Turns out fact checking is hard and costs money. What's surprising is that Meta, which has capable staff and lots of money, can't seem to be bothered to do it properly.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.