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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Both Facebook (now Meta) and Youtube bungled their fact checking by disabling posts and videos that were counter to some narrative, but not factually incorrect. That places them in a bad position, and they need to be called out publicly, as no other mechanism so far has pushed them towards more accurate fact checking.

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I note how your comment has been largely ignored by... the massive numbers of Facebook and Google employees reading this site.

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.

What did the CDC lie about? (Honest question)

Am sure you can find plenty when you go down this rabbit hole but you can start here: https://twitter.com/us_fda/status/1429050070243192839

Thanks for trying to help out, but that's the FDA, not CDC. And this is a much murkier situation. Ivermectin does seem to help Covid, but it looks like that's correlation, not causation.

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.

You are right. Had a brain fart moment there. Still a good place to check as some of these official statements from the two leading public health bodies communicate the agreed-upon response to the disease.

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...

Read on hacker news that Ivermectin is correlated with helping covid because often people with covid in developing countries also have parasites, so the covid + parasite can kill them. So if you give everyone in a developing country ivermectin the ivermectin will kill the parasite and they won't have to fight two things at once.

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 :/.

About the efficacy of masks. They said they were not efficace to avoid hoarding and to reserve the small existing stock for medical professionals.

A lie is intentional. I'm not saying this is the case here because I haven't checked but if they believed that masks weren't effective then later changed their view because of new information or whatever that's not lying.

As a scientific organisation the public expect them to have opinions that are supported by data.

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.

". You cannot trust mainstream newspapers. " Which newspapers can you trust?

It used to be a pretty short list, like NYT and Washington Post. But since the Trump era... honestly? None of 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.

So where do you get your information? If newspapers can/will lie isn't that also possible with your source now?

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.

> It used to be a pretty short list, like NYT and Washington Post.

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.

While I agree with you for the most part, their responsibility should not be fact checking. That should be left to the individual.

They made themselves the fact checkers. If they're going to take the mantle of "fact checker", it is their responsibility to do it well.

On the contrary, it's politicians and old media who came up with the "fake news" slogan and demanded FB and others start censoring opposing viewpoints. FB is all too happy to help spread falsehoods and inflammatory articles since they both drive engagement.

No, "Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information."

"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"?

Thinking "misinformation is a problem" is not the same as thinking "politically biased corporations should censor what they deem to be misinformation in accordance with their own biases."

They only did it after being pressured by the same people that are now saying they should not have done it. It doesn't matter what they do at this point. They will come out as the bad guys regardless.

I think them being the same people is exceptionally unlikely

Seems to me that everyone agreed that Facebook had to do something about misinformation and that everyone is now outraged that they did. Where are the people defending the fact-checking they helped make reality? No, I think everyone just loves to hate on Facebook.

I never agreed that Facebook took a seat in the chair of fact checking. I’d rather, along with others, would’ve seen that Facebook got hammered with fines into obsolence for fueling the world with controversy and doing everything in their power to keep revenue on top of fact checking. In regard if facebooks approach, it is laughable what Facebook is doing on their scale. It is barely enough with the amount of persons, and the way they enable people to share as much shit as possible.

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.

I mean yes, when asking someone to clean a mess they did make, and they do it as spreading the mess around, to make it worse, then you still allowed to be mad at them about that mess.

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