"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.
p.s. Not defending fact-checkers, just trying to defend HN against tedious deterioration.
I'm also not particularly confident that these social media companies have safeguards in place to ensure that their 3rd-party fact checkers are operating in good faith.
I don't think you need to jump to the conclusion that they're always operating in bad faith though - I think much of this is explained by a lack of competence in a field, overworked employees, low standards, and groupthink.
So called experts are not unbiased in terms of political interests. Also, all should believe that power is corrupting yes? But so are institutional power centers (social media monopoly platforms, prestige journalist outfits, elite media, academia, "expert" authorities, etc) targets for political factions to wield said power to their own ends. Just as centralized businesses are targets for hackers and such, so to are they targets for political factions because of all the power they sit on that can be wielded one way or another.
There is no "unbiased", there is no disinterested, above-it-all players that mediate some universal truth for the masses. Even if one attempts to do this they will quickly be subverted by political actors pushing a message.
They had to do some "research" and then type those opinions word by word, sentence by sentence, and revise it several times, and do the review and proofing before it get published.
Is there any chance, during the whole process, it didn't come to their mind that it's their own opinion, not "facts"?
There is not a single chance. NO.
The other explanation is that they are being paid to control the narrative that the 'elites' order them to, by censoring anything outside their agenda.
Maybe a bit too simplistic of a description but essentially I agree. They know exactly what they are doing. Companies like FB, which hire them, also know exactly what they are doing. The reason to have these "fact checkers" is to add a layer of indirection and absolve FB of any bias. "It's not us, it's the independent fact checkers who are telling you what's right and wrong".
If they don't perform as expected, they get fired and replaced with another fact checker group and so on.