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Comment by goopthink | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the points raised by BMJ and in the comments below, there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish. For example, are their fact checkers conducting their own scientific experiments validating claims and outcomes of a scientific paper? Are fact checkers reaching out to sources from a news article and verifying quoted information? When “breaking news” or “scoops” are reported presenting totally new information about the world, how can that be verified against other information that - by virtue of something being new - cannot be verified by other preexisting sources?

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.

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I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians.

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.

I'm French, live in China, so familiar from both countries with what you say.

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).

I see your point, but two objections.

- 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.

> 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.

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.

I'm not really sure I understand what you mean, sorry. Who would demand what? What's "editorial transparency"?

In France we mean by that that all newspaper have a public well accepted stance on the political spectrum, with candidates they push without hiding and ideologies they maintain.

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.

I think the biggest issue issue is FPTP. You need mixed representation to allow expression of a broader range of ideas imo

> we investigated together to realize she was sourcing it from a facebook post by our "the onion" equivalent !!!

The chained duck? (I prefer mine au confit, not enchainé.)

That would be a hard thing to achieve, given that we are talking about unnamed, unidentifiable groups.

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.

It's even worse than that. Groups inside the National Police do conspire against each other (I think there may be at least three of them) + Center of National Intelligence.

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.

I agree in principle but you're missing a small point: journalists are not proxies to the truth, they are proxies to a perspective.

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.

> 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

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.

For us to grow beyond entrenched binaries takes self awareness. Could you perhaps see how another doctor who hs caused harm before may have believed they were truly only doing good - and this could have been enabled by them being barraged with ethics reviews? "What do you mean i caused harm i have to do all these things to prove that i dont do harm" Meanwhile history shows clearly the sacrifices that were taken.

Being aware of biases is difficult in an attention-starved society, where specific opinions and confirmation biased news reports are pumped to social media with a Denial-of-Service-like frequency. Tribes have formed. We've gotten to a highly polarized society where every answer begins with "But they...". The most hardcore partisans I know follow and share news to essentially keep up with and mock what "They" are up to. I particularly avoid discussing politics with family and friends. I've started to tell my family and friends that there is no "They". There are only individuals. I'm also fairly convinced that roughly 5% of the population is insane, although the more political you become, you start to believe that number is closer to 50%.

I share that opinion (and hope) that a minority of the population is insane. However why does it feel like said insane are running the asylum.

Because insane (or angry, or radicalised) people are far more likely to vote or express political statements.

I actually like this idea of a status quo; but it depends on teaching children this from birth. In the US, I was taught that NYT and CNN are reputable and reliable sources of the truth. As an adult, I find them "pretty good" at best.

It's one thing to embrace diversity of opinion. However recently in the USA some right wing outlets have become nothing short of 50% straight lies and right-wing propaganda mixed in with some small amount of truthful reporting. See Newsmax or OANN which are mostly lies and Fox which is a strange mix of normal news and "opinion news" that often also full of lies but not as often as the others.

So what? Honestly, I don't understand the direction of your point.

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.

I would argue that hyper partisan outlets like Fox which don't even care to try to be truthful has exacerbated tribal nature of US politics and reduced its ability to actually have any meaningful competition of ideas. Sure, having a perspective or ideology is fine but I think out and out lying should have consequences. I think you need a regulator preventing misinformation. Beyond that, having a point of view - which you can back up with reasonable argument - is to be desired.

> you need a regulator preventing misinformation

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?

And now you are coming to the understanding that the first amendment is being weaponized against us. They're hacking our minds through emotions (especially anger) and imagery to further their funders corporate goals. I see no solution but having some regulation. They can be sued in the legal system for defamation, why not start with that as the bare minimum of conduct when reporting the news?

I love what you wrote here, a well written and fascinating take!

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.

> even a genius ... will forget to listen to the victims of the sacrifices he requires for the greater good, and that voice must be heard too

How do you know someone is a leftist? He will show you his fascist nature.

> but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style.

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.

Yes, political censorship is often called "fact checking". Facebook invented nothing new, and the sin is them trying to convince us otherwise. The increased censorship has been demanded by the Democrats, and Facebook is obeying.

This will be some snark in this comment, but against my own country and not you and yours. I invite a cross-cultural comment on competence.

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.)

In Spain journalism is lazy, but instances of poor writing are much less common than in the anglosphere. They do clickbait, but maybe it's because the spanish language is more formal than english, you can't really bee too creative without writing something meaningless.

This comment needs several fact checks

How is spanish more formal than english? You can write in a formal way or in a less formal one, like in most languages.

English is a bit notorious for "allowing" a lot of creative play with words (like that old quote of "every word can be verbed").

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)

> With more thought, perhaps the inferrable punctuation intended 'Disqualifying-And-Ingored'

Yup, that's how I parsed it.

I had to re-read it to find why someone might think it was nonsensical.

I think this is a pretty good summary for the US as well.

> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu.

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.

> 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

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...

> It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism"

I’m sorry this is the impression you were given because my intention was the exact opposite.

> Isn’t this a bit much?

Given the state of American journalism, it is if anything overly kind.

> Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing.

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.

I don’t disagree with this. I even like the way you put journalism in quotation marks. I (and apparently their legal representatives in many cases) consider those news stations you mentioned to be more entertainment than journalism. Put another way, the point of my original comment was that good journalists make mistakes too, but that shouldn’t mean anyone can be a journalist or there is no expertise required to do so. It should mean the opposite. What I’m beginning to take away from this and some of my other replies is that it’s become practically impossible to tell the good, bad, and poser journalists apart. I just don’t want that to mean that we devalue journalism as a whole.

We only effectively have 2 political parties in the USA. there are some other parties but all together they only make up 5-10% depending on the given year. Libertarian and Greens are probably the only ones worth mentioning from a statistical point of view. About 40% of Americans register as independent (no party) but when you talk to them they are usually strongly invested in one party or the other.

In the US, there was a brief period when real fact-checking existed. Then the political activists saw that the regular press had lost all credibility, but the fact-checking brand still retained some, so they made a hard push to take them over. Which by the time of covid has been already mostly complete, and with the push to fight "medical misinformation" (which was quickly defined as any information that contradicts the currently approved doctrine, no matter how scientifically based, factually correct or practically useful) "fact-checking" has been completely subverted to serve the preferred narrative and suppress any heretical thought.

> 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.

Thing is, if the idea is to stop wrong conspiracy theories from veing talked about, it makes sense to ban legitimate science that points in the direction of the conspiracy. If you want to do propaganda, then misinformation is useful. But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder.

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.

> But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder.

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/...

Using an article critical of the pfizer trials in a well balanced truthful way is one thing. Using that same article to argue that e.g. the government is trying to poison us (or microchip us) is another thing entirely.

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.

Spot on, the question is, do you trust BMJ?

I think BMJ has a pretty convincing reputation. So how can ANY fact checker flag an article from them without really good arguments?

There is a serious flaw in the way schools teach people about propaganda, that leaves people believing that propaganda is synonymous with lying, and if a claim is factual then it isn't propaganda. Propaganda is any communication that is calculated to further an agenda. Propaganda uses truth, lies, everything in-between, and everything else (claims that don't lay on the truth-lie continuum at all; e.g. subjective values.)

That definition would forbid any kind of "call to action" communication, would it?

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?

> "fact-checking" has been completely subverted to serve the preferred narrative and suppress any heretical thought

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?

People rarely get anything right. We do the best we can based on the time- and information available while trying not to bite the hand that feeds us. Fact checkers are no different.

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.

In regards to medical “fact checking” at least ( though obviously extended to pretty much anything ) the same people who tell me men can get pregnant and women have penises are the same ones telling me the vaccine is good. The same people who “fact checked” covid passports as a conspiracy theory a year ago and the same ones “fact checking” it as effective and necessary now. The same people who call me selfish for wanting to live normal after so long and the same ones having galas and parties for themselves.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like being gas lighted.

I do not believe fact checks. They have zero credibility.

This is a good one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

Oof.

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.

Remember the lab leak conspiracy theory, that got people banned on the spot? Every fact checker would tell you there's no scientific basis for it, every scientist worth of their name is opposing to it and it's a complete fabrication spread around by conspiracy nuts. Except it turned out not only it is not so, but people who said it knew it wasn't so and were lying because of vested interests, which they failed to disclose and hoped to keep hidden, but "conspiracy nuts" revealed it and the house of cards collapsed. For example:

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.

Remember that the ones spreading this theory before any evidence of any kind, were very much pushing a biowarfare angle. They still are but now they are more diluted ammong the larger group supporting a lab leak theory.

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.

I read the entire link you posted. The conclusion presented lacks nuance. But other than that I see no issue with that debunking. Even drawing that conclusion is understandable at the time it was initially published. But I agree, the conclusion was too categoric for the nuance presented in the rest of the article. They even mention that a leak is a possibility being investigated. Now, since that possibility has more standing, they even retracted the article. They did not delete it, they uptated it with a notice at the very top and it is there for everyone to read.

You are misrepresenting that article.

Do you believe covid is a bioweapon?

Not exactly doubting you, but is this really accurate? I hear a lot of "fact checkers are biased marxist commies" coming from people who just don't like it when "their side" is criticised.

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)

I would disagree with fact checkers being “biased and bad” in Spain. Some political parties have copied the misinformation spreading style, and they probably don’t like being called out.

Some of them are straight up clowns:

> 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.

Definitely wouldn't be the case in the US, they're fact checkers must be entirely legit because the media and politicians say so...

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.'

> there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish

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.

This sounds vaguely familiar. Do you think the people who created this site had recurring opinions on a particular type of punctuation?

You could work for the media/press if it was worth it as a side gig. But they tend to pay badly.

I am not a fan of Facebook, but this is one reason they did not want to get into being the arbiter of what is true (Along with a lot of other less noble reasons). There are indeed things that are demonstrably not true, or presented in a very misleading manner, but there's a whole class of things that are in between.

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.

If Facebook doesn't want to be arbiter, they should stop arbitrating.

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.

The moment Facebook stops trying to be the arbiter is the moment the government steps in and places heavy regulations on them.

Facebook's algorithmic outrage amplification is necessary to prevent an overbearing government from forcibly reverting parasocial norms to a simple chronologically sorted inbox?

A chronologically sorted inbox is the worst possible world for The Facebook. How can you boost user engagement with advertisers if you don’t use algorithms that repost years old stories of that time your dog died?

> A chronologically sorted inbox is the worst possible world for The Facebook.

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.

I don’t know exactly what you mean, but from a legal perspective, Facebook most certainly does not “own” anyone’s content by virtue merely of putting it in someone’s News Feed.

You didn't really give any legal perspective. Either Facebook owns the content and the liability as a publisher, or it's a platform and shouldn't fixing content towards what they want to show.

You're not making any sense. From a liability standpoint, there is no legal distinction between platform and a publisher.

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.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/153

Facebook is not a common carrier, but enjoys liability protections under the CDA Safe Harbor:

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.

You are mixing up two legal concepts: one is intellectual property ownership; the other is liability for republishing what others say. They are two different bodies of law: IP law (copyright/trademark) and tort law (libel etc.). They are analyzed under separate legal lenses.

Facebook can allow whatever they like on their website and it is perfectly legal. I would rather they filter out 98% of the tripe with a 2% fail rate (sorry BJM!)

You'd think so, but in doing so you've just imagined the world's most terrifying propaganda tool.

Exactly, let’s not forget that any story that refers to Taiwan being an independent country is marked as “fake news” in some parts of the world which has a chilling effect.

Why do we assume our own governments will also be immune from the same temptations?

They're not. Israel has the Hasbara team. KSA has the "lord of the flies" troll farm. Britain has the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, and the Integrity Initiative. But by far the best is Operation Mockingbird.

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.

It's not a matter of truth or not. They suppressed an article reporting on whistleblower accusations and documents backing them up.

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.

Oh, they did want to get into arbitering very much, and they got into it. What they didn't want is responsibility for their actions. They wanted to ban whoever they wanted to ban, but never be questioned on either the fact or the lack of ban in any particular case, and on the random and inconsistent enforcement of any "policies" they might have. They wanted - and still want - all the power and none of the responsibility.

I wonder how much more expensive would it be to have "explainers" instead of "fact-checkers".

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.

you just reinvented the news journalist...

Well, with the decline of newspapers there should be plenty of unemployed journalists who'll be happy to spread some knowledge around FB for a moderate fee?

Or - this thought scares me the most - FB actually doesn't care about facts?

Worse, FB doesn't care about the facts and neither do journalists anymore. All that matters is clicks and political leanings.

Journalists dont exist to spread knowledge. They exist to spread ideologies.

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.

Facebook "fact checks" are, according to Facebook's attorneys, just opinions[1].

[1] https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/13/facebook-quietly-admits...

Well, they surely are. The stupid part it's that they are opinions of people that have no business having an opinion on such matters, them having no related qualifications, no education, no access to facts, not doing any research or having any idea how the research is done at all - and their opinion is taken as one trumping the opinion of the actual experts in the field. Out of all possible opinions Facebook chooses the worst to listen to.

Facebook cares about advertising revenue. They only care about "facts" when content posted by users causes advertiser boycotts, or attracts unwanted attention from powerful politicians.

Google and Facebook are a direct cause of the decline in the quality of newspapers and journalism in general through their intentional strategy to capture as much of the value from news as possible, even though they created none of the actual content.

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?

But that has been done again and again.

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.

Correct. The last step needed: the debunkers need to debunk the myths not in their cozy groups and websites, but in the enemy's lair. This achieves two purposes:

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.

This is great in theory if each individual has the ability to arrive at the same conclusion as the “debunkers”. They don’t, so they fallback to trust, and that’s when it all breaks down.

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.

Most people are quite reasonable and can be convinced.

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.

Such a fantasy. This is exactly how it happens. And they literally just respond to the “debunking” post with garbage and move on. It’s not about information, it’s about emotion and tribe.

Not always.

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

Actually, I saw some "Climate Facts" blob from Facebook on a post that was extremely tangentially related, but the glorious Algorithm had apparently decided it was a discussion on climate change, and therefore needed to insert itself into it, making sure there was no wrongthink, or something.

Completely tone-deaf, and therefore extremely off-putting. I would not be surprised if an effort like that completely backfires.

A mandatory prayer at school is the best way to breed an atheist.

'existential crisis' : citation needed backed by actual model of the universe and human behavior.

Thanks for proving my argument

Extraordinary claims need extra-ordinary proof.

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

OP is not making the claim that Earth will stop spinning tomorrow though. Nor did OP mention 50 years. Nor does OP need to prove global warning, since many others have done that. Not that you'd read it but here's a readable summary of the evidence, https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-chan...

Global Warming by 2-3 degress doesn't imply human extinction (or even the leading cause of deaths).

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.

I think the easiest (?) thing to do would be to create automated tools to help individuals raise the level of debate when they encounter disinformation. Something where you could paste in a comment and get some analysis which included a) a classification about the specific kind of disinformation, b) an analysis of different kinds of sentiment, c) suggestions for how to reach the person spreading the disinformation, and d) other recommended strategies.

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.

Funnily enough, Facebook tried that shit as well with covid. I saw them pop up an extra icon in the comment field. "Insert a GIF", "Insert a Smiley", "Insert a Covid fact"

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.

As the letter points out, in this particular case, fact checking is not hard.

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.

No.. the fact checker should also make sure true facts aren't being used out of context causing the reader come to incorrect conclusions. That's what is happening with the BMJ article.

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

What incorrect conclusion and who came to it?

The BMJ article being discussed points out flaws in the medical validation of the covid vaccine. While true, this medical journal article is being used by the anti-vaccination advocates to make a more general claim that the vaccine is ineffective/dangerous/evil, etc.

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.

Please do not protect me from the truth even if it leads me to inconvenient conclusions.

BMJ is protecting you from the truth by hiding additional relevant information.

That’s not fact checking, that’s reputation assessment.

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.

Under that system a young German scientist who wrote about the photovoltaic effect would be ignored and classified as non-reputable. Just saying being part of the institutions doesn't make on right it makes one prominent.

This isn't about the inherent limits of fact-checking (substantial though they are). It's about the inherent bias of Facebook's fact-checking.

All arbiters of truth will eventually end up deferring to whatever the current holders of power wants the narrative to be as that is the nature of power and authoritative fact-checking is merely one more aspect of how power is exercises.

> there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish

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)

Indeed, as we saw in the recent-ish fact checking failure by the New Yorker about the "rent-a-family" business in Japan: https://newrepublic.com/article/160595/new-yorker-japan-rent...

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 [...]

"Fact checking" by social media giants is an inherent farce, which would be laughable if it weren't leading to people getting oppressed and killed and governments being perverted.

Overall they are doing more good than harm. Quickly cutting disinformation about covid and sending hateful racist/terroristic politics down the toilet where it belongs is important even if they mess up occasionally. I would have them hire fact checkers than just let the garbage that floats around freely on facebook not get shutdown.

The BMJ, ironically, is prone to publishing articles that make unverified claims without making clear rather significant conflicts of interest.

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).

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