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Comment by AlexTWithBeard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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