the full trial swabs were not taken from 477 people with suspected cases of symptomatic covid-19.
Of course, this comes after insinuating earlier that there is a complete lack of oversight.
> “There’s just a complete lack of oversight of contract research organisations and independent clinical research facilities,” says Jill Fisher, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and author of Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials.
I guess since you yourself were misled according to their own inconsistencies, maybe that is enough to convince you that the article is misleading.
Sorry, I don't see any inconsistencies. The box clearly explains what they mean by complete lack of oversight – doing inspections many months after the trial and even then just checking the paperwork.
Blocking the article (instead of opening relevant books to show that in fact it was just exception to otherwise solid prices makes) makes even stronger case that the prices is not honest.
If the FDA did not follow up on the whistleblower report it raises far broader questions about oversight of the trials as a whole.
I totally understand that when BMJ writes that this clinical research organization did a mess is this trial, someone misreads it as all Pfizer vaccine results are false. But if you say that BMJ is hoax, then we have much stronger reason to distrust healthcare professionals. Do you see the paradox here?
BMJ is expressing concern about Pfizer and regulator's failures with the ultimate aim to fix them and increase the trust by showing that every fault is taken seriously. We cannot sweep unwanted things under the carpet and hope that nothing will happen. Bad actors should be appropriately punished.
Probably the wrong way to think about things but that's how my mind works.
The first question in everybody's head when reading this article is, "Were the vaccine trials legitimate or not?"
BMJ does not even come close to truthfully answering this question. With their authority as a medical journal and a very limited amount of evidence, they give a clear and incorrect impression that the vaccine trials were not legitimate.
Do they report on the limitations of their evidence? No. Do they report on the perspective of employees at other trial sites? No. Do they get quotes from Pfizer, other health orgs, Ventavia executives? No. Do they report about other speculative factors at play from Ventavia ex-employees? No.
Are they purposefully hiding new relevant information? Yes. They leaked in their own article that the FDA is aware and reviewed the Ventavia trial.
> An FDA review memorandum released in August this year states that across the full trial swabs were not taken from 477 people with suspected cases of symptomatic covid-19.
After insinuating earlier that there is a complete lack of oversight.
> “There’s just a complete lack of oversight of contract research organisations and independent clinical research facilities,” says Jill Fisher, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and author of Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials.
Honestly, BMJ seems to be working very hard to lie using true facts. I have no objections to their articles being marked as false.
You are writing complete rubbish. BMJ does not question the legitimacy of the vaccine trials. With this sentence you are making very serious accusations to healthcare professionals. Most likely you don't even understand how clinical trials work or terminology used in the original article. If BMJ were not a serious journal, nothing in medicine would be serious including those trials.
BMJ is questioning some irregularities brought to the light by a whistle-blower. It shows some evidence confirming issues about one particular clinical research organization and lack of reaction from the FDA. These issues should be addressed and resolved to remove doubts that the data from vaccine trials can be sufficiently trusted.
Also FDA memorandum does not confirm that the FDA has investigated the sites. You probably don't even understand what the quoted professor meant by “oversight”. It definitely is not just checking and fully trusting the submitted paperwork.
The singular "trial" in the headline implies that the flaws are in the trial as a whole rather than in a particular distinct subset of the trials.
The argument that just because one of a company's trials are unsound doesn't mean that the rest aren't is not a good one, when the whole objective is to provide assurance in proving the safety of a product.
I can see room for misunderstanding no matter what. Emphasize the portion of sites where the problem was observed and it wrongly can be inferred that the other sites are fine even if they have no evidence either way. Emphasize the problem as a generic feature of the trials overall and it can be wrongly inferred that the whistle is being blown on some aspect of the trial that doesn't have any site-specific aspect.
The story that I'm hearing in all this is that the whistleblower brought out issues that were specific to certain sites in a way that has no direct bearing on other sites besides being a reason to scrutinize the rest of the sites as well.
Maybe an analogy would be helpful. If a whistleblower observed a disregard for safety protocols at a food processing facility, that's not a randomized sampling that indicates a high likelihood of the problem being throughout all similar facilities, but it doesn't indicate otherwise either. It opens the question whether this is a typical problem in such facilities or if that facility is an exception. If the facility was supplying brand X, there's at least some sense to criticizing a headline like "whisteblower reveals brand X unsafe food handling" instead of "whistleblower reveals unsafe food handling at facility run by brand X". The former implies wider issues, the latter errs toward not making that presumption.
I disagree. One bad study doesn't mean all scientific conclusions are bad. One bad study doesn't mean Pfizer's trials are bad. Ignorance doesn't prove anything...
I wasn't saying that one bad study means the overall trial was bad.
The issue is that SOME people might think that. (Also others might think that if it's ONE study that's bad, the overall trial WAS fine, when that's not clear either).
The risk is whether real people take away a too-strong message and run with it.
In other words, journalists have SOME responsibility to not mislead people even when the main way people get off-track is their own erroneous jumping-to-conclusions as readers. We KNOW that readers do such things, so we have to be careful to minimize it.
We all know that the trials were rushed and for a very good reason, there was a pandemic. Still, if issues are discovered they should be resolved. Pfizer is a private company, they are not obliged to be very transparent with everything they do. FDA is the main organisation that oversees such trial in the US, so this is their responsibility to investigate.
Pfizer had one large trial that involved many sites. Three of those sites run by Ventavia had problems. That's why the headline says “in trial”. But even if you didn't know that it is explained in BMJ article “... Ventavia had enrolled more than 1000 participants at three sites. The full trial (registered under NCT04368728) enrolled around 44 000 participants across 153 sites that included numerous commercial companies and academic centres.”
Where Lead Stories goes overboard is in the way they present their title. It would be far more appropriate to title the story like this:
>Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Revealed Flaws In Only One Of Many Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials
In fact the use of the plural "Trials" in the fact-check title from Lead Stories is a malapropism, since the BMJ article clearly focuses on a single trial. The BMJ article also does not use the word "disqualifying" at all, nor does it supply such an implication.
The problem is not with fact-checking or even with attaching a fact-check to this particular story; the problem is that the content of the fact-check is structured like clickbait, with a classic motte-and-bailey title.
The entire article from the opening headline to the grey box take-aways to the closing paragraphs is framed to cast doubt on the entirety of Pfizer's vaccine operation. That they don't outright lie inside the article is beside the point, they don't need to. The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt and give ammo to anti-vax advocates who know the general public only read the headlines.
And I don't understand why so many think that BJM article tries to cast doubt on the entirety of Pfizer's vaccine operation? It is nothing like that at all. It clearly says the issue is with one research organization contracted by Pfizer. Maybe it is because you lack the context and jump to quick conclusions?
Here are some examples of malapropisms: Mrs. Malaprop said, "Illiterate him quite from your memory" (obliterate) and "She's as headstrong as an allegory" (alligator). Officer Dogberry said, "Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons" (...suspicious persons). Rainy weather can be hard on the sciences. (sinuses)
https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-malapropism....
> Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.
> for researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety
Which of these conclusions do you think make zero sense? The entire rest of the article looks like a recitation of facts to me.
I can't find that expression anywhere in the Lead Stories article. Facebook outright labelled the BMJ article "false" and containing "false information".
Beyond that, should fact-checkers really become an "optics police"? For every single news story, you will have (wild) misinterpretations on social media. It becomes too convenient if a fact-checker can point to those, and then have Facebook limit the spread of the original story. This is a question of poor FDA oversight. There have been several instances throughout this pandemic: see the recent FDA resignations, and the GAO report[0]. Oversight is not about pro vs anti vaccine, this is about people's health[1]. Oversight should always be robust, even in emergency situations.
[0]: https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2021/11...
[1]: story from Japan https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/07/third-person-d...
As far as whether Facebook should become "optics police" I think it's obviously a difficult decision, but with life and death questions such as "is the vaccine safe" I have to go with yes, facebook shouldn't let itself propagandize people who decide to read headlines instead of articles.
Is that not a misleading thing to say yourself? Plenty of vaccinated have died. And for those unjabbed but with permanent acquired immunity, the jab may be safe yet at the same time have no material effect to save their life.
For example in Texas, from Jan-Oct of this year 8 percent of covid deaths were fully vaccinated: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/11/09/texas-unvac...
Most of that time period was before Delta or Omicron were dominant, not to mention the effectiveness of the vaccine wanes greatly over a ~6 month period, so the situation today is likely higher than 8 percent.
Unvaccinated are more likely to contract the virus from a family member. [0]
> According to the analysis, 25 percent of vaccinated contacts exposed to a household member with an infection contracted one themselves.
> In contrast, 38 percent of unvaccinated contacts got an infection.
> The study results suggest that because the viral load of vaccinated people drops off more quickly, their infection may be infectious for a shorter time than for unvaccinated people.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccinated-people-can...
From the vaccine?!?
You literally just made this up.
1. The Lead Stories article aims to debunks social media narratives linked to the BMJ article, but the result is the BMJ article itself being censored on social media (preventing it from being sent in DMs among other things)
2. The gist of the Lead Stories article is that Pfizer, the FDA, and Ventavia have found the whistleblower report "unsubstantiated". These organizations have not to my knowledge offered any facts that would lead us to doubt the whistleblower's report; and further, have made claims that were directly contradicted by the whistleblower (with proof), such as which team she worked on.
3. The last part of the LS article seems like it would be a violation of fact-checking ethics (if such a thing existed), since it brings the debate out of a dispassionate argument about facts, into an ugly ad-hominem attack (stating that she "does not express unreserved support for COVID vaccines" on her personal Twitter). Similar errors are made in another fact-check below the HN comment you link to (by Dr. David Gorsky, oncologist).
Given these points, I don't see how you can call the fact-check "correct".
"According to the poll, 79% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats said social media companies have a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for misinformation."
(https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-technology-b...)
Talk about "fact checking" you just make a statement about what people think and provided no evidence to back it up. That's the main problem here. Also "old media"?
So in short Facebook is doing way too little and doing it wrong too. But it does seem like the cheapest option for them to keep the lawmakers at bay.
If there was an ounce of integrity in Tech these days, this would have been called out, front-and-centre, and remedies to it would have been enacted. Instead, here we are almost two years later, and we're pretending that never happened. In some cases it's even being memory-holed. I predict within 4 years, it will be common to call someone pointing this out some sort of rabid conspiracy theorist.
You cannot trust FB. You cannot trust Google. You cannot trust mainstream newspapers. You cannot trust the CDC. They got caught lying to you. Repeatedly.
Obey at your peril.
Astral Codex Ten has a great writeup on this, and a big controversial debate with the ivermectin crowd. It's pretty glorious, and I do recommend reading it in its entirety.
If you do want to call this a lie, I suppose I could see it. Someone claims something helps Covid, but it shouldn't, because it doesn't make sense, so instead of trusting the studies, they go out making a bold claim like this, that ivermectin is completely ineffective.
In any case, this does reduce trust in those agencies, when they ignore science and instead spout off politically-expedient dismissals of data.
But I wouldn't call it lying, really.
On Astral Codex Ten's piece, I assume you are talking about this one [0] The whole piece is such a doosie. Am almost sure 90%+ of the non-core audiences that landed on the page never scrolled to the end. If you are going to debunk a controversial subject, KISS. Not to say he didn't do a good job at poring through the numerous inconsistent data and studies carried out on the possibility of use of ivermectin for treatment. But am sure I came across some of his material on the interwebs.
Back to the source material of this post, FDA were completely malicious by tweeting that. Their linked post even goes to mention that taking ivermectin could be lethal for you.
What happens when the body whose sole job is to be the arbiter of truth and science regarding safety of drugs knowingly makes obviously dubious false verifiable claims? They are either knowingly participating in a lie or they are incompetent.
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...
Turns out giving ivermectin (parasite killer) in a country where a lot of people have parasites is good public health policy. It's just butt stupid to use in a developed country like the US where ivermectin probably won't help people, but that doesn't stop people from taking horse dewormer in Florida :/.
Already, today appealing to the autority argument while data are widely accessible is graceless. But abusing your expert position is outright deceitful. A scientific should be able to say that they don't have enough information to form a position.
I think medicine more widely is in crisis as they still have not incorporated the digital transformation.
And that can be seen even at your local doctor level. The patients are very informed (and often wrongly) and are coming to the appointment with a lot of data. A lot of doctors simply brush off those concern and go about with their standard diagnostic process.
What patients expect is that the doctor take their proposition at face value, congratulate them for listing their symptoms and coming with a lead, and repeat the process with them, pinpointing the eventual inconsisencies in the symptoms or simply offering them another diagnostic that is also compatible but statistically more probable.
That's the behaviour of the new expert, enjoy sharing informations and discussing them.
I am literally unaware of a single mainstream television station, newspaper, or magazine that hasn't been caught in blatant politically-motivated lying.
My rule-of-thumb for news sources is: I need to see zero lies for at least two years before I trust them again. This is different than mistakes which are immediately and prominently corrected with front-page stories as big and bold as the original mistaken story. I'm unaware of any currently mainstream TV/newspaper/magazine that ever retracts their "mistakes" anywhere close to this standard as well. Hence, the lack of trust.
Every newspaper is going to "lie" once in a while, there are independent people who write articles. What's important is reputation. The New York Times has been around since 1851. How many truthful articles have they written vs how many were misinformation or biased?
Since the longer a news source exists the more likely it would have lied you will only trust recent news sources? Like if I made a news website then published some random article and sent it to you, I've never lied before but I have 0 reputation are you going to believe me?
That seems like an easy thing to exploit if I was evil I could just keep creating random news websites and you'll trust them. If one is ever caught lying I'll just shut it down and make a new one. However how many "lies" will you believe until I'm caught.
I opened a post here the other day (or yesterday?), intending to reply along the lines of "Oh look, the New York Post -- the new 'paper of record', together with the Washington Times!", but by the time I was ready to start snarking, the post was dead.
Couldn't help but laugh when I read this. Good on BMJ for standing up.
Meanwhile, in the Stossel libel case, Facebook's lawyers allegedly 'claim that Facebook’s “fact-checks” are merely “opinion” and therefore immune from defamation.'
They positioned these "fact checkers" as arbiters of truth. At no point in the past year has Facebook indicated that these were merely opinion.
Seems like a reasonable claim to me. https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Faceb...
> The quote in Facebook’s complaint is,
> "The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion."
My impression is that Meta's distancing move ("third party" fact-checkers, with label/pointer linkage) is more solid than a claim, say, "I am merely the owner of the safe and the combination, your Honor, not the contents themselves." However, if someone such as Stossel wants to pierce the veil with regard to 230, so to speak, it seems a good question whether a prominently linked "fact check" has the same ontological/moral status as any uninvited third party post.
The whole notion of fact checkers is laughable -- who pays them? Do they still get paid if they 'fact check' their benefactors?
There is no debate. There is no invitation for refutation.
It's propaganda.
> It becomes necessary when you lie all the time.
There are plenty of people lying and/or grifting on the other side of this power structure as well. There is some non-zero benefit being provided by fact checking, but it's certainly not an ideal situation. The real problem is virality. No one felt the need to fact-check discussion forums because those posts were not likely to spread to millions of people.
The issue is I don't agree with all that. Who cares if crazies share flat earth theories on Facebook? You either trust your fellow humans to be able to think critically, or you don't. And if you don't, then why do you trust them with power of life and death over you via the state and voting?
And who has power/moral authority/whatever to decide that? There's no answer to that that doesn't lead to tyranny
The point that a lie in this context can be societally dangerous is still very relevant. Next up is the frequency / commonality of these dangerous lies.
Isn't that implying that the reader is too ignorant to know at a glance? In the marketplace of ideas shouldn't that nonsense content just get buried anyway?
> There are plenty of people lying and/or grifting on the other side of this power structure as well.
Agreed. Lying is how you create something out of nothing after all.
I don't like being lied to but some amount of lying does seem to be necessary to maintain any control over a group of people and impose order.
> No one felt the need to fact-check discussion forums because those posts were not likely to spread to millions of people.
Exactly. The range and impact presents a challenge to their long held ability to unequivocally decide what is 'true' -- which is the authority's most critical power because this effectively creates reality, from which everything else flows. It's not surprising they are defending it so vigorously... they just don't call it that. They use phrases like 'combating misinformation' and 'fact checking'.
I agree that in a free marketplace of ideas bullshit content would get buried, but this isn’t how modern social media platforms work.
Yes. Have you been on Facebook?!? It's pretty much Ignorance City.
> In the marketplace of ideas shouldn't that nonsense content just get buried anyway?
Maybe it would... If the "marketplace of ideas" weren't a marketplace of sheep.
The particulars aren't the issue and never have been. The issue is, there's no "authority" you can trust to decide for you what is and isn't true. The particulars are of what's being discussed is a red herring.
Facebook, youtube, twitter, and reddit, all think they know better and you should trust them. It would be far less alarming if they didn't all agree with each other all the time. There's no significant political dissent between them. The present a single face. Aka fascism when they agree with the government, which they currently do.
You know, at some point in the history of this earth, people thought the earth is flat. Those who thought it was round were thrown in fire. Don't be that guy and let's not get there because it's easier than you think.
If you know the earth is round based on observed reality then why would you believe some internet rando who says it's flat?
It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.
How do we deal with this challenge without censoring some information that ought not be censored?
https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1229137314074505216?s=20 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1224734993966096387?s=20
Censorship is not the answer. It actually gives more credence to the persecuted/wrong and lets them gain more supporters. Just like we dont ban KKK or Nazi stuff, we openly destroy their arguments with facts, not fascism.
Destroying their arguments with facts doesn't work, because they just replace them with new arguments. Since it takes much less effort to generate new but plausible sounding incorrect arguments than it does to refute such arguments, the misinformation wins.
It used to work back when distribution of ideas was slow or expensive or both. Those times are long gone.
Information of some kind of flu/pneunomia-like sickness in central China was available on December 31st, 2019, the day I learned about it from our local news media. Chances are the CDC had that information before I, a non-medical civilian, had it.
On January 15th, with me noticing a significant difference between what the Chinese said and what they did in Wuhan, I realised shit's going to hit the fan. I bought a few extra conserves when I was going for groceries, some extra toilet paper, started to invest in my home office situation, "just in case". Nothing too prepper-style crazy, but enough to be prepared. And - figuring that any flu/pneunomia-style sickness would also be commuted by coughing, I got me some 100 cheap masks, some nitrile gloves, for good measure (arguably didn't use them much), and some isopropyl alcohol for disinfection. You know, things that I see doctors using when they get into a potentially infectious zone.
No-one at the CDC, packed with medical professionals, watched Chinese news reports and did some "what could possibly go wrong" reasoning?
Around mid-march, people in the west finally started panicking. By now, what I got over two months, slow and steadily, they needed to get all at the same time. Suddenly, they realised that this is not just a Chinese thing. "Don't panic buy'", the powers to be claimed, "There's no need! Supply chains will hold". Well, today we know they didn't, and back then, people sometimes found themselves lacking basic necessities.
"No need to buy masks, they don't work", the CDC (and health officials around the world, with the exception of countries who use masks every time it's flu season) said - yet every single doctor and every single nurse I've ever seen dealing with Covid Patients go in like medieval knights in armor.
I've been vaccinated trice by now, having made the appointment for the booster shot two months in advance. "No need to do that", we (non-us) were being told. "there's enough vaccinations around for everyone". Well, right now over here (non-us), we have people standing in line in the cold for up to four hours, and vaccinations are actually running out quickly, because the former government decided to not order enough, let the next guy deal with it.
You are right not to trust Fox, Trump, or Breitbart News. But there's also no reason to believe news media or official offices on "your" side of the turf war. They will all lie to you. Watch like they are doing, closely, and make your own decisions.
It's not about what you or I would do, it's about what the median user does when the topic is public health and safety. And half of everyone is below average.
I think we saw enough of crazy conspiracy theories occurring before the latest trend of service info-shaping to conclude that it's an independent variable.
Silicon Valley companies held the line on being agnostic media for decades. The result was a world that appears to have necessitated another approach, because bad actors figured out how to exploit the laissez-faire approach of the digital media to signal-boost crazy conspiracy theories, misinformation, and propaganda. It was the laissez-faire Facebook of the mid-2010s that allowed foreign companies to signal-shape a US election via paid-for advertising and micro-targeting [https://www.vox.com/2018/5/10/17339864/congress-russia-adver...].
If you cut out a man's tounge, you do that because you are afraid of what he might say - or that's what people will think. It's better to make better arguments than they do. If you resort to obvious censorship, you are just creating martyrs.
This is an unwinnable fight, the only reasonable response is to abandon the pretense that opinions are facts, and that most people can't distinguish truth from falsehood.
Listen to yourself. You are allowing MSM to manipulate the meaning of things in your mind.
You literally just suggested that fact checking in general is bad and should go away. I know you think that everyone is operating under the context of malicious/false fact checking, but that is my point: you all have undergone a paradigm shift in which you allow the meaning of words to change based on false flags and what mentally ill people are claiming is "fact checking".
Stop.
Everyone should be learning critical thinking and fact checking. Uneducated and vulnerable people need to understand this and see the difference between someone else doing it for them, and they themselves being able to see clearly what is happening to their lives.
They're not checking facts, they're just enforcing the mainstream view. The mainstream view is often correct, but sometimes it isn't, and then the fact-checkers are just horribly wrong, and suppressing actual debate on the merits of an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
“Some scientists agree that the possibility of a lab leak should be examined as part of the ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19, though they have expressed concerns about the risks of politicization.”
You argue that blocking debate is a righteous act because the theory's "very existence harms public health". I'd counter that the gagging of a concerned public breeds distrust that is vastly more harmful than allowing debate would have been.
If the FCC ever got regulatory hooks into the internet we’re done with web innovation.
- as I researched and reported, I kept notes about the source of every piece of info I got.
- as I wrote, I noted that source every time I stated a fact (using phrases like "according to")
- my editor asked me in general whether I had done all this - and during the editing process drilled down on several facts I stated and what the basis for them was.
- A factual error once crept into my story through the headline, which was written by a different editorial team. It was a minor thing, but it was a big deal, my editor was super stressed, and they issued a printed retraction.
- This was all inline with the general policy followed by a 300 person newsroom.
- Editor's year-end review is partly based on the number of retractions issued.
- The culture of the organization was such that if a known error made it into print, and there wasn't a retraction, that would be basically a scandal.
> [1] https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1469331084550852615/ph...
In this context, it is the fact checks that are claimed to be protected speech.
"Protected" refers to statements of opinions (as opposed to facts) being protected by law against allegations of defamation. For example, if I publish something as a factual statement, e.g., "Mark Zuckerberg is a criminal", I can be sued for defamation (if it is false). However, if I say "I think Mark Zuckerberg is a criminal", I can't be sued for defamation.[1]
Thus, Facebook is defending itself against a defamation suit by arguing that all its "fact check" labels are merely statements of the fact checker's opinion, not actual statements of fact.
In particular, the paragraph quoted in that Twitter post does not refer to any attempt to protect an opinion against "political enemies".
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#United_States - In particular: 'Defenses to defamation that may defeat a lawsuit, including possible dismissal before trial, include the statement being one of opinion rather than fact or being "fair comment and criticism".'
I don't see how that's much different than a newspaper running front page stories that asserting that everything John Doe says is inaccurate then a year later saying "oh it was just our opinion".
Imagine if CNN interjected in our in-person conversations with friends and family on nearly everything we said -- it would be a nightmare -- and on social media, there is no difference in its nightmarishness or weight, and to think that some millions of people are in full support of such interjections in order to protect their own narrative, because as long as someone powerful is watching out for them to prevent the high crime of "disagreement" viewed as dangerous bullying, they couldn't care less how negatively it impacts society, much less the other side of the aisle's freedom to discuss, debate, and participate in the broader discussions society brings us.
There's a lot of irony in nearly an entire political segment (leftists) in 1) supporting third wave feminism as a means to shut down, specifically men, from correcting others when they're wrong, or simply acting on one's behalf out of kindness (I ain't need no man), and 2) supporting the same behaviors by abusive corporate media outlets and paid commentators acting on behalf of social networks.
It may be true that it's hard to draw a clear line between bullshit and almost-bullshit, but it's hard to draw a clear line between porn and almost-porn and they somehow manage to do that okay.
edit because apparently this wasn't clear enough: the way you distinguish science from bullshit is not by evaluating the claims (that's what I am arguing we should not trust Facebook to do). One is a money-making endeavour and the other isn't, and that's the basis on which they are distinguished. Even the worst science is not festooned with ads.
I'll say it again: "Facebook doesn't do a good enough job of evaluating accuracy" is a trap, and it's a trap they desperately want you to fall in to. If we get to the point where we put any value in FB's evaluation of any scientific claim, we're already into dystopian sci-fi territory, no matter how good a job they do.
The existence of power-centers like giant social media monopolies guarantees they are targets for political interests to hijack that power & censor opponents. Even if you could snap your fingers and magically populate these dominant platforms, and media/journalist institutions as well, with good faith actors (even here they are limited by their ability to actually know what is true), this wouldn't be a stable equilibrium and would in short order be populated and/or lobbied/pressured/swayed by political opportunists.
Every single (semi)-erotic artist i know has faced a daily struggle of avoiding their work (and livelihoods) being demonetized somehow - whether it be shadowbans, straight up sudden bans, deactivations of accounts under false pretenses, etc. One could argue there's a difference between 2D art and "live action porn' but I'd say as an artist the line is a lot fuzzier than most think, as there tends to be a suspicious amount of activist work that tends to get shoved under the "porn" rug because it makes it easier to hide dissenting minority opinions.
The truth being suppressed once is far worse than a thousand lies.
No, not by that logic. The logic is "some people claimed that claims of the possibilities of bad outcomes were instances of the slippery slope fallacy, and now that the bad outcomes were actually realized, they should apologize, because something isn't the slippery slope fallacy if things further down the slope have actually happened". That's not even remotely connected to anything you said here.
the truth hurts...if you care about the truth...
You can certainly argue that censorship isn't always a bad thing. But calling censorship "fact checking" is purposely misleading.
Not agreeing on basic facts in the prime problem in our current political discourse. Disagreement is usually a good problem to have and leads to testing the complete problem space.
What we are seeing now, though, is the absence of the problem space exploration. Instead any discussion is just dismissed by calling the other party's information "fake news". In that fact-checkers are crucial.
Can the fact checkers be wrong? Sure. Could they have an agenda? Sure. Let's fix that. Let's not dismiss them outright as some of the comment here suggest.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/12/facebook-accepts-that-its-th...
Let's remove the term "fact-checking" and replace it by "facebook sponsored opinion"
2 of the 3 reviewers had not even seen the video Facebook labeled as "misleading". The other refused a request for an interview.
In Stossel's case, one of his video's is being very closely taken to their implications, and being marked accordingly as "misleading" and "missing context". In the case of the BMJ, the factcheck title is fully inaccurate and itself is misleading. The Stossel case highlights this nuance, but in the end appears to be a partisan test of the legal waters. Facebook itself has spoken on that one and has defended it.
Of note though is this passage:
> In a previous response posted by Climate Feedback to Stossel’s charges about the fact-check rating on the “Government Fueled Fires” video, the organization wrote, “Stossel complains that we should not have rated his post using a claim review of a quote that does not appear in his video. This is a misunderstanding of how fact-checking partners operate on Facebook. Given that many pieces of content posted on Facebook can separately make the same claim, it is not necessary to create a separate claim review article for each post we rate. It is, of course, necessary that the claim we reviewed is representative of the claim in each post we rate, which is true in this case.”
It seems like in an effort for efficiency, articles are grouped together. I wonder if some article citing BMJ made the inaccuracies, and then the source got grouped into the same article group. It seems like that is a corner that cannot be cut here. To the surprise of no one, fact checking is hard and trying to group things together will cause problems. It seems to me that the critics are right to point out that fact checking will simply not scale while maintaining accuracy.
What?
I want forums and blogs back.
This is where Facebook is going to stop reading and toss out the letter. The claims BMJ is making may or may not be accurate – I personally don't have the scientific knowledge to judge. But ultimately Facebook is going to always defer to the authorities of the jurisdiction it operates in over random third parties.
The Democrats are responsible for this state of affairs: they have repeatedly threatened the social media giants with legal action lest they combat whatever it is the Democrats deem to be disinformation, which increasingly is indistinguishable from anything that contradicts what powerful government institutions deem to be true.
What about Mark Klein?
A small minority of people here and elsewhere are tearing their hair at the insanity. In the meantime a tiny municipality in the Netherlands gives the go ahead for meta to build the largest datacenter in Europe.
Somehow once the giant wheels of societal regression are set in motion there is nothing to stop them.
Imagine a forum that works in the following way:
1. You post similar to here.
2. Any post that has a claim is flagged. The poster, or another commenter has 24 hours (or some time period) to link to both a page and specific text (similar to how Google highlights search text when visiting a link) that supports the claim.
3. Once a claim is attached, posters can vote and downvote how well the source(s) support the claims (claims themselves are not voted/downvoted).
4. Sites are whitelisted and blacklisted by looking at the total percentage in which claims are sited with sources that are downvoted vs. up + downvotes.
5. Posts that do not receive sources for claims are deleted.
I feel like the only reason this isn't already done is because it was dramatically decrease the amount of posts and increase friction around posting. Posters would have to be careful to assert nothing in their post.
I'd say there are two main ways:
You have an assert that would comprise of many claims that are all supported independently by sources, and so you would then have a hypothesis and present it as so (as opposed to a fact, which would be a claim and require evidence, but inherently your idea is jus that).
You present your idea on another forum that's eventually made into a fact by empirical evidence and then later link to that, citing your novel idea. This as you imagine is somewhat self-referential and probably wouldn't work at scale.
In that framework you present novel ideas, and they are vetted, somewhere other than the particular forum.
While it is somewhat different in detail, it's conceptually a lot like the Wikipedia model.
In other words, you might have a claim that's supported by an otherwise bad website, but the bad website actually has a morsel of legitimately factual evidence there. It would be up to the readers of the claim and sources to actually verify whether or not the underlying supporting evidence is true.
The other reason to do this is to build a corpus of "truth." Meta and Google are clearly capable of this, but choose not to do it for reasons.
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This is why it's important that the claim itself is not voted on, but rather the source. Otherwise brigading will happen (it can obviously still happen, but is less of a problem in face of some hypothetical pure truth).
I'd also add that inherently the problem of "determining the truth" requires consensus. What I'm proposing is simply a way to make said consensus be gathered transparently. Obviously there's no oracle of truth out there for us to consult and some variant of what I'm describing is inherently necessary.
And you are missing a fundamental concept in that for most fields of science there are very few objective facts or proven truths. If I write a post on Newtonian physics should I be "fact checked" for misinformation if I fail to state that it's only an approximation and doesn't always give correct answers?
It used to be an accepted "fact" in medicine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. Except that fact turned out to be wrong. How would Drs. Warren and Marshall have rated under your scheme?
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.asp...
Your comment would be fine with just the second sentence.
Somewhere at this point it will get into "yes, he's a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch!"
I've done fact-checking work professionally; it's not that fact-checking itself is difficult, it's that fact-checking can only work as intended in certain information environments, and mass media is NOT one. I've also studied filter bubbles, algorithmic influences on political POVs, etc.
Your proposed system might work in a vacuum, but unfortunately, our modern landscape is NOT such a vacuum.
Issues with your proposed system:
2.) What counts as a claim? Is 'the sky is blue' a claim, or is that common knowledge? We clearly wouldn't flag common knowledge because using the flag when it's not necessary deprecates the usefulness of the flag, but then who decides what counts as common knowledge, particularly across different cultures and countries?
3.) A common metadata way of judging someone online is through their sources. Think of many subreddits which don't allow certain 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' sources. The supporting text will be upvoted and downvoted based on the readers' idea of the source: In the politics subreddit, a NYT 'claim support' would be upvoted while a WSJ one would be downvoted. Instead of using headlines as proxys, the URL would be: "Oh, it's X. They just always lie. Don't even need to check; downvote, nobody listening to THEM could be correct."
4.) Once the whitelisting and blacklisting go into effect and people are aware of it, the voting becomes even more distorted as certain people with grudges can both climb community hierarchy (and therefore put themselves in positions of influence and say things like 'we don't read X here, they're all liars') and encourage voting en masse to blacklist certain sites they disagree with.
5.) This is terrible for search and archiving as well as for tracking bad actors.
And that's just off the top of my head.
Everything, including your example. The entire point is to discourage people from making claims.
> 3.) A common metadata way of judging someone online is through their sources. Think of many subreddits which don't allow certain 'left-wing' or 'right-wing' sources. The supporting text will be upvoted and downvoted based on the readers' idea of the source: In the politics subreddit, a NYT 'claim support' would be upvoted while a WSJ one would be downvoted. Instead of using headlines as proxys, the URL would be: "Oh, it's X. They just always lie. Don't even need to check; downvote, nobody listening to THEM could be correct."
This is a good critique, but if one were actually implementing this, you'd also need to implement some way to verify that people are actually reading the sources (which in itself is already a big annoying problem).
Your other points are also good, but ultimately this thing I'm claiming would be niche due to the friction involved. If it were to not be niche you'd want to put in effort to "validate", or in other words have "trusted" (another problem) members randomly select controversial claims and verify them manually.
I don't believe a fully algorithmic approach, even with "the crowd" can work.
Then you wouldn't have discussion, at least not of this type. It would resemble more a slightly faster version of academic papers as everybody has to read everything and becomes more invested in preventing themselves from being blasted for making an unsupported claim on accident than in contributing.
> This is a good critique, but if one were actually implementing this, you'd also need to implement some way to verify that people are actually reading the sources (which in itself is already a big annoying problem).
Right, but when you say 'we should do thing X' and when somebody says 'we can't do thing X without solving Y' you can't just reply with 'also solve thing Y'. For example, we should go to Alpha Centauri, but I think figuring out FTL travel is sort of necessary first.
> Your other points are also good, but ultimately this thing I'm claiming would be niche due to the friction involved. If it were to not be niche you'd want to put in effort to "validate", or in other words have "trusted" (another problem) members randomly select controversial claims and verify them manually.
I don't believe a fully algorithmic approach, even with "the crowd" can work.
Yeah, it might work in that particular usecase. Perhaps as an adjunct to academic listservs.
As a further point, what if a blog says "not a single cloud was in the sky" and subsequent facts show there was in fact one cloud in the sky - does that count as fake news?
I wouldn't say it's "fake news", but it would be a claim that would be deleted, yes.
And how do you account for metaphors, common fictional phrases and uses, in-jokes, and claims that cannot be verified but a person still has the right to make? For example, I have a lot of Web memories that pre-date the Internet Archive and Wayback. I'm not pulling my claims from nowhere, but it's not my fault they're hard to back up either.
Anytime there's a thread on Netflix, there'd be a group of users who would start complaining about Netflix recommendations. Even when the article has nothing to do with recommendations. I am using Netflix as an example, this pattern you'll notice in many other HN threads.
Great idea, however I'm not sure how to make so that the first doesn't degenerate into the second, especially about sensitive issues... Hmm, maybe this is one of the cases where prediction markets can work ?
Yes, it is. Years ago I went through a period of personally fact-checking stories across the board as they were being discussed by my FB contacts. It is hard to quantify just how time consuming this was.
Some stories were super easy to debunk. Others took days to weeks of research and sometimes mathematical modeling. Other stories took 10+ months to wait of legal evidence to surface. I remember one particular case where someone tried to burn down an black church and spray painted "Vote Trump" on the side of the building. The outrage and blame was immediate, massive and pretty much across the board. I looked at it from a game theory perspective. It just didn't make sense. It took some months for law enforcement to finally track down the culprit: It was one of the members of the church, black, of course, who had a problem with the pastor (or something like that) and thought he could burn down the church and deflect blame through his graffiti.
There were cases like this on both sides of the US political spectrum, of course. This is one I remember. A lot of the cases on the other side have to do with things like climate change and vaccine denial.
The point is, it takes a lot of time and effort. It's almost impossible. And, when you finally get down to facts, convincing people what they were told was wrong is pretty much impossible. They can't un-see the lie when it was carpet-bombed into their brains.
Not sure what the solution might be. Taking sides doesn't seem to be a good idea.
I might be wrong, but I imagine each has a binder with a bunch of bullet points under each topic, listing common claims determined to be false by management. Probably some post-it notes holding new claims that their manager saw the previous day and didn't like.
Maybe the 'lab-leak' claim is scratched out.. it's permitted to be spoken of, now.
Of course, nothing remotely close to the ideal use case happened, and banal nonsense was voted as being a good argument because the readers agreed with it, and good, carefully thought out comments got swamped in bad argument flags because they were disagreeable. People just rated on one feeling-valence and nothing else.
In the end, the paper canned most of the voting options, and the interface is left with "reply" and "well argued".
That's why there doesn't seem to be any fact checker whose calls aren't predictable from one of the major ideological partitions.
Another way of putting this is that the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest. It's understandable that people would like to reduce that contest to a simpler subset of factual questions—but you can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset reduces to it.
(Edit: it might be worth repeating that there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves—people do that, and when they're people with political preferences, that's usually the high order bit. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
Great point, which reminds me of 1960s "English Prime (E-Prime)", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
> a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms ... D. David Bourland Jr., who had studied under Alfred Korzybski, devised E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's general semantics in the late 1940s. Bourland published the concept in a 1965 essay ... Albert Ellis advocated the use of E-Prime when discussing psychological distress to encourage framing these experiences as temporary ... and to encourage a sense of agency by specifying the subject of statements.
> It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which supports my view", at least when the emotions are activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions are activated. There may be exceptions—i.e. people whose minds don't work this way—but if they exist, they're so rare as to be no basis for social policy. (And I doubt that there are really exceptions.)
I think there are at least people who do seek to fact check their own views or dissents from their own views with genuine curiosity. But that's still a matter of degree, and even the most platonically curious among us still use the same monkey brain blueprints that we all do. They may do their due diligence more often, but never, ever always.
He blew the whistle on the following: some staff were not blinded, potentially unblind recipients, quality control on the paperwork, the patients weren't followed up with.
It just adds to my nihilism, tbh.
AI needs good training sets - that is large corpuses of data about a domain, which have been accurately labelled so the AI can learn safely. Curated content basically. Image recognition software is suffering from this as all the large corpuses are basically the same three or so.
When we move into the realm of knowledge about the human world, economics, politics etc. then having a corpus is easy. Just download reddit, twitter and 4chan. But having a labelled corpus is really hard and trusting one. I mean 4chan might be able to teach an AI but you would not want it to date your sister afterwards.
Journalism is basically a means of labelling the corpus of "everything" - and it is only trusted because "most people" trust what WaPo or NYT say. And the new generation of non traditional journalists (err, Captain Disillusion?) are doing something similar.
But there is no real means to decide what is a correctly labelled corpus or what is not. We have a long process of discussing the hard stuff - from flame wars to editorial letters to courts and scientific papers.
Ultimately if we think AI is going to help us manage the flood of information (and I am not sure how else) we need to put effort into training it - and that basically means journalism. Proper Nournalism.
It's not Facebooks job to decide truth. But is it the governments job? Is it everyone's? how do we build this labelled corpus at scale public ally and with trust and verification?
Let me just say: This case proves that so-called "fact-checkers" themselves need to be scrutinized even more than the claims they are "fact-checking".
At the fundamental "entity" level, Facebook continues to glaringly miscategorize the recording of social relationships between people as "friendships". Clicking a "Friend" button for a family member is an insult, and doing the same for a casual acquaintance can incorrectly suggest mutual admiration.
No central authority on truth. Not twitter, not Facebook, not the King, not the church.
The fact is that many of the “facts” that twitter, Facebook, and google “checked”, they were wrong about, and they are doing j told damage to our society.
Facebook is a company which, remember, performed psychological experiments on their users without their consent. Twitter has an opaque algorithm which appears to intentionally foment rage and misunderstanding.
Why in gods earth would we trust these people, whose entire business model relies on either subtly misrepresenting reality to make you more “engaged”, or just blatantly tailoring their entire service to make you angry, with being the arbiter of what is true?
Do people realize how insane that is? Twitter and Facebook, who appear to be using adversarial psychology techniques to make us angry, theyre going to tell us what is real? They’re going to be in charge of building the foundation of our being?
No.
In the short term the greater evil is people not getting vaccinated.
In the long term the greater evil is erasure of free speech.
I’m not a fan of app stores though. Google and Apple are monopolistic.
Parler (?) did not support (!) it. They moderated hate speech. Maybe not 100% efficiently, but in response to some examples in media Parler AFAIR posted similar hate speech examples on Twitter, which Twitter failed to moderate out.
Not fighting literal hate speech was not their policy. And no moderation is 100% efficient.
What you are saying about Parler is false (and defamation).
By this point, anybody who relies on Facebook and their "fact checkers" as a source of relevant information on any topic is a doofus.
I'm unclear what the solution is but I'm quite sure no one will be please with either direction.
I'd welcome laws that requires specific kinds of transparency and conduct at Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/YouTube user counts. Simply tie this conduct to S230 protections, and we evade all first amendment issues. The companies would do anything to avoid being responsible for the hateful, libelous, harassing, and terroristic content they convey every single day.
Even if an individual had proven facts and legislations on their side, the court can still screw them up.
This position aligns with Meta CTO boz’s thesis of the “Platinum Rule:” choose personal success over authenticity. https://boz.com/articles/malcontents
The sad thing for BMJ is they spent so much time “investigating” and trying to criticize here. That’s exactly what Zuck wants—- any news is good news when you’re the dominant network. Following boz’s own advice (“co-opt the establishment not fight it”), BMJ should go after sanctioning the Meta board. E.g. file a breach of fiduciary claim with the SEC. Everybody should be doing that. False “fact checks” can legally mislead users, but you can’t mislead investors. Get Zuck and his empty metaverse vision out of there before Snap and Ticktok take he market.
In the medieval ages, book production and reading were rare and highly controlled capabilities unavailable and unpractical to learn to most. Then Gutenberg and his movable type printing press came around, and suddenly affordable media production and with it, reading. People quickly learned that not only you could print books, but also (political) leaflets, and before long, you had all kinds of these early propaganda instruments floating around, some more outrageous or potentially dangerous than others, from commentary about the local counts's promiscuity to divergent religious or reports on UFO sightings[1]. This of course did not suit the powers to be, and they introduced strict controls on what could and could not printed, they set up censorship offices and heavily taxed or banned private, unlicensed movable type presses. We can only dream about what information, which plays, which artifact we lost because they never were created - and we can be thankful that censorship never works 100%, and some still was printed in secret. It took us 300-400 years and several bloody revolutions to get rid of these governmental controls - and it is a process that has not been completely finished in many parts of the western world.
Then, much later, the Internet came around, the Web being intended as a document store/sharing system for scientific information ("books"). Access to the net was rare and most people did not see the point in getting it ("reading"). But eventually, the system became more ubiquitous and with more non-scientific info around, people started to flock in ("more readers"). Simultaneously, publishing on the net became more approachable, and this made all kind of low-level information available, which sometimes was outrageous, sometimes outright dangerous ("leaflets"). And in the last five years or so, we have seen an increasing push to supress unwanted information (under the guise of "battling fake news") and opinion ("censor's offices"). And just like back then, we will see that censorship does not work perfectly - but how much information will be lost, how much this will hold back society.
This BMJ thing is a symptom of a beginning of things, things will become a lot worse before they become better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over...
Also encase it wasn't already clear, 'independent fact checkers' are themselves not free from bias, particularly political bias. I find it deeply concerning that we allow some unaccountable authority to state truths, on very important issues that are heavily political.
In UK parliament for example, there is the concept of the 'faithful opposition'. They rarely agree with the government of the day, but what makes them 'faithful' is their opposition in good faith. Where is the faithful opposition to the fact checkers?
For anyone who has not read Neil Postman's works, look him up. I'd start with Amusing Ourselves to Death but How to Watch TV News is particularly relevant. All his books are fantastic. https://www.amazon.com/How-Watch-News-Neil-Postman/dp/078611...
Maybe these posts should have metadata? Mark things like sarcasm, hyperbole, etc. People already do that here - with the /s tag.
At Facebook's scale there are very many 'morons' out there who might see it.
And this article demonstrably confused at least one person... as it got fact checked didn't it?
While I agree that there are people who take ridiculous stuff seriously, they're beyond what a fact checker--or anyone else--can help.
I'd disagree. I think a literal huge 'satire' flag on the post would help.
That said, they clearly label the site as satire on the 'about' page if there was somehow any doubt that articles about spinning news in a washing machine were not serious.
If half the articles someone looked at were clear satire, people would have to think about what they are reading and who the source is. (Analogous to how we are being trained to recognize phishing)
For those that can’t figure out what satire is, A/B test content until we discover empirically how stupid something has to be before even they realize it is satire.
A lot of media outlets ran with the (non-)story that Elon Musk was planning to quit his roles at SpaceX and Tesla to become an influencer. Musk was joking and very obviously so; and yet so many of them ran stories with tags like "it's not certain yet if he's serious." (CNBC for example promptly ran a story with that elaboration)
They're really, really, really, stupid.
In the US if you can't cut it doing anything else, you become a faux journalist. You write hack regurgitated tweet-based articles for Business Insider or MSNBC or CNN. Which also partially explains the condition of journalism in the US.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160325165926/http://babylonbee...
Because we live in a democracy where being uninformed doesn't mean you have less say in the government.
If the Telegraph controlled the "fact checker" the Guardian wouldn't exist. If the Guardian controlled the "fact checker", the Telegraph wouldn't exist.
If you support "fact checkers", you are not welcome in my life and I will route around you.
You could, perhaps, consider yourself to have been "fact checked".
TLDR, citations are for those who are incapable of making the arguments themselves and must outsource their very thought to other men they unquestioningly revere.
You could say that one man's garbage is another man's treasure, but I'm not sure I would ever say that to my doctor.
Your doctor is not a "fact checker" in the newspeak meaning of the term, because your doctor is not preventing other people from speaking to you.
If I want to know what the BMJ is writing, https://bmj.com is right there. Facebook is under no obligation to center it on my wall.
HN, BMJ and Facebook pay for their expenses as private parties and may not wish use their money to help you broadcast your speech. The main difference between HN and Facebook is that Facebook is Very Big.
If your idea of free speech means that either HN or Facebook must pay for a metaphorical Dang and other fancy engineers to maintain your free speech...
"refraining from giving some sources a megaphone" is exactly equivalent to "censorship". There's no difference.
Your argument confuses the prescriptive and the descriptive.
Descriptively, yes, Facebook is under no legal obligation to treat speech on its platform equally.
Prescriptively, Facebook is morally obligated to either assume full responsibility for user content (both editorialization and moderation), or no responsibility (passing through legal challenges directly to the user).
Additionally, as a de-facto public square, the principles of free speech still apply - a platform with more users than almost any single nation on Earth has citizens is morally bound to allow free speech.
A public square is one which is funded and governed by public means, and the source of funding is one of the core mechanisms for ensuring that the public institution answers to public money.
Facebook is a private property, much like HN and the BMJ. That means people like dang, who also engage in banning, are not paid for by the government. Surely one's concept of public square does not entail private parties footing the bill for fancy engineers and metaphorical dang.
As a matter of prescription, why would we ever want Facebook to be the financially responsible party for public town squares? Why do we not have the government fund an actually public town square? Or ought we be using tax money to fund Facebook itself?
I didn't say "prevents someone from speaking" - I specifically said "censors the press" because those are two very different cases (and because that's the exact language that GP used). A government could censor the press but not prevent private individuals from speaking to each other, so it wouldn't technically be preventing people from speaking - but it's pretty clear that it's still engaging in censorship (which was the point I was making to GP).
> If I am banned from sharing information such as classified intel
Classified material isn't covered under free speech. Free speech protects sentiment and expression. Classified information isn't sentiment, it's factual data, and it's protected for national security reasons, so as long as the material is classified for that reason, and not, say, to hide the embarrassment of a government official (which is illegal in the US at least), it's pretty clear that it's not free speech.
> A public square is one which is funded and governed by public means
I disagree. A "public square" is a forum for expression that appears to be open to all, styles itself as a public square, and has a substantial population in it. The CEO of Twitter, for instance, implied that Twitter is a public square[1].
> As a matter of prescription, why would we ever want Facebook to be the financially responsible party for public town squares?
Aha, that's a good question - we don't! Or, I don't - the problem is that it is a de-facto town square already, not that I want it to be (a regulated) one. Top of my wish-list is for it to not be that - for the DoJ to take it apart and/or force them to make it trivially easy to move your Facebook data somewhere else. (I suspect you share this sentiment) Unfortunately, because the DoJ appears to have lost its fangs over the past few decades, we're stuck with the Facebook behemoth - so, if we're stuck with it anyway, it's morally right for them to adhere to free-speech principles.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/09/05/jack-dorsey-twitter-us...
And public funding is a critical component to public governance. Facebook is accountable to private money. There is a reason why people don't like the idea of politics being funded by private money.
To change that, we might talk about using taxpayer money to fund Facebook, and rather than mere rules for companies, we might talk about public ownership and governance of Facebook and not merely breaking businesses apart. Breaking Facebook apart is about dealing with free market concerns. Nationalizing Facebook is about recognizing that Facebook ought be a public institution.
Under the political theory underpinning the origins of the US, private institutions have different moral obligations from governments because governments have the monopoly on violence, not simply because governments are big and have lots of "users." Facebook can't force anyone to use Facebook, and their competition is always one click away.
Facebook isn't a "public square" because it has no local geographic monopoly on space; it's the Internet, we have our choice of internet fora. This differs from the physical world, where one can't easily just go to the next public square over if the use of the nearby one is curtailed (hence the need for legal theory enacting the concept of "de-facto public square"). There's a problem if Facebook is the only online forum. But the solution to that is anti-trust law, not the government dictating what Facebook may not refrain from rebroadcasting via its network. Trying to solve the legitimate concerns of discourse manipulation via modification to First Amendment protections opens a Pandora's Box that is almost certainly best left closed (for starters: given the customer behavior we currently see, one could infer that people use Facebook because they like the signal-tuning. Stepping on the neck of Facebook's ability to signal-tune in a heavy-handed way risks driving users to alternative services that don't operate out of the US and therefore aren't beholden to any concept of First Amendment protections, for good or ill).
There are people who you cannot write personal messages to on facebook/messenger. They have to write you first, otherwise all your messages to them are marked as sent, not delivered and eventually seen, just sent.
I assume that political idelogy of aforementioned persons is obvious. And these people are not some no-names.
edited to add:
Those poeple have facebook profiles, post stuff publicly, you can comment, tag and all that. Except private messages. All private messages are silently undelivered. No error, only sent.
Unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, you seem to be saying that shadowbans should be illegal. Or at least, I don't see how any law that would prevent shadow delivery wouldn't prevent shadowbans. So I think we'll have to agree to disagree.
They take parcels, give tracking numbers, but those specific persons never receive anything. Tracking is always stuck on "parcel enroute".
edit: clarified wording, to make it clear that fedex shadowban is a hypothetical situation
There is no such "theft of information" for failing to route a data packet, nor should there be for obvious reasons.
Better analogy would be if a newspaper took money to run my ad but never ran it. Also theft, or at least try-able in civil court for failure to render service.
... But if they take a message from me, for free, on the understanding they'll route it and never route it? Much, much grayer legally. I have to prove harm and that they had a legal duty they abrogated. Neither are obvious regarding Facebook DMs.
That's one of the things that could be argued in a court of law... That it was wrong for Facebook to collect data from someone on the false pretense that they would send a message they would not send. I wish the plaintiff who argues it the best of luck... Hell of an uphill battle. The notion data about a person has tangible value that belongs by default to the person and can therefore be exchanged is an open question (legally and morally). And there's still the issue of proof of harm. In fact, that's the biggest issue.
If a person thought they had communicated something via Facebook and Facebook falsely claimed it was sent when it was not, and that person could prove material harm as a result, they might have a civil case to rectify the specific harm. I struggle to imagine such a scenario, but I'll assume it could happen for the sake of argument. "Facebook silently black-holes your attempts to contact a celebrity" as an example, is not harm.
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You had a deleted post talking about how I'm masturbating. It may surprise you that HN also "censors" you.
This reasoning by analogy doesn't really go anywhere.
There are facts. There are ways to make rational arguments based on those facts.
Those arguments don't have to be the same, or even produce the same results to be useful - because they state their basis and how, based on that they produce their conclusions.
That is a really useful and powerful thing.
> If the Telegraph controlled the "fact checker" the Guardian wouldn't exist. If the Guardian controlled the "fact checker", the Telegraph wouldn't exist.
Why? Having a fact checker that explains (even arguably incorrectly) why something is wrong isn't censorship.
A newspaper could be a factchecker (and sometime are) - if they explain their reasoning, or have some transparent way to see their reasoning.
This feels like a 'let perfect be the enemy of the good' type situation. Fact checking doesn't mean everything will be correct. It doesn't need to. Much like science doesn't claim to have the correct answer for everything - it's to the best of our knowledge based on the scientific method.
(1) "Fact-checking" is a term used by people who are not interested in facts, but just want to control a narrative.
(2) Convincing the public that "fact-checking" is always done in bad faith is in the interest of people who do not want to actually be fact-checked, but rather want to control a narrative.
Well, that's one problem. The other problem is that (2) has the potential to be far more pernicious: it dismisses the possibility of material difference between real fact checks and propaganda disguised as such. "Fact checkers may have their own agendas" can be true without leading us to "therefore no facts should be checked." If we choose the latter, then we have largely given up on the possibility of facts at all, and we are, not to put too fine a point on it, well and truly fucked.
In the case of this BMJ article, it looks like there are reasonable questions as to whether the authors truly make a case that supports their conclusions. There's a comment from PaulDavisthe1st somewhere around here that links to both the actual article and the fact check, and it at least seems a bit more complicated than "THE BMJ IS BEING SUPPRESSED BY THE ELITES WHO DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW THE TRUTH, MAN," which is a distinct vibe I get from the comments.
"Fact checkers" attempt to produce a coherent narrative and force one side to win out.
But not all issues can be decided in that way.
»The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct ... The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny.«
- Nikola Tesla, 1937
I absolutely do want my news sites to verify facts rather than serving up stories to confirm my existing beliefs so they can sell advertising space.
Many of my professional friends have either left mainstream social media or have become much less active.
Not only has this destroyed the credibility of science but has created vicious polarisation of people and destroyed friendships and family relationships.
Frankly why any platform can be allowed to decide the worthiness of an article themselves is beyond me.
If FB were citing some insane group who score publications/data publicly and openly based on their content is say they're guilty of nothing more than trusting a trusted information outlet. (I'll even accept that the JDL is probably more open than this and they get triggered by small green reptiles)
Now that Facebook is deciding what is worthy to be deemed "truth" it has entered firmly into the arena of editorialism. Of course FB want this, it is practically the last brick of the wall around the garden of it's user-base. But it should be something that is illegal as it's clearly broaching on anti-competition territory.
(This unfortunately exposes a problem in tech from the monopoly argument. There is always an alternative people can move to, that is not, and should never be, an excuse for crap behaviour by crap companies)
Nobody is asking this. And that is the first problem here.
"Fact checking" is just a narrative device, to present something as authoritative.
The reality is that even for obvious, physical phenomena, whenever there is any complexity, you cannot know the truth. There are all sorts of buried assumptions and theoretical knowledge.
> Boyer 1991, p. 119 notes, "The Elements of Euclid not only was the earliest major Greek mathematical work to come down to us, but also the most influential textbook of all times. [...]The first printed versions of the Elements appeared at Venice in 1482, one of the very earliest of mathematical books to be set in type; it has been estimated that since then at least a thousand editions have been published. Perhaps no book other than the Bible can boast so many editions, and certainly no mathematical work has had an influence comparable with that of Euclid's Elements".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid's_Elements#cite_note-...
Most of it is survivor bias. I'm sure they claimed plenty of stupid things too, those just didn't pass though over two thousand year filter.
Which should be pointed out isn't the same as Facebook's users. Facebook's customers are powerful entities that already have nearly unlimited access to promote their messages. What upset them was the ability of others to also push messages, some of which were inconvenient to the powerful. What Facebook's customers are demanding is that only messages they approve be heard.
FB being so insistent to censor posts regarding side effects and vax concerns - justifies deeper investigation.
As you can see, it is gone, practically in a few minutes after I had read it. Why? Is it because HN is a tech website and this not related to tech? Even though there are many articles related to covid?
Or is it because BMJ articles are meant for healthcare professionals? I am also a healthcare professional but don't have time to read all journals and sometimes I rely on blogs and even HN to bring the most interesting articles to my notice.
The third possibility is that some HN voters don't want to admit possibility that the current political establishment was wrong about vaccine mandates. Or at least that some respectable healthcare professionals are against them.
Be careful not to draw excessively general conclusions from these data points. The current post, for example, spend 22 hours on HN's front page. That's as much exposure as anything gets here.
They have repeatedly questioned the claims of vaccine makers, especially Pfizer, in a way that no other serious publication, scientific or corporate, has.
They platformed the many experts who called into question the evidence basis for masking children in schools, for closing schools, for lockdowns, and several other now obviously failed mitigation strategies at a time when Nature and Lancet had already moved their gaze elsewhere, almost completely failing to catalog the collateral damage.
This is incredibly strongly worded for a medical journal, but no more strongly than is warranted:
"These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites."
...
"We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime."
BMJ platformed this particular whistleblower at a time when the facts revealed (most obviously the unblinding) were already the subject of widespread speculation in expert circles, but were magnetically drawn to the memory holes of mainstream social media by 'fact checkers'.
And now, with Facebook having demonstrably used its editorial discretion and censorship to protect Pfizer's reputation and profits, BMJ has carefully taken them to task in a way that we might expect traditional journalists to do, but haven't.
When we look in our rearview mirror at this pandemic and ask ourselves how we can ensure that the next one doesn't provide for states and corporations to go on vulgar grabs for money and power at the expense of the most marginalized in society, BMJ's relatively progressive position on these matters in the past two years will offer a substantial portion of that playbook.
But the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect infected fact-checking, and turned fact-checking into an extreme danger to democracy (ironic, considering it's supposed to "save democracy"). Fact-checkers are not subject experts; they all seem to believe that you can get to the "truth" after half an hour of Googling. That's not true! Even domain experts might need weeks or longer of research to reach a confident opinion on a topic, and that's with a very strong and wide knowledge foundation.
An obvious impact of fact-checkers' universal Dunning-Krugerism is that they end up biased against certain facts, if they believe those facts to be "promoting harmful narratives". If people hear about Pfizer's mistakes, they might not want the vaccine, so they're biased towards suppressing the BMJ article.
Fact-checking leads to implicit (if not deliberate) paternalism, where information is only allowed to spread if it has no negative connotations. Unfortunately, that means no scrutiny for the FDA, for Pfizer, and a democracy that decays even further. I could give comical examples of recent incorrect fact-checks on European television, where mistake were all biased against narratives that would have harmed the centrist government.
Corporations like Facebook, Twitter and Facebook just shouldn't have this much power.
Could a grassroots cultural movement like the 60s happen again today? One that's anti-authority, anti-elite? Not a chance in hell, not just because of fact-checkers, but because of how much cultural power has been taken from the people. The elites made sure of that: even music, which was at the very heart of these cultural movements, is now controlled by unchecked corporate power. (And the consequences are disastrous: pre-pandemic, 40% of young people felt chronically lonely; atomization is inevitable in a heavily "controlled" and restrictive culture.)
And here lies the crux of the issue : Facebook (and other Meta services) currently don't.
While since they decided that they wanted to moderate themselves what people were posting on their websites, and they are neither a small service, or a nonprofit (or potentially other attenuating circumstances), they should be responsible for everything that Facebook (et al.) contains.
That's also not a very honest claim in such broad sense of term "responsible" that we usually use when we talk about what Facebook does.
Was Lancet responsible for publishing Andrew Wakefield paper? Yes. Does it try to pay for damages suffered by every person who had infectious disease with severe outcome that was a result of people not taking the vaccine because of modern anti-vaccine movement this paper has spawned? No.
They are responsible for what they wrote. Not for what people reading it did. But when we talk about Facebook we want it to be responsible for all societal impact. So the people shouldn't be surprised that Facebook might not only consider if something is true or accurate, but also if it remains so in the heads of the readers. Because we expect Facebook to consider it.
They've already admitted that their "fact checks" are opinion. Why the false advertising, then? I guess the word 'fact' can mean what they want since they have the megaphone and the cancel button.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-t...
It's not definitive (nothing in a case like this will be), but is provides way more context for both the particular BMJ article and also recent history at the BMJ in general.
It paints a bad picture, but it doesn't seem to answer overall picture about the vaccine. Namely, was there testing done by other people for the vaccine?
Misinformation doesn't have to be completely made up. The worst misinformation is carefully selected parts of the truth.
Yes, there may be some data integrity and procedural integrity issues with one, or two, or even three of the hundred plus sites/contractors used to collect data on any given vaccine trial. However, by using modern statistical methods, and auditing, we minimize the impact of these possible errors.
In addition to this, the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer has now actually left trial and been ADMINISTERED TO MILLIONS OF PEOPLE!!!!! So we actually have data now, in some cases from 6 months ago and longer, showing that, at least for effects that are short term visible, there is very little to worry about. How do we know this .... THROUGH ACTUAL MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF VACCINATION DATA IN THE GENERAL POPULATION. The trial data is LESS AND LESS RELEVANT.
This BMJ may have been a reputable publication at some point ... I'm not going to assume it wasn't ... but if you read the study and the article posted you'll very soon realize that this is some shoddy bloody journalism. AND, YES, it will misinform people, because Joe Rogan and the like do not apply suitable skepticism when considering the claims of these "scientific skeptics".
I wish everyone could actually take the time to read these long medical articles. But most people can't. I happen to be working on a project where I have to occasionally read and digest "fact finding" content to judge its accuracy. And even I am growing exhausted with what I have a financial interest in doing, because of the sheer stupidity of the interpretations of data by the Joe Rogan crowd ... and it's always something you need to dig a layer deep to uncover too. So sometimes reasonable people without free time can get bamboozled because Rogan and Co. seem to have neocortexes that operate with some strange parameters.
P.S. In general I agree that "fact-checking" is a bad idea. I prefer crowd-sourced fact-checking from a community ... basically like Hacker News comments. A lot of fact-checking is just mirroring the prevailing political mood.
It looks like this has been a trend with the BMJ, now that Peter Doshi has managed to become an associate editor. Just because the journal is historically important doesn't mean it should be looked at with an uncritical eye. Spreading misinformation, especially from a pulpit of legitimacy, needs to be challenged.
I'm sympathetic to arguments that FB has too much power in these things, but in this instance they got it right. The BMJ editorial staff need to be shamed into getting these cranks out of their midst.
They complain of nonsensical title:
>"Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials"
The title is nonsensical because that's the nonsensical claim the fact-checkers are debunking! That's the title the BMJ article (or its screencap) is being shared with.
BMJ's article is being used as "proof" that vaccines are a hoax. That's why there's a hoax alert.
BMJ's article is "misleading info" in the context of how it's shared on Facebook, where the fact checkers are working.
I mean, there are a lot of thing that Facebook does wrong, but this is not one of them. Good job, Mark.
And article is like Fox News: “ Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.”
Come on guys… this is definitely “click bite” article where headline really does not match the content l.
I mean, shouldn't it? The fact that this was reported to the FDA and they took no further action to investigate makes all of their other efforts suspect.
So you're saying it "raise[s] questions about... regulatory oversight"?
There have been many scandals with pharma and regulators. Opioid crisis is one example, even though all involved parties currently blame each other and it has not been established who shares the most guilt yet. In either case, we definitely needed alarming articles about risks from newly marketed opioids 10 years ago.
The other worry is the recent approval of aducanumab by the FDA.
The title is very precise and corresponds with the contents very closely. You could say it is a little bit alarmistic though.
If it reads like Fox News to you, then you probably don't understand this industry. That's fine but don't call it wrong.
https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...
I mean the FDA is asking for 55 years to process and release all such public data to the public now.. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants... . Which to me is concerning as well the CDC just announcing not to get the J&J shot but the other two.
Early science .. we all jumped in like guniea pigs ... some forced to like myself where Ive already been burned twice (hernia mesh implant recalled causes pain forever and a med I took damaged an organ) by early science/profits over people crap.
Also any media to research where bias (pro or not pro vaccine ... left or right) is.. is hard to believe as truth. Bias clouds the truth always! Im sure any vote on my post is biased based ... pro vaccine or anti. Im in the middle and wanted to wait to see years of data to see/find out which one was the best .. which one was the worst but i wasnt given that opportunity... get vaxed or if not lose everything.
Unfortunately, the research misconduct that the BMJ letter points to plays right into the hands of anti-vaxxers and anti-science types.
Science hard, science communication is even harder, but how is the hardest part caring enough to do the research right?
Edit: As has been pointed out, I got the date wrong! This is dated as of 12/17.
This open letter is dated today (Dec 17) - see sidebar.
Here is a video interview of the head of DHS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp3r04dfpZA
Just what does the head of DHS consider "misinformation" you have to wonder. It was not long ago we didn't really care, because they would not have dared to infringe on free speach.
I wonder what other partisans in power are saying to social media companies?
I can agree with that. After learning about this BMJ article some people with certain bias might take it as an evidence that Covid vaccine trials were seriously flawed and resulted in wrong conclusions and that the vaccine is unsafe or ineffective.
So plenty of context is sometimes necessary to avoid misleading people despite the fact that everything you say is true.
1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cheer%20Pres...
Beyond that the suggestion that all user's data should be shared equally is inherently flawed.
The point of the parent comment was to discuss advocacy for a alternative and your comment essentially is replying well this is how it is currently so nothing can be done.
It's not today. But is it in society's interest that a small group of elites gets to decide what we can discuss on our primary discussion platforms?
Internet is public utility just like roads.
There's probably no other way around it instead of treating stuff like Facebook as a partly private business and partly public utility.
I realize this is begging for an "aha! the elites are proving the point!" response—but really no, we just don't want threads to clog up with low-information, high-indignation rhetoric. If you want to be all non-elitey within those params, have at it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.
I'm sorry if my meager comment became work for you, however you do realize you are modding a 'hacker' forum, where social engineering is the purest and earliest form of 'hacking'? Consider that most of the original 'hackers' are/were looking for social equality, now while social media has been infiltrated by big money 'elites' to squash the lamentations of the poor and impoverished. Lastly, John D Rockefeller only bought into newspapers after Ida Tarbell exposed the ills he was incurring on American society.
If one can't wail at the wall of propaganda on a hacker news forum, where can impoverished ideologists still have a voice? All the main social media sites have been bought by 'elites', or hacked by their cohorts into oblivion when they don't play ball.
Really, in their view they were just trying to help people not be infected by false claims.
Mind you: it may even be worse. Not in terms of physical harm.
As I see it, there's lots of opinions, some are clearly wrong, and some are varyingly plausible. Annotating the clearly wrong ones isn't anything close to claiming that there is only one opinion.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.
I feel like something's evading me. Is it because I'm an old fart?
This has largely replaced forums
Facebook tried to make a separate groups product for people that just want groups and not the rest of Facebook
Just like Messenger can be used without a full Facebook account
It is higher value for users than the newsfeed other social network experience, but it mostly sucks too
The only reason it killed forums is because they lowered the effort barrier. Forums were great because it required logins, and a minimal level of competency in order to use it. Only people who really wanted to be part of the forum would join. A simple login was enough barrier to keep out people who didn't want to put in any effort to their contribution. Facebook made it so that you can just go click a button and upload a picture and contribute a shitpost with no effort.
It's not good for edgy discussion, but consider this: social media platforms are more like: "which platform is good for what type of interaction" vs. "is this a good social media platform or not?" When I want spazzy bullshit I go straight to /b. I avoid twitter, tumbler, and tiktok like that plague because I don't want to be a human garbage filter looking for diamonds in the rough. I go on Instagram sometimes for pretty stuff from people I kind of know.
Also, private special interest groups on Facebook are really excellent. There's nothing else like it. Sub Reddits are good for anonymous/psuedonymous general discussion, but for actually meeting and interacting with people who share your interests, and especially for sharing pictures/videos, I haven't seen anything better than Facebook. I'm a member of several music related Facebook groups - they get far more high quality participation (and fewer flame-wars) than comparable old-school web forums.
I don't understand what's wrong with a group chat in <your favorite messenger>?
Not arguing. Just lost. Completely lost.
I know that means publications like these which may have something important to add to the vaccine conversation, won't be able to have millions of "likes and shares"... but, who cares? Is that really such an important thing? Why is it so important for billions of random uninformed people throughout the internet to directly vomit out the first thought that comes into their head on topics like these?
I know I know, censorship, blah blah blah. I don't give a shit. To me, it's akin to somebody opting to turn off the comment section on a YouTube video that's bound to get a lot of heated debate. Just... publish your article, let actual news sites disseminate it, and do things the old fashioned way. That is, without the internet mob weighing in at every opportunity.
I know that the endgame of my argument is that Facebook would just be a site with cat pictures and status updates on what people are having for dinner. I don't care. That would be a world that is 100000 times better than the one we live in.
What, you think a tech monopoly will always be on your side? Or that someone will care when news that YOU care about will be censored / defeated / fake fact checked?
You're just a propaganda cog with such an attitude, no better than dumb antivaxers who don't care about facts either.
Funny how you downgraded "world" to "Facebook user experience" in your second comment.
Freedom of expression, as a principle, not as the literal 1st amendment text, is a bit more important to continued existence of our society than your Facebook experience. Unfollow your antivaxer friends if you can't bear them.
Have you been to a newsroom lately? If it isn’t on twitter, it’s not getting published.
How do you fact check a brand new fact?
The premise that there are some specially endowed people who, by virtue of their credentials, are the only ones able to mark things as true sounds like the core tenants of a religion, not a secular society!
Not the best way to make an argument against fact-checking.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI
I will concede that I spelled 'minix' wrong.
Tanenbaum did SAY that, but that is different from it being true.
Fact-checking doesn't mean just accepting the declaration of the more credentialed party in a debate that their view is expert consensus.
Or to make it less personal, how can someone fact-check information they aren't knowledgeable about?
I think it's reasonably fair for the policy for nobodies posting on social media to be that "new facts" (or "original research" in Wikipedia parlance), particularly those which may be harmful to public safety or marginalized groups should be either unpostable, or considerably reduced in how far they're able to spread organically (shadow-banning).
If you don't like it, go to some other social media network. For my part, I'd be content with a Facebook feed where none of the posts I'm seeing are "new" facts. OTOH, I'd also be content with a FB feed that was exclusively pics of my friends and their kids and very little news or politics at all.
Outside science I would recommend to delegate fact checking to knowledgeable persons. For brand new facts ask an expert.
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis...
The conclusions in the original BMJ article make zero sense when actually scrutinized.
Additionally, the fact they never reached out to the companies at all is telling enough of their agenda.
I'm actually more for community tools to do moderation correctly and for content to be moderated by "people I trust" within the community. So for example if someone who I've marked as trustworthy on science reporting marks a science story as fake news it's flagged for those of us who have marked the flagger as an authority.
People will say you are just encouraging echo chambers like this but I actually think it's inevitable and we all live in echo chambers. Having your views challenged is extremely hard work that we don't always have time or the inclination to work through day to day. Everyone is watching a different movie.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there were perverse incentives for the fact-checkers: Some claims take longer than others to evaluate, but I bet they're on some sort of metric based system. Or that 'I don't know' or 'it's unverifiable' aren't good enough answers even though that happens.
I also don't know if FB could GET that expertise at this point: I view big tech more kindly than most information specialists I know and I wouldn't work for FB even for six-figures.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I'm not defending what you're criticizing—I'm saying that on HN, criticism needs to be more substantive than this.
I think what I wanted to say is that it seems to me that a) the resources Meta throws at this are not sufficient to check facts properly, and b) that proper fact checking is a really difficult business.
a) because if they had used staff with minimal domain knowledge they would probably have been aware what BMJ is, that it is a trusted scientific journal that has peer-review in place. I don't know whether the article in question was peer reviewed, but I assume so. Either way, this didn't seem to play a role. Whoever fact-checked the article labeled BMJ a newsblog, so they have near-zero domain knowledge.
b) BMJ and all scientific journals which are worth their money employ experts to do the fact checking in peer review. Funny enough, these experts mainly do that work for free. Turns out that the experts place high value in fact-checked and verified information. Clearly, peer review takes a long time and wouldn't be suitable for facebook's quick turnaround. Or perhaps it would... if Meta designed a peer review process that takes Facebook's specific requirements into account. But that's a whole new approach to things, perhaps better developed in a startup and then bought out by Meta ;)
Not that peer-review is perfect, or that all experts are always right. But Meta needs to acknowledge that fact checkers are sometimes wrong, too. When that happens, there must be a way to correct the error. The BMJ having to write an open letter to Zuckerberg clearly indicates that this error correction doesn't work.
Why can't we have open discussions about "the facts?" Are we living in a democratic country or an authoritarian country? For those that say "Facebook is a private company, it can do whatever it wants on its platform," I think it's important to distinguish between the legal right for a company to do something and the moral character of their actions. In other words, Facebook may well be within their rights to do what they are doing, but that doesn't mean it is moral. Given that we are a "democratic" country, our moral judgements should weigh heavily against these types of authoritarian actions, even if they are legal.
I'll go a step farther. For those who say "facebook is a private company, it can do whatever it wants"... does that include taking a completely hands-off moderation policy? I'm pretty sure that the answer is no - because the U.S. government will step in if they try. They're already in legal trouble over the Myanmar/Rohingya thing - what we're seeing is not Mark Zuckerberg standing up for his moral principles. What we're seeing is government coercion.