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Comment by deft | Hacker News Reader

"fact checking" is bad. I'm not sure what the good version of it you imagine. By "fact checking in general" do you mean pointing out when someone is wrong? The parent comment sees fact checking as one thing: propaganda used to shut down heterodoxy. It has nothing to do with facts or truth.

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Fact checking is simply applying some standards to information. People do this in their own minds every day. Outsourcing it to others can be dangerous, but it's not inherently so. If you choose to believe something you read, you're placing your trust in someone else - a news organization, government, friends, family, whoever. If an organization set up for fact checking has published standards and list the violations of those standards when they deem something to be false or misleading, then why shouldn't you trust them? To be clear, I'm not suggesting Facebook fits the bill here - you attacked the very idea of fact checking, which, when done right, is a valuable thing to have in society, unless you just literally trust no third parties that present information to you.

If fact checking is bad, why are you wrapping it in quotation marks? Is there a difference between fact checking and "fact checking" implied here, and if so, what is that difference? Please elaborate.

In 2020, talking about the lab-leak theory was labelled "misinformation" and brutally purged from social media by "fact-checkers". In 2021, major news outlets started talking about it, and then it suddenly became ok to talk about it on social media again, and the "fact-checkers" did a complete 180 on the issue.

They're not checking facts, they're just enforcing the mainstream view. The mainstream view is often correct, but sometimes it isn't, and then the fact-checkers are just horribly wrong, and suppressing actual debate on the merits of an issue.

I think people kept it taboo for as long as they could because: people were literally dying due to low vaccination rates, which were caused in large part by such specious conspiracy theories. Fact checkers did not do a 180, it is still widely considered a conspiracy theory, and its very existence harms public health even if there's a remote possibility it's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

“Some scientists agree that the possibility of a lab leak should be examined as part of the ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19, though they have expressed concerns about the risks of politicization.”

The Wikipedia article is frankly disgusting. The two options are natural origins or leaking from a lab and currently there is more evidence for leaking from a lab. There is no debating this. The Wikipedia article has already chosen a conclusion with no evidence and also is slandering the other possibility for political reasons while simultaneously saying that it can't be the other potential cause because it might be politically motivated. Absolutely disgusting. I expect better from Wikipedia

There is no Wikipedia editorial board. If you disagree with the article, you can engage in the discussion regarding it and make edits of your own.

This reads like a lot of mental gymnastics attempting to excuse the inexcusable.

You argue that blocking debate is a righteous act because the theory's "very existence harms public health". I'd counter that the gagging of a concerned public breeds distrust that is vastly more harmful than allowing debate would have been.

Unfortunately this wikipedia article serves effectively as yet another type of political "fact checking". Multiple virologists have stated that the only evidence in existence currently points to a lab leak. Labelling it as a fringe or destructive "conspiracy theory" is complete BS and it's not even conspiratorial, it's called a mistake and lab leaks have happened in the past.

there is no difference, I put it in quotes because its newspeak.

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