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Comment by linuxhansl | Hacker News Reader

Let's please not throw out the baby with the bathwater and dismiss all fact checking as political, biases, or agenda-driven.

Not agreeing on basic facts in the prime problem in our current political discourse. Disagreement is usually a good problem to have and leads to testing the complete problem space.

What we are seeing now, though, is the absence of the problem space exploration. Instead any discussion is just dismissed by calling the other party's information "fake news". In that fact-checkers are crucial.

Can the fact checkers be wrong? Sure. Could they have an agenda? Sure. Let's fix that. Let's not dismiss them outright as some of the comment here suggest.

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Without getting into the specifics of any individual instance of fact checking, it is not at all clear that the presence of third party “fact checks” advances towards a shared understanding of “the facts”. It may be better for the state of the online discourse to have no “fact checkers” than for them to make perform in this way. And if such mistakes are inevitable given sufficient scale, that means it would better not to have such entities.

There is no such thing as fact-checking without an agenda. What would the incentives be? No agenda, no demand, no-one pays for it.

Is Facebook competent to be the fact checker? Demonstrably no. So, without necessarily having to judge the universe of possible fact-checking possibilities, we can say that what Facebook is doing isn't working.

I want statistics rather than "oh no they were wrongs once so let's just stop the entire effort" which is precisely what a lot of HN people are saying.

I think it's worth differentiating between "Reproduction Studies" and attempts to streamline the narrative and lets be honest the fact checking being called for and implemented in regards to social media mostly takes the form of "streamlining the narrative".

Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

It is not a bug it is a feature. Fact checkers are just propagandists/censors under a different name, contracted out to deny direct responsibility.

"dismiss all fact checking as political, biases, or agenda-driven." But they most certainly are! Facebook themselves admitted that their fact-checking is opinion-checking.

https://www.opindia.com/2021/12/facebook-accepts-that-its-th...

Let's remove the term "fact-checking" and replace it by "facebook sponsored opinion"

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