Facebook said my article was false – now the fact-checkers admit they were wrong | Hacker News Reader

Facebook said my article was false – now the fact-checkers admit they were wrong

reason.com

494 pointsnradov682 comments

Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning. It is inherently biased. The heavy political leanings of those in direct control of the organizations' verdicts are brought up time and time again, and even memes are being made about sites like Snopes. My favorite meme goes something like:

Did x member of y political organization get arrested for hitting some in the head with a baseball bat?

FALSE.

[big block of text]

X member of y political organization was arrested for hitting someone in the head with a cricket bat.

[big block of text]

Whenever I see a Snopes article where the claim is similar to the facts, but some parts are off, they use "Mixed", not "False".

> baseball bat? [...] cricket bat.

In my experience, Snopes would have rated that "Mostly true" or "Mixture". Do you have examples where they've given a clearly misleading rating?

Are you questioning the veracity of memes sir?

No, just checking facts.

For example, this whole article just should not exist:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-p...

There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form:

"X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say that's wrong."

i.e. "fact-checking" a prediction about something that will happen in the future. Unless you're clairvoyant, that isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't happened yet! So any rating at all is misleading.

I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse will happen. But they do it for economic and social and political issues. They just shouldn't, at all.

"Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some category that has magically different standards or incentives than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart, skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and motivations of every other news outlet.

When you say that "this whole article just should not exist", are you stating that predictions should never be investigated, validated, measured against the statements of experts? Or are you just quibbling that it shouldn't count as "fact checking"? The former seems silly and the latter gets a shrug from me (who cares if there's a better phrase than "fact checking").

Of course the predictions should be investigated and validated, but only after the events have come to pass. If you're going to write something beforehand (e.g. contrasting the predictions of various experts), don't call it a fact-check, because it's not about facts, it's about opinions. Informed, educated opinions yes, but still fundamentally opinions.

That's fairly absurd on its face.

There are many important predictions to be made about medium term outcomes (say, in the 5-25 year range).

If someone says "We will never develop grid-level energy storage because elves cannot fly, therefore renewable energy is hopeless", we don't have to wait one second to investigate and (in)validate this claim.

If someone says "Sea level will drop by 3m within 15 years because today's cows are farting less", we do no thave to wait 15 years to investigate and (in)validate this.

If someone says "Astronomical body N28291k will hit the earth at 13:45 on Dec 2nd 2037", we do not need to wait until 2037 to investigate and validate the claim.

If someone says "The cost of coal will decrease by 20% over the next 10 years", when all known reserves of coal are more difficult to access than historical ones and when demand for coal appears to be dropping, we do not need to wait 10 years to investigate and (in)validate this.

the first two things you said are preposterous strawmen, the third I already mentioned, the fourth is wrong. you don't know what will happen in 10 years, maybe some new coal extraction technology will be invented, maybe new sources will be discovered, maybe it becomes possible to economically extract the CO2 from the smokestacks and coal becomes green and gets tons of subsidies. yeah it's unlikely, but it's not something you can "fact-check". it does violence to the meaning of the term.

imagine telling someone ten years ago that oil prices would go negative, which they did last year.

and apart from all of this, for every example you can give me of an obvious black-and-white issue where you really could fact-check it 10 years in advance, there will be 99 others where it's really not so clear-cut, but partisans want there to be fact-checker approved talking points for their side. and the market will fill this demand. for subjects outside your domain-expertise, good luck telling the difference.

> yeah it's unlikely, but it's not something you can "fact-check". it does violence to the meaning of the term.

One of the points of fact-checking is to point out to "yeah, it's unlikely" to people who would not otherwise know.

Lots of claims are made about stuff, in particular climate change and energy supplies, that completely fall into the "yeah, it's unlikely" zone, and yet most ordinary readers and viewers would not know this.

It's always going to be in the interest of someone to say "this might happen by the year XXXX". There's generally no shortage of black-swan boosterism. Having someone step who actually knows the field step in and point out that yes, it might happen but it almost certainly will not is of incredible value.

Your response reminds me of the situation in the current satirical movie "Don't Look Up", where because the probability of an asteroid colliding with earth is only 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president decides it's OK to "sit tight and assess". I mean, sure it could miss, and *"yeah, it's unlikely but...."

> One of the points of fact-checking is to point out to "yeah, it's unlikely" to people who would not otherwise know.

Saying some prediction about the future is unlikely to be correct is not fact-checking. That's the whole point. Predictions aren't facts. Unlikely predictions aren't false facts. They're unlikely predictions.

> because the probability of an asteroid colliding with earth is only 99.7%, not 100%, the fictional US president decides it's OK to "sit tight and assess".

Saying that it is a good idea to act on predictions that are overwhelmingly likely is not the same as saying that those predictions are facts.

If you want to improve other people's critical thinking skills, you need to make sure yours are good. Calling predictions facts and acting as if they're the same thing is not good critical thinking.

> Saying some prediction about the future is unlikely to be correct is not fact-checking. That's the whole point. Predictions aren't facts. Unlikely predictions aren't false facts. They're unlikely predictions.

Our culture has become filled with a certain kind of noise in which people who frequently don't know what they are talking about make predictions about the future. I don't really care what you want to call a counter-balancing trend to that - I would agree that "fact-checking" for things that are clearly predictions is likely not the best term, but it's not the worst either, since frequently the process of pointing out just how ridiculous the predictions are will involve using actual facts. So in that context, "fact checking" does not mean "check that the facts claimed are correct", it means "check the facts underlying the prediction".

But call it what it should be called or not, it's still a valuable act.

> Our culture has become filled with a certain kind of noise in which people who frequently don't know what they are talking about make predictions about the future.

Focusing on "fact-checking" in general, let alone expanding it to include "prediction checking", worsens the huge amount of noise in our culture of supposedly authoritative pronouncements being made that turn out to be wrong. The Facebook "fact check" that is the subject of the article we are discussing is a case in point. If Facebook weren't so fixated on trying to remove "noise" through "fact checking", they wouldn't be going overboard all the time and removing things that aren't noise at all, but useful dissent.

Also, the very term "fact checking", as it is being used in our culture now, is a Russell conjugation (someone else brought up Russell conjugations elsewhere in this thread). Facebook is "fact checking" (actually their outsourced third parties who remain anonymous and unaccountable are doing it, but let that pass); those who support Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "helping to spread authoritative information"; those who question Facebook (and other "fact checkers") are "questioning authority" (even if they cite actual facts).

In short, while I agree that our culture is filled with noise, I don't think all the noise is from individuals who don't know what they're talking about; I think a lot of it is from organizations who don't like to have their power and authority questioned.

I am a fact checker, you are a journalist, he is spreading harmful disinformation.

I haven't provided any information at all. I provided some opinions. If you're actually a fact checker, that would seem to behavior that plays directly into the critiques of such work. However, I suspect this remark is just a play on the "they are stubborn, i am persistent" trope, in which case I don't see the relevance at this point in this sub-thread.

yes it's a russell conjugation joke (and an example of something that is blindingly obvious to one person, and evidently not to another)

https://xkcd.com/1053/ of course

I would agree that "fact checking" (at least of several varieties) is not unambiguously good, and may in fact turn out to be harmful, quite possibly for reasons not directly related to the content of "fact checking" itself. I would also agree that the case discussed in TFA is a good example of "fact checking" that likely does more harm than good.

However, that doesn't mean that the concept of "fact checking" is inherently problematic. It could be that there is no way in our current culture of doing anything remotely like what "fact checking" probably needs to be. To me, that's still not an argument against the concept, even if it is necessary to accept for now, the actual execution issues force us all to be profoundly skeptical about it.

> that doesn't mean that the concept of "fact checking" is inherently problematic

Perhaps not, but I think there are wrinkles in it that you might not be considering.

First, if "fact checking" just means "consulting other sources of information to see if they say the same thing", then you have to deal with the question of the credibility of those other sources of information. No source of information is always right. Nor is any "fact checker" always right in judging the relative credibility of sources of information. Ultimately, unless you have your own personal knowledge of some fact, any "fact checking" is going to come down to which sources you trust and which sources you don't. Those are always judgment calls and there will always be some degree of residual skepticism, so citing "fact checks" as if they were authoritative is problematic.

Second, if you try to go beyond that and actually do things like independent experiments to check claims (for example, when scientists try to replicate experiments or studies), then you're not really checking on previous facts, you're creating new facts, which you are then going to use to judge the validity of previous claims. But those previous claims were not factual claims but theoretical ones (for example, doing study B to help in judging the claim "study A shows that treatment X is effective against illness Y"). And again, these kinds of comparisons are judgment calls (sure, sometimes you uncover strong evidence that, for example, the data in study A was fabricated, but study B alone won't tell you that).

> t could be that there is no way in our current culture of doing anything remotely like what "fact checking" probably needs to be.

The critical problem I see with the Facebook case is that their "fact checking" results in something more than just publishing whatever Facebook's ultimate judgment is on some website (as, for example, Snopes and other "fact checking" sites do). Facebook's "fact checking" has other consequences, such as blocking access to things people have posted. And since our current culture seems to be fixated on using "fact checking" in this way, not just to arrive at judgments which are then published as speech, for the reader to take or leave, but to take actions that amount to filtering, restricting, or blocking other speech, yes, I think our current culture is not really capable of doing the limited kind of things that "fact checking" properly done would consist of.

> And again, these kinds of comparisons are judgment calls (sure, sometimes you uncover strong evidence that, for example, the data in study A was fabricated, but study B alone won't tell you that).

Making statements like "these kinds of comparisons are judgement calls" is precisely what I'd consider to be a part of any good "fact checking".

> Ultimately, unless you have your own personal knowledge of some fact, any "fact checking" is going to come down to which sources you trust and which sources you don't. Those are always judgment calls and there will always be some degree of residual skepticism, so citing "fact checks" as if they were authoritative is problematic.

If you follow through on this as far as possible, you vanish in a cloud of solipsism. If it is not possible to establish some ground rules for epistemological truth, then really things have just completely fallen apart (which, indeed, to some extent they have).

> Making statements like "these kinds of comparisons are judgement calls" is precisely what I'd consider to be a part of any good "fact checking".

But the very fact that judgment calls are involved means that it isn't "fact checking"; it's not just reporting facts and giving obvious "true" or "false" labels to statements.

> If you follow through on this as far as possible, you vanish in a cloud of solipsism.

Oh, please. Saying that other people might not be trustworthy as sources of information is not at all the same as saying that other people don't exist.

> If it is not possible to establish some ground rules for epistemological truth

The problem isn't "epistemological truth". The problem is that people have many reasons for not telling the truth, either because they have incentives to deliberately lie or because they have incentives to fool themselves.

In theory the idea of "just tell the truth as best you know it", independently of any incentives to do otherwise, sounds good. But in practice it never works out that way. The present time is not exceptional for the low level of trustworthiness of information; it's exceptional for how widespread the consequences of that are. Our culture has a belief that if only everyone would just listen to the "right" authorities, everything would work out fine. The idea that there are no "right authorities" at all and never have been--that every adult human being needs to have their own set of critical thinking skills, and that if some piece of knowledge is important to you, you have to make the effort to verify it for yourself, and that there is no way to avoid this by any form of social organization--is not one that our culture wants to consider. With what results, we see.

Hey, you know you are right.

Every time a prediction is made in connection to a fact-check, the prediction should be falsified 100% immediately. You are right, we don't have to wait.

They should have called it bullshit check and all claims about the future not backed by data and scientific modelling should be automatically marked as BS.

Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being undoubtedly true. This is a big part of the widening divide between right and left, which is a major issue.

> Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being undoubtedly true.

In my experience, people with poor critical reading skills don't read. Instead they just regurgitate what they heard on FOX, which is that fact check websites are a liberal scam.

> In my experience, people with poor critical reading skills don't read. Instead they just regurgitate what they heard on FOX

The same thing happens on the left with the New York Times. Laziness is a trait orthogonal to political party.

False equivalence. Fox went to court to call themselves entertainment because of all the verifiable lies they were pushing. In court, Tucker Carlson said “no reasonable person” would believe him.

New York Times standards are much higher than Fox. Are they perfect? No. But generally they are far less likely to lie to you.

You're trolling us, right? Maddow won a nearly identical court case using a nearly identical defense.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/a-court-ruled-rachel-maddow...

When did Rachel Maddow switch to being part of the New York Times? Or is it all just "liberal" media?

I complain about all USA corporate media, perhaps more accurately described as "war media". I don't recognize a difference between "conservative" and "liberal" flavors, since they are about as distinct as Coke and Pepsi. It isn't a surprise that both Carlson and Maddow use these techniques, since they both learned from Roger Ailes. NYT like to pretend they are somehow above these clowns, but they too have lied us into our every war. The idea is that fools will pay lots of attention to the spectacle of false disagreement and ignore the actual policies of every politician in the employ of billionaires.

The NYT is using a near identical defense in an ongoing libel lawsuit from James O'Keefe.

Source? That’s very hard to believe.

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/nytimes-project-veritas-defamati...

> Calling it a fact check (even implicitly) causes people with poor critical reading skills - to wit, almost everyone - to interpret the expert opinion as being undoubtedly true.

People with poor critical reading skills will probably just accept (or, if it conflicts with the preexisting world view, reject) the original claim as true without referencing a “fact check” at all.

That likely depends heavily on which one they read first.

Predictions shouldn't exist because noone is clairvoyant.

Clearly people can and do make predictions and sometimes those predictions are quite right - and sometimes wrong. Even a really really good predictor like Nate Silver gets things wrong.

Future predictions are not fact checkable. You can argue likelihoods, present contrary evidence or whatnot but predictions are not facts, they are predictions.

A good predictor gives odds to every outcome. That is not something a fact checker can respond to well.

> Even a really really good predictor like Nate Silver gets things wrong.

That's because if he doesn't use mathematical modelling and data he's only ever accidentally correct. There's no such thing as good predictor. If you don't use knowledge (and the only real knowledge comes from scientific process) you can't get your predictions better than chance.

It's a combination of brief luck and "predicting" the obvious.

With interesting personality you can make a good career out of predicting that dice roll will result in >1. You'll by wrong in less than 20% of cases.

Being good predictor is getting popular while you are on the roll. There's nothing else going there.

All predictions that don't have a form of scientific paper with clear mathematical model and ample data are just making stuff up and should be labelled as BS in all media.

World doesn't need prophets.

Knowledge is not a binary. The world is not a mix of "true" and "false", especially not in the realm of analyzing future outcomes.

You need to not only get multiple analysis, but normalize them, give them confidence scores and then interpret them - and you may interpret them differently than their authors. You may entirely discard some.

How do you get a confidence score? Sure sometimes we can analyze the history of an analysis such as with political polling where we have someone like Rasmussen who has done it for a long long time... but you still need to account for changes in their own process. If Rasmussen gets a new head data scientist tomorrow, does that alter our confidence level?

"Just use math!" is about the same as saying "Just don't be wrong!". Math is a tool, not a magic 8 ball.

Knowledge is not binary. Knowledge is a subset of science. If you draw from outside of science you can't have any knowlegde. An can't make any predictions or even evaluations of the present better than chance.

I am not sure about Snopes, but Politifact sure has several like the OP's example

This is not at all my experience with snopes. They've been pretty transparent from what I've seen.

The issue in my opinion is that there are various, almost-equally "true" perspectives that can be reenforced with facts and presented. That there is no single objective truth to all matters means that biases (political, religious, etc.) act as a lens and the "truth" presented on fact-checking sites (and elsewhere) is shaped by this lens. This is why you can have news organizations with different political slants painting a story two entirely different ways, without directly lying.

I disagree. There are definitely some things that are completely and entirely false, not left up to speculation.

My point was more that Snopes tends to indicate when something isn't clear-cut.

Out of curiosity I googled the current state of articles regarding "Wuhan Lab Leak" theory and potential NIH connection to gain of function research. Both issues that aren't clear-cut but have compelling evidence. None of these articles show the nuance you are claiming they would show.

Except for the time that Snopes fact checked this article as "disputed": "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication". (The article was very clearly labeled as satire.)

https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008

1 is a very small sample set.

did you really expect someone to have published a peer-reviewed study in a high quality journal about how many times snopes was misleading?

The claim was that fact checkers write misleading verdicts with political biases, one example is sufficient enough to verify that claim.

I liked it better when the internet had a sense of humor.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cnn-washing-machine/

It has the rating "Labeled Satire" not "disputed".

Snopes edited their page after reasonable people pointed out how stupid they looked for fact checking a joke.

Snopes exists in large part because idiots can't discern joke/fake from fact. This isn't really Snope's fault. Some people genuinely don't understand satire. We hear about people sharing Onion articles legitimately still.

Poe's law. I don't know if we need to call people who fall for that 'idiots'. Do people who fall for April 1st jokes count as 'idiots'? Furthermore, can you cure from being an idiot? We used to April 1st a bit on elementary school. I guess I managed to define some idiots back then.

Do you think they look less "stupid" for having to point out that there is no evidence for a cannibalistic, baby-eating cabal of pedophilic Democrat sex-traffickers?

Seems like a pretty thin line between satire and reality these days.

They only retroactively changed this later. Web Archive didn't archive that page for a whole 3 years unfortunately, but you can see in this article that Snopes initially issued the verdict of "false".

https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_ca49020f-5d05-5649-b1c...

So it was labelled "false" and not "disputed" as claimed by nradov? Then it is hard for me to see how this is an example of the phenomenon that hereforphone discusses.

Haha.

Remember that time with Donald Trump quoted "The Babylon Bee"?(BTW, The Bee is CLEARLY Christian Satire) That was pretty good stuff.

A day later, The Bee had an article "Trump declares Babylon Bee the most trusted news in America"

To be fair, in the age of Q, it is kind of hard to find the line.

Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak. Reality is the whole Acitvist Industrial Complex and many elites, who have financial ties w/ China including HN favorites like Apple and Amazon [3][4], are trying to regain control of the narrative they lost because of internet.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/

[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

[3] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-ch...

Lol at 1.

> Did COVID-19 Originate in Market 400 Meters From CCP Lab Studying Coronaviruses?

False. The wuhan lab for coronaviruses is actually 15km away.

In my experience, that's how left wing disinformation works. Using rhetorical tricks to mislead the audience. It's even more ironic when most left wing journalists and pundits are followers of Foucault and Derrida.

In this specific example, given the context (that a virus would have a simple time going 400 meters from lab to market via some host), isn't the difference between 400m and 26km valid to point out?

Hahaha, nice point!

Hi, I've been revisiting an old thread from way back in April of 2020, and you are the only person that replied to me that appears to still be active on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22958528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22965328

I'm @maxharris9 on Twitter, and I would like to see what every person that replied to me has to say now.

Link an example please

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-freed-chil...

She chuckled, but she didn't laugh. False?

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/clintons-1975-rape-case/

Well she did laugh. True?

Binary opposites for this detail, depending on which you are citing.

They both say the same thing. She laughed at some points during the interview, but not about the outcome of the case.

A chuckle is a quiet or inward laugh. All chuckles are laughs but not all laughs are chuckles.

> They both say the same thing.

They say some of the same things. The conclusions are different, despite the material to the fact. This is an example, as requested.

Both links place the 'laughed' piece of the claim in the 'true' column of the analysis, with more accurate characterizations and contextualization of 'about it'

I think the more salient factor is which facts they choose to check. Better to leave some stories un-checked, so they can be dismissed as only reported by right-wing sources.

In one instance, PolitiFact requested NewsBusters to prove a chart on illegal immigration they posted was true, with the implied threat of labeling it false. When NewsBusters complied within the 14 hour window given, proving their claims true, PolitiFact did.. nothing. No post telling NewsBuster's claim was proven true.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2021/04/21/p...

Sure, but give examples and you often start to find that the topics are so far afield from reality that they don't merit the cost of a fact-check.

Snopes has fact-checked claims that Donald Trump said Earth is flat (false) but not whether Earth is flat, and they won't fact-check that any time soon.

They won't fact-check that if Donald Trump claimed it?

No, they won't fact-check "Earth is flat" because it would be a waste of resources; the evidence Earth is a globe is overwhelming.

You're being downvoted for no reason I can tell, other than the fact that NewsBuster is a source popular with right-wing audiences. There are people on HN who basically will downvote anything they perceive as being supportive of their political enemies, with no regard to the content of the message. Message to those downvoting this:

If your position on free speech changes depending on who is doing the moderating, you don't have a position on free speech.

I had the oddest experience in trying to upvote his comment. I’m on mobile so it may just be be that. But, when I upvoted, there was a small delay but it seemed to register a downvote. So I unvoted and tried again. Same thing. Anyway, assuming HN mods do not have some switch that turns every vote into a downvote on particular comments. I think it’s fine to space out the upvote/downvote buttons. Users shouldn’t be losing minutes of their life trying to convince themselves that their vote was properly registered.

If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion, then your votes get disabled and/or inverted. I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm. Some call it an echo chamber, others call it "consensus". There will always be a contrived justification.

what?

> If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion, then your votes get disabled and/or inverted.

Um, what? I don't believe that for a second - that sounds crazy. Is there evidence for this? I'm willing to be educated. Er, fact-check please. (And the strange phrasing "I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm" sounds like Dang didn't 'confirm' it.)

Use the email link at the bottom of the page.

So, that's a "no" - there's no evidence. (I looked at your recent comment history, came across this[0] which I consider completely deranged, so I'm not too interested in doing what you say. Chomsky & Herman's seeing no atrocities in Cambodia, and you seeing them everywhere in Australia, seem some kind of dual.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28834724

I deliberately post against the consensus on HN, and what you see is the result. I invite you to email Dang as I have, but I will not post the transcript of what began as a private conversation.

It's a war for mindshare and the culture we live in. And the way that's done is with marketing and appearances. Seeing something down voted has a very clear effect, like seeing a product rated with bad reviews.

And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing. Basically this media bias cartoon:

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c9d2cf6e6e840c133b9376...

Russell Conjugation is also a powerful tool they often use.

I am firm. [Positive empathy]

You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy]

He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy]

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181

My framing: What's the difference between persistence and a stubborn asshole? I'm one, you're the other.

Mostly gets folk to double-think that it's their perspective that chooses their description.

> And it's not hard to spin things 180 degrees with framing.

Can we see some examples of this actually happening? Have you seen this before?

Maybe not 180 degrees, but the major court cases lately:

The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened.

The Kenosha stuff was quite obviously at least possibly self defense when the whole incident was shown.

Both of those may or may not have affected the court cases, but the riots that happened? People’s opinion on them?

Oh, just thought of a better one - Nicholas Sandmann. There’s a full 180.

All in one direction, too. Curious.

> The media largely only showed the video of George Floyd being knelt on, not him freaking out about not being able to breathe before that happened.

Are you implying that restricting someone's breathing by kneeling on them would somehow be less bad if that person was already complaining of breathing difficulty?

Of course not. But it makes the whole thing a lot less clear cut in the absence of other information. Would he have died anyways if someone wasn’t kneeling in him due to drugs or other causes? Should they have believed him more or less that he couldn’t breathe when he was on the ground?

I’m not saying it at all excuses their actions, just that the media was pushing a narrative by not including that.

Capital Hill riot vs insurrection

BLM "mostly peaceful" protest vs riot

Or that one politician who called the capital hill autonomous zone a “summer of love”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown

When it first happened the media framed it with the racially inflammatory headline:

"White cop shoots and kills unarmed black teen"

All technically true information. But what really happened (according to forensic evidence and credible testimony) could also be framed as "Convenience store robber attacks police officer and was killed in the process". It's hard to tell exactly what happened since we only have a few facts and the rest is witness testimony, but it seems the media definitely pre-determined that the framing of the story should be that the cop was the "bad guy" and the victim was the "good guy" and that the whole thing should have a racism angle.

How about "Murderous cop kills convenience store robber who tried to punch him"?

Yes, that's another example of squeezing a complicated situation into a soundbite that can be easily understood by those who are terrified by the complexity of the real world.

*tried to get his gun

Reminds me of this legendary clip of comedian Sam Hyde bombing massively

https://youtu.be/YkiQwVT8ij8

This reminds me of a recent comment (from another post) about borderline personality disorder and abusive parents (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29718798):

> I've dealt with someone with eBPD who was unable to get through a 45 minute therapy session without contradicting themselves. They also habitually selectively report facts to distort reality... Here's an example with details changed: "Joe drank too much last night and we got in a car crash." Reality, Joe was in the passenger seat, and the driver hit a deer that jumped out in front of them. On confrontation: "I never said Joe drove drunk!"

Your framing implies the normative claim that convenience store robbers should be shot and killed. This is hotly contested on moral grounds, but on purely material grounds it is hard to justify that claim at all.

If the teen attacked the cop there is a self defense claim, albeit that doesn't stand if the use of force is greater than the threat (eg shooting someone if you think they're unarmed)

You may have missed the “attacks police officer” part.

Does that also warrant shooting and killing? Why do those who take the oath to protect and serve have a seemingly paradoxical right to extinguish life?

The framing does not imply that at all. The framing is "Convenience store robber attacks police officer and was killed in the process". The justification for the shooting is clearly that the robber attacked the police officer, not that he robbed a convenience store.

There was a great example in Germany recently. A Hamas terrorist killed one Israeli and wounded multiple others and was shot himself by Israeli security forces. German State TV opened with "Israel: one Palestinian killed".

The Trump fish-feeding story: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/358983-media-shows-w...

It shows how the media will abuse framing even with such a trivial event.

Reagan was asked during the Presidential Debates whether he was too old to be President. His reply:

"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience"

The reframe sank Mondale's campaign.

I was young, but even at the time I recognized this as a joke. Did Mondale really not have any argument other than "Reagan is too old"?

Mondale was unable to respond to Reagan's quip.

BTW, Reagan was a master at reframing difficult questions into a joke, thereby disarming their payload. I remember the Democrats at the time complaining in bitter frustration at how adroitly the "Teflon President" did this.

Not to take away from the joke, but it was a televised debate and Reagan was responding to a question from the moderator, one he probably had an inkling was coming -- not an "argument" from Mondale.

Like I said, I was young at the time. Still, one would expect any candidate to offer multiple arguments for voters to consider. If this simple joke really "sank Mondale's campaign" as claimed above, one would wonder just what form that alleged campaign might have taken. It could be that other factors led to the 49-state drubbing, which factors would have decided the matter even in the absence of a particular canned response to a softball from the moderator.

It's not just my opinion that that joke was the turning point. Although Mondale was clearly outmatched by Reagan, that incident pretty much encapsulated why.

Why are these stories so important to us? Upthread we learn that this debate was as staged as any of Hillary's. Anything planned in advance can't have been an actual turning point. USA popular discourse was shockingly dumb in the 1980s, so it's possible that Jodie Foster had already clinched Reagan's reelection a couple of months after his inauguration.

I think going up against Reagan, who had enormous popular support due to being thought to have presided over a strong economy and progress in foreign policy vs. the USSR, did most of the work in sinking Mondale's campaign.

Reagan wasn't popular by default. He was popular because he was a master at debate, charming people, and framing himself as President.

For example, Jimmy Carter never looked Presidential. For one, he encouraged people to call him "Jimmy" rather than "James". For another, he'd wear a sweater when giving speeches to the public.

People liked that Reagan wore a sharp suit and acted (yes, acted) the role of President.

BTW, Obama, Trump, and Biden all were very careful to present themselves while campaigning as Presidential. They all wore sharp, well tailored suits, and took pains to stand up straight. I bet they all got coaching in body language.

Trump has never once worn a suit I would describe as “well tailored” or “sharp.”

I suggest taking another look. Look past his weight. He knows exactly what he's doing with his suits.

US presidents’ suits tend to be generously cut (if not a full “sack” suit) rather than very well tailored. Viewed in this light Trumps suits seem to have been flattering if unstylish.

The Rittenhouse trial. A section of media was successful in making it all about racism.

And for anyone not up on the details at hand, the incident involved four white individuals. It had nothing to do with racism.

John McCain was a maverick. Joe Manchin is a traitor.

(In reality both are moderates that resisted enormous pressure from their respective parties.)

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-mccain-...

[2] https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/579766-joe-...

That media bias cartoon is pure genius.

Your setup was WRT political bias, but your meme example was WRT the tedious manner in which they report conclusions.

I've not experienced the political bias. Can you link some examples?

We have a serious disinformation problem. In my experience, Snopes seems to be overwhelmingly accurate and to do much more good than harm on balance. The fact that they tediously present the facts before drawing a conclusion (per your meme) actually helps to mitigate any perception of bias.

Here is an example of identical claims made by a conservative and democrat politician.

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6fed2339071d503d32e531...

Those aren't identical claims; "Canadian homes set thermostats to 0 in the winter of 1800" and "Canadian homes had no heating in the winter of 1800" are not saying the same thing.

One says there was on balance no desire for federal tax income, the other says there was no way to have federal tax income whether or not it was desired.

Well that's not Snopes.

But, assuming we're taking these as identical claims (and they are not necessarily), I still don't think that necessarily reflects bias in any case. These were two separate fact checks about two claims worded slightly differently, spaced 3 years apart. They were performed by two different organizations, and also likely performed by different people.

That they landed only a degree apart (mostly true vs half true) seems pretty consistent. Certainly doesn't seem like any kind of egregious bias.

And they get roughly equivalent truth values, modulo Paul's slightly more misleading wording?

"The unreliable 'facts' of a fact-checking site" https://archive.is/t6sDN

Your comment (and the child comments replying to it) would be much stronger if you could point to actual examples of this happening rather than imagined examples.

Personally, I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Are they anywhere similar to this cricket/baseball example you've given, or are they far less egregious?

Huh, one can fill pages of this.

How ‘fact-checking’ can be used as censorship https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0... - covers how Trump's vaccine prediction was 'fact-checked' as false, how the Wuhan leak report was 'fact-checked' and also heavily censored as false, how the reports of Biden's memory boopers were 'fact-checked' as false.

Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...

https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-example-...

https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-the-f...

This article is a very good demonstration of the problem with fact checking, thanks for sharing.

> Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...

I imagine I could find more if I wanted to as well, but it probably kicks off a more interesting discussion if we focus on real examples instead of imagined hypotheticals. I was just trying to drive the discussion in that direction.

Personally, I think its fine if so-called "fact checkers" exist as long as their fact-checking isn't used to flag and censor people.

crowkingblog problems: 1. no link to the actual snopes article, which is this: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nbc-vaughn/ 2. the link "debunking" that the video was edited on the website is hard to confirm, because it is no longer online, and on archive.org it requires a flash player. But at least in the text version (https://web.archive.org/web/20160807110939/http://www.today....), there is the reference to christ.

investortimes: I think this is a weird semantic argument. Yes, there are fines that need to be paid by water management companies if they do not reduce the amount of water per capita each person uses, and I think investortimes is correct in saying that the cost will probably be somehow passed on to consumers. But that is still not the same thing as saying how it is illegal. The prices will just go up a lot more, and I imagine some kind of usage based pricing will come into effect to make sure the goals are reached. But calling that illegal is like saying it is illegal to run a mining rig in your home because you will be charged a lot for electricity and a power company might force you to reduce the amount of power you are using. So I believe mostly false is still correct.

also inb4 tldr

One of my favorites: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-debates/...

"Trump said Clinton "acid washed" her private email server. She didn't. She used an app called Bleachbit, not a corrosive chemical."

And we know she didn't because of: fact-checking.

Media follies ought not be conflated with fact-checking in abstract.

This was one of those times I couldn't believe the media took the bait. 1. Trump wants media to report on Hillary deleting her emails. 2. Trump claims Hillary literally acid washed her emails. 3. Media jumps in (they can't help themselves). "Haha Trump is so dumb he thinks Hillary literally acid washed her emails. What really happened is she used software called BleachBit..." 4. Everyone knows how Hillary deleted her emails.

Or when Trump claimed that the Media barely ever talks about Islamic terrorism. Then they do to prove him wrong. Trump is a master at trolling.

> I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position.

There's a still a problem of scale that fact checkers are attempting to solve. Much like any other outlets of information (news organizations, your neighbor, fact checkers, etc) it is left to the individual to evaluate whether the totality of output from that individual / organization is factually correct. I don't think the answer is to dissuade "fact checkers" similar to that I don't think we should be removing "news organizations" (even biased ones, which they often are), but the need to educate rational thinking skills to be able to evaluate who and how to trust summarized and often opinionated information.

> Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to?

Even if there were a pile of egregious examples, the conclusion should be to put reduced weight (or none) on the authors of those examples, and not necessarily the idea of fact checking, considering there could be others that more often communicate the nuance of the situation.

(There's also a problem of how fact-checking conclusions are _applied_ into other contexts of course..)

A specific example.

I went to a fact-checking conference. During the keynote, the speaker (a previous Wikipedia foundation CEO) used a graph from a study to drive home a specific point. It sounded way too perfect, and I got suspicious.

After the talk I looked up the study, found the graph, and below it the research wrote "Do not interpreted the above graph as X! For reasons Y, this would be false. The graph illustrate Z, with the caveats of ...".

I contacted the conference holders about the obvious issue of using the graph to prove X, and they forwarded it to the speaker. Nothing happened. This in turn drove home a different point for me. Fact checkers don't care about facts if those facts don't fit in the social context that they are being used.

Twitter is the worst! I dont even know what the original viral article/post even looked like, they just decide to promote the fact-checking response

I’m always thinking “tune in at 11, where we find out who asked!”

Snopes has never really been credible beyond their original domain of looking into urban legends and chain mail forwarded by your aunt and uncle.

They are also guilty of massive plagiarism, and heavy revision of articles without any notice. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-pla...

But the other fact checkers aren't much better. The Washington Post (in particular Kessler himself) are some of the worst in my opinion.

Why anyone ever took Snopes seriously for anything more important than wether Paul from the Wonder Years was Marilyn Manson defies comprehension.

My personal favorite was something like "No, Trump was not telling the Truth, Clinton did not submerge her servers in acid." prior to the 2016 election. That is when I knew the guy would never get a fair shake, no matter what he did.

He said she "acid washed 33000 emails". BTW, he was still saying that years later. From a May 2019 Tweet of his [1].

> Will Jerry Nadler ever look into the fact that Crooked Hillary deleted and acid washed 33,000 emails AFTER getting a most powerful demand notice for them from Congress?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190824131756/https://twitter.c...

NBC gave it a big "NOPE" in their fact check:

"The Claim Trump says Clinton 'acid washed' her email server.

The Truth Clinton's team used an app called BleachBit; she did not use a corrosive chemical."

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/785299709342654465

This was October 9, 2016. I have no love for the man, but like I said, we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him. Gosh, she did not use a corrosive chemical! SHEESH!

> we were never gonna get the media to be fair about him

Never forget:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/11/politics/trump-time-magaz...

Watching grown adults freak out about that was just ... I know that history is full of otherwise reasonable people working themselves into a froth about something, and going from there to do whatever terrible things, but to watch it happen over such trivial items was chilling.

It‘s called Trump Derangement Syndrome.

disclaimer: I am European, I have no skin in the game here

What do you think would be a fair way for the media to handle the "acid wash" claims?

He doesn't seem to have been talking about BleachBit, because he said in his ABC interview on 2016-09-05

> I mean, she had her emails — 33,000 emails — acid washed. The most sophisticated person never heard about acid washing. Acid washing is a very expensive process and that’s to really get rid of them.

and at a couple campaign events the next day

> But why do you acid wash, or bleach, the emails? Nobody even heard of it before. Very expensive

and

> How about the 33,000 missing e-mails that were acid washed — acid washed. And Rudy was telling me, nobody does it because it’s such an expensive process.

BeachBit is free software. There is nothing "expensive" about obtaining it, installing it, or using it. So what the heck was he trying to get at?

Do you honestly believe that Trump thought that Clinton or her proxies had subjected hardware or "emails" to bleach, acid, or any kind of corrosive or oxidizing agent?

That is my question. Do you sincerely believe he thought that was what had happened?

The guy who thought maybe you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach? The same guy who was convinced he won the 2020 election on the logic that “it’s impossible Biden would get more votes than me”. Yes, I sincerely do believe Trump is that stupid.

> The guy who thought maybe you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach?

You have been misinformed. You should watch the video. I watched the video back when it happened and it was blatantly obvious he wasn't saying you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach. Unfortunately I can't find the video now but here's an article that lines up with my recollection of the events[1]:

> The former President did not instruct people to drink bleach, but he did suggest that the use of disinfectants as a treatment should be researched.

[1]: https://www.logically.ai/factchecks/library/677338a2

Your source transcribes him as saying

> Disinfectant knocks it out in a minute. Is there a way we can do something like that? By injection, inside, or almost as cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs. it would be interesting to check that,

While the BBC[0] transcribes

> And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that.

In popular relation 'injection' was rendered as 'swallow', which is indeed technically inaccurate. However 'suggested that the use of disinfectants as a treatment should researched' is a very, very generous interpretation of that sequence of words, and not the message that anyone watching that event walked away with.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177

When I watched the press conference, I did think Trump was suggesting we should spend research money on injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19. I am not a biologist, but as I understand this is very naieve; at a high enough dose to kill the virus it would also kill the patient. I facepalmed, imagining billions of dollars spent on this on the president's whim; I am glad it didn't happen that way.

Trump later said he was being sarcastic, which makes even less sense to me than anything he said or was accused of saying.

> The guy who thought maybe you could cure Covid by swallowing bleach?

He never said that or anything like that and we don't know what he was thinking.

You are spreading fakes. In a thread about fakes.

> I sincerely do believe Trump is that stupid.

When left-wing media does the fact-checking, Trump indeed looks bleak.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52407177:

'The president said to swallow bleach' is an uncharitable and inaccurate summary of that line, but so is 'he never said that or anything like that'. At an absolute minimum he spit-balled an idea about internal application of 'disinfectant' live on national television. His manner of self-presentation was more than bleak enough without any additional interpretative efforts.

Hey look, you fact checked me and nobody got hurt and a misunderstanding was cleared up. Thanks for proving fact checking is a good thing. Indeed, genius Trump only suggested injecting bleach, not swallowing it.

> genius Trump only suggested injecting bleach

This statement is still grossly misleading at best.

(Especially because this lies about "drinking bleach" was actually spread by Joe Biden and repeated numerous times in left-leaning media.)

What he said is he suggested to study it. Which is fine. He never "suggested" injecting it or drinking it.

> nobody got hurt

American democracy got hurt. People belief in system is reduced.

>What he said is he suggested to study it. Which is fine. He never "suggested" injecting it or drinking it.

No, it absolutely is not fine for the President to spitball dangerous ideas like that on live national television. Even Trump later said he was being "sarcastic". Is that an appropriate moment to be sarcastic? Did he sound sarcastic at the time?

I don't understand your reflexive defense of Trump. There's a million things to hang the guy for, this isn't like Obama and his tan suit or his dijon mustard.

> No, it absolutely is not fine for the President to spitball dangerous ideas like that on live national television.

Maybe. This is topic for another discussion. For now it would be appropriate for you to admit you were wrong. Factually incorrect.

> I don't understand your reflexive defense of Trump.

I don’t defend Trump. I defend facts.

> There's a million things to hang the guy for

Perhaps you came to this conclusion after trusting fake news.

I came to the conclusion after reading books written by the people who worked with him, or who interviewed him or his staff. People who worked with Trump on a daily basis in the White House, hoping to keep the American experiment going.

So I suggest you read some books, that will put your “facts” in a larger context that makes them so you don’t miss the forest for the trees. Trump is a bad person who belongs nowhere near any levers of power except in charge of his grifting operations to sucker “patriots” off their money to pay off his debts.

I’ll give Trump this, though. He’s not as crazy as a lot of his followers and fellow grifters. His recent Candace Owens interview where he promoted the vaccine was comedy gold. Trump isn’t dumb enough to think the vaccine doesn’t work.

Trump's a moron, famous for his verbal diarrhea, this is nothing new. He seemed to have heard the name BleachBit, conflated it with bleach, which in his mind was a harsh chemical like acid, which then became acid wash. There are many such examples of his meandering thought patterns, it's definitely in character.

The Clinton camp and their supporters in the media were the ones being disingenuous, and seizing on the chemical angle to deny malfeasance. Versions of "she didn't wash the server with acid", or the infamous "wipe, like with a cloth?" comments do not debunk the core claim, that data was deleted, and the Clinton political machine are savvy and cynical enough operators to know this.

This is a common tactic of left wing media. They use rhetorical tricks to mislead the audiences. Lab leak has been tarred as conspiracy theory because of political and financial gains through very dubious rhetorical tricks.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/

[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

Still no actual examples provided in regard to snopes.

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.

Verdict: mixture

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."

(she was sentenced to 58 years and pardoned by Bill Clinton after serving 16)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

That is an interesting one. Snopes gave it mixed because technically she was never convicted of terrorism by any court, thus isn't actually a "convicted terrorist". In this case a mixed verdict does seem fair as the lack of nuance in the claim doesn't match the reality of the situation.

There is, for sure, a definition of terrorism (by Alex P. Schmid) agreed upon by academics. It has 12 subchecks though; not simple (unfortunately circumstances require it to be complex as-is). If I were to fact-check this (say as journalist) I would reach out to academics, asking them their take on the matter by presenting them facts (and, perhaps, uncertainties).

Apart from that, usually, when it comes to democratic countries with a working objective justice system, I would say we can trust verdicts unless proven otherwise. A presidential pardon could be such, I don't know. I do know the case of Scooter Libby, where presidential pardon was unjustified (Valerie Plame case) but as an outsider of USA I don't know if that is common, and how common (I can imagine its an abused political tool).

Is a presidential pardon considered a verdict and part of the justice system?

I've always assumed that it's merely removing the punishment (which is what the executive branch deals with), but has no influence on the legal status, i.e. if you're convicted of fraud, sent to prison and get a pardon, you're still a convicted fraudster, but you're released from prison.

I don't know, it seems like it overrules the verdict (which only the president can do) but I am not sure. Its worth noting that initially, Libby specifically wasn't pardoned but his sentence was commuted.

> After a failed appeal, President Bush commuted Libby's sentence of 30 months in federal prison, leaving the other parts of his sentence intact. As a consequence of his conviction in United States v. Libby, Libby's license to practice law was suspended until being reinstated in 2016. President Donald Trump fully pardoned Libby on April 13, 2018. [1]

Which is rare:

> After Libby was denied bail during his appeal process on July 2, 2007, Bush commuted Libby's 30-month federal prison sentence, calling it "excessive", but he did not change the other parts of the sentence and their conditions. That presidential commutation left in place the felony conviction, the $250,000 fine, and the terms of probation. Some have criticized the move, as presidential commutations are rarely issued, but when granted they have generally occurred after the convicted person has already served a substantial portion of his or her sentence: "We can't find any cases, certainly in the last half-century, where the president commuted a sentence before it had even started to be served," said former Justice Department pardon attorney Margaret Colgate Love. [..] [1]

There's 2 movies which involve the Plame affair, Fair Game and Vice. Both well worth it, though its more a side thing in Vice while its the main subject in Fair Game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby

Fact-checking is absurd. It's a phenomenon that hints at greater problems, solving none. It's offloading critical judgment skills and knowledge (as informed as ony may be, and as broad and shallow one needs to distinguish most misleading or false argumentations, it's been a long time since the "last person to know everything"!), and offloading it to people that don't know better, and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization. Snopes got made fun of a lot in the past, some of their conclusions are abstract and get down to semantics instead of actual facts. At some point the average person should know better. It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages.

I regret not finding some of the compilation images, but I found one such example of.. questionable lines of thought.

https://archive.is/KrSEn

> It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages.

So everyone has to thoroughly investigate everything, become experts in all fields, and never rely on those with more education and experience. Thanks, I hate it.

That's a scary prospect, but not what I meant. If they went away, or weren't plastered on any controversial news piece, it's not as if one's judgment and trust of sources would be worthless. What are the qualifications for the average fact-check reporter? I know it's hard to say these things when one of the most profitable and fundamental abilities since the beginning of propaganda has been manipulating the populace and its judgment, but we ought to do better!

All because this new generation of journalists are utterly incapable of doing their jobs.

> .. solving none. It's offloading critical judgment skills and knowledge .. and offloading it to people that don't know better

Are fact checkers any different than people who contribute to Wikipedia? It serves a purpose, but does come with a lot of disadvantages.

> .. and may be subject to mass-producing them to satify the massive amounts of misinformation online, or they may be voluntarily or not following certain agendas or philosophies that may not reflect reality, and I believe this ends up with a tendency to extremism and marginalization.

Isn't this the case already? Without "fact checkers" you still have the current population of people spinning stories and framing them in their own desired ways. I don't see how fact checkers are necessarily making the situation worse in that manner.

> It'd be more useful to divert all fundings and investments they get into teaching rational thinking and information validation to people of all ages.

You still have the problem of scale that you need to solve. There are a lot of controversies now-a-days. I imagine this proposed individual (or even a current, motivated individual) does not have time to investigate some of the more nuanced disputes.

Fact checking, like education, is absurd in an adversarial context. In a neutral context, both are very useful.

People ask for examples. This is an interesting one where Snopes admits they were wrong, and honorably changes their rating from MOSTLY FALSE to.. Mixture?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrant-girl-never-separ...

https://archive.fo/UKPBQ

Today I learned that Snopes isn't archived by the Wayback Machine. In August of this year Snopes admitted that founder David Mikkelson plagiarized portions of his articles, and as a result are now allowing Wayback Machine to store archives (reversing Mikkelson's policy).

> Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning

This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most people are staggeringly unintelligent. They suffer from such a deficit of basic critical thinking skills that they need to squeeze all the complexity of the world into a model in which experts have figured out The Absolute Truth and anyone wio disagrees needs to be brutally crushed, or in the modern world, simply silenced. (The similarity to the notions of scripture and heresy is 0% a coincidence).

The problem is that this model inevitably undermines its own foundations: the faith that a Science deity hands down truth on clay tablets is only sustained by a process of knowledge-generation that requires a full engagement with the nuance, uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to trying to understand reality.

The simpletons for whom Believe in Science is a dogma are always going to be an obstacle to the process by which those with adult-level cognition _actually create the level of certainty we do have in societal knowledge_.

It's encouraging to see that the (obvious) contradictions of a centrally "fact-checked" social media ecosystem are already revealing themselves in ridiculous examples like this. But I'm probably too cynical to be convinced that we won't just blow through to a new equilibrium where an important conduit for communication has a content filter on it that boils down to "don't think things about sensitive topics that a layman would find 'weird' " .

Snopes would usually list that as mostly true or true right?

That said I stopped following them when the websaite was taken over by ads and whitespace.

Depends if they like the person that did it or not.

I find it ironic that we are subject to the power of a bunch of people who probably couldn't even read or write proficiently, let alone understanding the basic science.

Their hit rate on truth is probably 95/100 though as opposed to far left media which has gone flat out bonkers. I'm glad services are there.

Can you point me to some examples of Snopes being bad?

I think what many here and the writers of the article are missing is that you can both be truthful and misleading. These are not mutually exclusive. Let's start with the title: "The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science". If you just read this (titles are very important and most people only read these) what will you take away? What the authors are trying to say is that this one study has problems.

But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don't say masking is effective, they continually question if it is. This is really problematic. The study being wrong doesn't question _if_ masking is effective, but _how_ effective. There's a major difference in these statements and they can have readers, who are not experts and don't know scientific vernacular, to doubt and distrust more science than the article _technically_ draws into question. The article is suggesting that this is the norm and because this study is bad we get to question all the others.

So the problem here really is that while yes, the article only questions the one study they do so in a way that questions more fundamental knowledge that we have. Masking works. How much? Harder to say. There's a few old sayings such as "the devil never tells a full lie" or "the devil sows doubt" (often with truth). These are the errors that the authors are making here.

I would conclude that they aren't inaccurate, but are misleading.

You are coming to this article with your own biases. You seem to be basing your analysis that we "know" masking is highly effective. That is not true. The evidence used to justify this policy is low quality(don't you remember the CDC hair salon study) and dependent on the precautionary principle. High quality evidence on masking has either low effect sizes or is inconclusive. It is certainly not settled science.

We do know masks prevent the spread disease. Look in any Operating Room. If masking by the general public is shown to be ineffective, that only argues for further education on how to mask properly.

You are obviously conflating the use of surgical masks in operating rooms that are for stopping droplets with using masks to stop a respiratory airborne virus. How can this possibly be the basis of your argument? It's utter nonsense.

I see the "surgeons use masks in operating rooms, this proves public masking prevents the spread of COVID" argument nearly every time a mask debate appears on this site or others, and it just seems so...obviously fallacious and absurd to me on a dozen different levels, that I almost feel like I'm missing some fundamental point about it.

The point is that masks are obviously effective. It requires a lot of mental gymnastics to reach the conclusion that masks are not effective despite the overwhelming evidence in support of masks. Even the Reason article admits that masks are effective despite its misleading headline that suggests masks are not effective.

I would like you to consider the possibility that the evidence in favor of masks is probably overwhelming as you might believe. The studies that have been done have so many cofounders as to be flawed at best, useless at worst. The "overwhelming evidence" line not even consistent with the studies that do strongly support maskin.

In addition, the arguments have become political/partisan which muddies discussion (i.e. even if you or I had a study that proved it 100% beyond a shadow of doubt, many people would refuse to believe it nonetheless), and in general even though I personally believe that masks are effective at slowing down the spread of covid, I don't believe it particularly strongly and my belief has a lot of qualifiers to it. The phrase "overwhelming evidence in support of masks" overstates your point.

Simple observation: The huge difference in infection rates between Democratic and Republican areas--far more than can be accounted for by the vaccination rate. That says behavior (masks + distancing) is definitely a substantial factor.

Also note the much smaller effect of mask mandates--it's compliance that matters, not merely the rules.

Don't New York and Florida have essentially identical rates of infection though?

Of course, the only two states.

Florida has been the media whipping boy for the entire pandemic, and yet here we are almost 2 years in and their infection rates are on par with the states that had the most restrictions.

Maybe that is instructive.

Only because Omicron first showed up in the areas with more international travel.

And note that the Florida data is untrustworthy, anyway.

Mask resistance is what's dependent on the precautionary principle.

The science is pretty clear. "Mask distribution and promotion was a scalable and effective method to reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections." - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069

I am completely aware of that study. That study is exactly what I had in mind when I wrote my comment. The effect sizes were barely significant. Not all groups managed any effect of significance. There are biases, confounding factors and limitations of that study. Those results are not the slam dunk you think they are. I implore you to read the study carefully.

Barely significant? What is that supposed to mean?

The evidence is clear - mask wearing reduces infections. You seem to be arguing something else.

According to the study itself, the evidence is _not_ clear:

> Although the point estimates for cloth masks suggests that they reduce risk, the confidence limits include both an effect size similar to surgical masks and no effect at all

You're making a mistake by drawing conclusions that masks aren't effective. Pointing to one study which has non-significant data means you shouldn't draw any conclusion at all from it.

I'm not drawing conclusions from that study, I'm pointing out that the study which the OP used to say "the science is pretty clear" and "the evidence is clear" does not reach the same conclusion as OP.

Your comment should really be directed at the OP, not me.

You took ONE study and your claim is that the science is not clear on masks. You used that study as evidence for your conclusion. That is not how science works. One study not having enough data to support the hypothesis doesn't mean that the hypothesis is wrong or that ALL studies are unclear.

You're cherry-picking the results for cloth masks. The study found surgical masks do better. And I assume by now everyone knows N95 are superior.

And anyway, it's unlikely the true effect would land squarely on zero.

I'm not cherry picking. This whole thread is related to mask mandates. No one is mandating N95 masks. All the discussion around masks in this context is about cloth masks.

Even if it was related to masks in general, very few people are wearing N95 masks for protection. Cloth masks are far more relevant.

I have no idea where you’re coming from. The word cloth does not appear in the Reason article. You’re just making vague assertions.

Masks work, it’s settled. I don’t need to point out the logical fallacy in “some masks aren’t as good, therefore mask mandates don’t work.”

What article are you talking about because the one you mentioned doesn't say what you state it does?

It does not go on to make further judgements of masks as you stated. And it's not very long. Are you conflating an article from somewhere else?

That article linked to this article https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 on a controlled randomized study that claims "Mask distribution and promotion was a scalable and effective method to reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections."

The article is talking about another article. I'm talking about the other article. The one that was originally flagged.

I assume merpnderp understands perfectly well which article you were talking about.

You said:

>But reading further in the article they rise doubt about masks in general, which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). They don't say masking is effective, they continually question if it is.

There are five parts of the article that contain the word "mask":

1. On September 28, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky shared the results of a new study that appeared to confirm the need for mask mandates in schools. The study was conducted in Arizona over the summer, and published by the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: It found that schools in counties without mask mandates had 3.5 times more outbreaks than schools in counties with mask mandates.

2. "You can't learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study," Jonathan Ketcham, a public-health economist at Arizona State University, told me.

3. Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of these experts told me, and there may well be contexts in which they should be required in schools. But the data being touted by the CDC—which showed a dramatic more-than-tripling of risk for unmasked students—ought to be excluded from this debate.

4. For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question. Any public official—including and especially Walensky—who purports to follow the science should toss this one in the trash.

5. Hopefully, we see something similar [death rate not rising in DC despite a spike in cases, as with delta] with omicron, though everyone should prepare for Democratic officials to bring back mask mandates (and maybe lockdowns) in response to rising cases. Mayor Muriel Bowser will probably reinstate D.C.'s mask mandate—just as soon as her own holiday parties are over.

None of these are, as you claimed, "continuously questioning if wearing masks is effective". (1) describes the study that is the subject of the article. (2), (3) and (4) are specifically saying, exactly as the submitted article describes, that they don't think wearing masks is ineffective, just that this study doesn't prove that they are effective. (5) is just saying people should expect masks to become mandatory again for everyone soon.

(And to be clear, the parts of the article that I didn't quote above don't question the effectiveness of masks either. In fact, the part about college campuses being closed due to omicron specifically points out that vaccines have not been sufficient to prevent that from happening.)

You're welcome to say that you think the article's title is suggestive of something the article doesn't claim. I happen to agree; I think it's clickbait. But your points about the content of the article are unfounded.

> which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view)

This in itself is a tricky claim to make with confidence. I agree we know certain types of masks (N95) are highly effective at preventing spread of airborne illness if worn properly.

But... in the context of the article you referenced, are you prepared to defend the claim that cloth masks which haven't been washed for months and are frequently touched, adjusted, and worn incorrectly by kids and teens are "highly effective at preventing spread of airborne illness"?

Just because inferior masks poorly handled aren't worth much doesn't mean masks aren't worth much.

But it does indeed mean the mask mandates weren't worth much.

It means mask mandates that allow cotton masks as opposed to surgical masks or N95s aren't worth as much.

Which is what they were.

So we all agree they weren't worth much.

They're still worth a lot. For one, mask mandates are going to encourage some people to wear non-cotton masks who would otherwise skip masks. For another, cotton masks are still better than nothing.

But I agree, we should statrt having stricter mandates.

I'm still waiting for the CDC to explain why last year when they were explaining how N95 masks required expert knowledge to use and that us dummies in the public would just poke covid in our eyes if we tried to wear them, how exactly that changed. Are we no longer dummies and capable of using masks without poking covid in our eyes or were they lying? And if they were lying, how many people died from using inferior masks since then based on the lie that cotton masks are somehow useful.

Do you have anything to support this “dummies” claim? What I remember from the N95 “guidance” (it wasn’t a “ban” iirc) was that the reason was to ensure there was enough supply of them for healthcare / frontline workers, who need them more than the rest of us, which made sense at the time (and I can see reasons why it would change later). I’m curious when that reason switched to “you are all dummies who can’t be allowed to use masks”?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200301071220/https://www.forbe...

They wanted to save N95s for professionals due to a shortage. They lied. It's the same way the fed lies about inflation because people thinking inflation happening worsens the effects making it irresponsible to tell the truth.

How many people died? Hard to say. You have to also compare how many were saved because medical workers had access to N95 masks. But you're not considering this factor.

Honest truth is that it's complicated and people were trying their best. It's not a conspiracy it's just that we're humans.

> making it irresponsible to tell the truth.

So, we should be thankful for being lied to? Perverse. And extremely short sighted.

I'm saying that things aren't simple. If you're not aware of cases where telling the truth is worse than telling a lie then I'd tell you that you're lying to yourself.

Are there Jews in my basement? No, Nazi fucks, not at all.

But that's not really the same thing as a critical taxpayer funded health body telling major fibs at the outset of a crisis. And if you think it is then who here is lying to themselves?

> They wanted to save N95s for professionals due to a shortage. They lied.

That's certainly a plausible interpretation of what happened. Another is they actually thought masks don't help in most cases and that covid wasn't primarily air-transmitted.

You adjusted the parent's assertion by saying "worn incorrectly by kids and teens" where they only said "masks are effective".

Sure the original article was talking school mandates, but that wasn't the parent's point.

I don't understand how anyone can assert that masks are not useful in preventing the spread of airborne saliva and mucus particles. Have you never in your life had someone talking toward you and had some spit land on you? Have you ever been to a salad bar and seen a sneeze guard? Do you cover your mouth when you cough?

Particles spread a lot when forcefully exhaling, and not just when coughing or sneezing.

Yeah but my point was the claim that "wearing masks is highly effective" needs more qualifiers.

There are many kinds of masks and many different communicable diseases. A cloth mask will not block covid aerosol transmission at all, and covid is known to transmit via aerosol. A cloth mask may prevent some spread via droplets, but it's unclear if it's "highly effective" or just "marginally effective" or even "ineffective" given how often people touch and adjust cloth masks and how rarely people wash them.

Cloth masks definitely prevent said spit that lands on you but not fine aerosols. My point was how effective, not if

The science on cloth masks is pretty settled - they are ineffective at preventing covid transmission.

Huge study by pro-masking people at Stanford and Yale, N=350,000: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...

Cloth masks had no statistically significant effect on the transmission of covid. There is good news though - a 20% increase in masking with surgical masks resulted in a 10% decrease in transmission.

You should consider cloth masks to be purely psychological protection.

"not statistically significant" means you cannot draw conclusions from it. You're mistaken when you draw the conclusion that masks are not effective.

When we're talking about well-executed studies with N=350,000 I think the practical conclusion is pretty obvious. This is not an underpowered study. The effect size was tiny.

That's not what the article says. The article says, "cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period"

The part about statistical significance says, "Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant."

The paper said that villages in Bangladesh that used the provided cloth masks did not have a statistically significant reduction in cases. This is not the same as saying cloth masks do not work; a cloth mask with higher filtration efficiency than was used in the study can be manufactured, but this was cost prohibitive compared to surgical masks. It was also not possible to procure one of the materials they wanted to use in the cloth masks; without it efficiency was only 37% instead of 60%. This was described in some detail in Appendix F.

From the paper:

These cloth masks had substantially higher filtration than common commercial 3-ply cotton masks, but lower than hybrid masks that use materials not commonly available for community members in low-resource settings

and

In our internal testing, we found that cloth masks with an external layer made of Pellon 931 polyester fusible interface ironed onto interlocking knit with a middle layer of interlocking knit could achieve a 60% filtration efficiency. Upon discussions with the manufacturers, we learned that those materials could not be procured.

It may be theoretically possible to improve cloth masks, but the ones you see people wearing around here in California aren't that.

Nice logical fallacy you got there. move that goalpost.

I had to scroll pretty far to find someone willing to address the substance of the article. Kudos to you.

Your very statement of "which is something we know is highly effective (purely from a physics point of view). " is misleading

As both this story, and the "fact checked" story (as well as the position of many others) is not really talking about masks at the physics level (though new data about omicron is placing that in question now as well) but masking as a POLICY

it may be true that masks themselves are effective, but due to human nature masking POLICIES, including masking POLICIES in schools are not. Human interactions with the mask have we have seen countless times are far far far from perfect, people pulling on the masks, masks around chins, removing the mask to cough or sneeze, etc. Children will be even less disciplined

So I dont think they are questioning the mask as a technical barrier to stop covid, they are questioning the masks as a public policy given that humans are involved

> They don't say masking is effective, they continually question if it is. This is really problematic.

Forbidding questioning is really problematic.

The Reason article makes perfectly clear that masks are very effective and should be worn in school. It's then totally dishonest for the article to have that headline which seemingly questions the effectiveness of masks. The author knew what they were doing.

If we question the motive or even the eventual consequence of an article but not the truth, that’s NOT fact-checking anymore but purely intention-checking, whose intention and what the hell it might be. At least at that point, “fact-checking” is becoming a propaganda machine, no more, no less. Communist countries have even “security law” to put people in jail based purely on intention and eventual consequences.

Btw, the “fact-checker” labeled the article as “false information”, not as “misleading”.

Sigh. Comments in this thread are predictably polarized.

I personally think that fact checking is potentially damaging to society but so is the ability of social media to spread misleading claims.

It's difficult to predict which is going to be worse in the long run. As in many things we'll probably learn to tolerate a degree of both and aim to find a "least worse" outcome.

Anyone claiming here either that no fact-checking would be the best outcome or it's inverse (I can't quite formulate what that would be right now) is probably wrong and the messy middle is probably correct.

> fact checking is potentially damaging to society

Why do you think this? I am struggling to understand.

The argument would be along the lines of "It will stifle debate and silence voices on topics outside the orthodox view. A simple glance through the history of science shows many ideas now regarded as fact were initially heretical and outside the mainstream. Open discussion of controversial ideas is healthy."

which is obviously reasonable. However it needs to be balanced against the other problem we face - widespread dissemination of inflammatory misinformation, in many cases by nation states deliberately sowing dissent.

Fact checking as it is currently practiced is counter-productive: unknowable things are called "facts", and "pinocchios" are given even if you're factually correct just because (being charitable myself here) the checker things you're not being charitable enough to their political faction.

I keep seeing allusions to this bias.

Can you point to any mainstream fact checking organizations that are consistently biased and any specific fact checks that illustrate this?

Please don't dismiss it just because of the source or its focus on Sanders. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/02/washington-post-sanders-b...

I take your point and, while there's some subjectivity there, that may well be an example of fact-checking done in bad faith.

I'm just not sure that it is happening at scale though. But I do agree that, to the extent that it is happening, it is particularly egregious when done under the guise of fact-checking versus, say, your standard tilted article.

Economics and foreign policy are two areas where the fact checkers are most often cloaking ideology as facts. These are two massive and hugely important political areas though, so I think it's pretty widespread.

Comments about political leaders, especially if the leader is aligned with the fact checking group, are also suspect. But leaders are huge often huge bullshit artists, so the fact checkers are also often absolutely right.

Yeah, the problem here is that there is so much disinformation that we need fact checking in the first place. Once you've gotten to that point, there will be no perfect solutions.

But IMO, we're far better off having organizations at least attempt to fact check, even if they get it wrong from time to time. The alternative is an open fire hose of unchecked disinformation, and I'm not sure how we survive that.

Do fact-checks work? That is, if they fact-check an article claiming that Bush did 9/11, are there significant amounts of people who say "oh, I thought he did. But I guess not, thanks, fact checkers"?

The things that get fact checked tend to be more tribal, so most people either believe it or not, and tend to understand the fact-checkers as mostly biased against them if they don't agree with the result. Fact-checking is pretty useless in that situation, and people will start considering it as a biased tool ("they only fact-check what my side is saying and start splitting hairs, but they never fact-check what the other side is saying"). I don't think you can solve a tribal conflict by trying to present selected facts.

I think this ignores the fact that the "tribes" are dynamic. People join, leave, sub-groups form etc. Nobody was born believing in Pizzagate. People with more moderate views can become radicalized and leaving misinformation unchallenged must at least sometimes contribute to this.

You'd have to step in super early though, wouldn't you? If you have people at the level where reading about Pizzagate will make them a believer, I reckon you've already lost them. What leads them to that kind of thinking? Will a generic "the elites just look after themselves" feed that kind of thinking? Should we fact-check it and say that it's false because of some counter-example?

I have no idea when people get onto a slope that leads them to believing that reptilians are ruling the country, but I doubt that there's a right moment where you can hide content from them and not make them think "aha, they're trying to hide something from me ... I wonder what it is". At that level, I assume, there's a good chunk of paranoia involved, and paranoia doesn't really need a certain fuel.

Fact checking is a fig leaf that allows you to apply further content decisions. You can’t just stop promoting or ban a piece of content outright without some ground rules; a “fact check” acts as a filter that enables you to do so. It doesn’t matter if the target audience believes the fact check or not if they never see the content as a result of it.

They're definitely not perfect, and they will be ineffective at times.

But there is a need for sources of factual information, so it is a worthwhile objective. And, I think there is a lot of usage for fact checks, wherein reasonable people who are not tribalists just want to sort through competing information.

And remember, fact checks also include removal of disinformation (i.e. not just leaving in place and providing commentary). So at a minimum fact checks can slow the propagation of disinformation by simply making it unavailable.

> reasonable people who are not tribalists just want to sort through competing information

Hmm, maybe. I've always assumed that you go to reddit, twitter or facebook with your mind made up and a need for validation or the wish to tell everyone -- it's social media after all, not news media, and you'd go some news site to get your fix, or to Wikipedia if you want to learn about some topic de jour.

The removal of (dis-)information is what I'm least comfortable with. We've pretty much always called it misinformation when we censored something, but it hasn't always stood up to the test of time. I have to admit however, that I've never personally come across a fact-checked link, so I don't have a good intuition where most of it is between "ban that opinion, I don't like it" and "this is insane and they have pitchforks, we better shut this down".

>I've always assumed that you go to reddit, twitter or facebook with your mind made up

Well, that definitely happens, and maybe I'm thinking more of independent fact-checking sites like Snopes, where people visit explicitly to verify the veracity of something.

>The removal of (dis-)information is what I'm least comfortable with

I understand, but, unfortunately, we have an absolute explosion of explicit disinformation.

The funny thing is that the notion of being uncomfortable with removing disinformation is itself partly the product of the idea that there are no objective facts. And, that is a function of how successful the firehose of disinfo has been at attacking the value of truth and the existence of objectivity.

So, we kind of conflate removing disinfo with undertaking a subjective political act.

But, not long ago, it wasn't so easy to argue base reality.

I don't believe that there are no objective facts, but I do believe that we're generally pretty bad at observing objective reality and once we get above some level of complexity, "facts" isn't a good term. I don't think you need an attack on the value of truth and the existence of objectivity to have issues with "truths" about complex systems. We've had plenty of truths about the economy, and we've corrected them lots of times as well. If anyone asked you to fact-check some claim about the effects of raising the minimum wage to $25/hr, what objective truth do you look to? Do you ask 20 economists what their gut feeling is and say "that's it then"? Do you just reject the question?

Largely true, but I think it's a matter of degree. That is, the set of facts that society generally agreed upon was once much larger and less tribally-driven.

I think your example about the economy is perhaps not well-fitted to the argument I'm making. We've always allowed for the interpretation of facts in certain fields or areas of society. So, areas of subjectivity are well circumscribed and expected.

Thus, for instance, it is well-known and accepted that people will offer different opinions on the impact of raising the minimum wage. And it is known that the answer depends on a complex set of variables that can earnestly be interpreted differently.

I think this is qualitatively different from, say, suggesting that a person did or did not say something or that an event did or did not occur, or even offering up something like Qanon with no evidence.

This latter paragraph is what I would describe as comprising objective facts/reality. And, that's what's changed most dramatically.

If I understand you correctly, you'd apply the fact-checking to very obvious issues ("The president is a reptile", "X has said Y", though I guess that gets fuzzy quickly unless you're limiting yourself to quote-checking), but not "mostly opinion based" things? Would the case of this article fall in the "needs fact-checking" basket or the "mostly opinion based"?

I agree about society being less split at some point. My pet theory is 1) lack of leisure time to find out, b) needing more cooperation to make things work, enforcing more homogeneity c) no social media/forums to question the official view at scale.

>you'd apply the fact-checking to very obvious issues

Well, more simply, I would apply fact-checking to facts (versus opinions).

>Would the case of this article

I believe the article in question falls into the needs fact-checking basket as the issue at hand can be tracked back to verifiable facts. That is, this study was flawed by accepted scientific standards. I think where they dropped the ball is on the context side. That is injecting this kind of article into the current climate (that is filled with disinformation and conspiracy theories around the topic) can be itself misleading. I'm sure this is why Facebook was so eager.

So, Facebook should have been more specific in its warning, versus stating the claim was false.

>My pet theory

My take is less generous. I think it comes down to cynical politicians and adversarial nation states poisoning the well for the explicit purpose of driving this social divide.

"Fact checkers made a mistake" articles draw out a certain crowd, and their over the top rhetoric is always the same. The dominant narrative in here is unlikely to correspond with the public at large, or even the majority of HN users.

This is a particularly weird submission because the article the person authored was basically blogspam. They took someone else's hard work, put a clickbait title on it intending for the sole value of pandering to a very specific audience, now getting to double down under the auspices of "my blogspam was suppressed" narratives.

And I suspect that the article came under the attention of Facebook because it, exactly as intended by the author, fed directly to a certain crowd that absolutely consumes and propagates fake news (not like "it's open to debate", but just astonishingly nonsensical junk that just makes a wider and wider audience of the gullible and misled). Being embraced by that crowd is probably the biggest indicator to such systems, and 9 times out of 10 it's probably spot on.

That's because facts have a well known liberal bias

I think that's a false dichotomy. If social media is so disruptive to society then costs shouldn't be externalized onto citizens but the corporations.

* Force transparency on the engagement metrics and the algorithms they drive.

* Have C level executives face prison time.

* Force data interoperability or break up the SM monopolies.

All of these options are less extreme then restructuring society around social media corporations and their stakeholders.

I'm not sure I understand this part

> costs shouldn't be externalized onto citizens but the corporations.

what costs do you mean? Costs in the broadest sense? That's a very amorphous type of cost.

> Force transparency on the engagement metrics and the algorithms they drive.

We can mostly infer this already and that knowledge isn't helping much

> Have C level executives face prison time.

This will have hard-to-predict consequences that may or may not be better than the status quo. We're trying to find a balance between free speech and misinformation. Harsh punishments are a blunt weapon.

> Force data interoperability or break up the SM monopolies.

Not sure how this would solve the problem under discussion. It would merely spread it over a larger surface area.

>what costs do you mean? Costs in the broadest sense? That's a very amorphous type of cost.

It's clear facebook and twitter are primarily funnels towards polarizing content presented in disjointed snippets which makes real discourse impossible. This is a product of corporations chasing "engagement metric" at the cost of social corrosion and polarization.

>We can mostly infer this already and that knowledge isn't helping much

Who is "we" in this sentence? Not the average citizen.

It's not just about inferring but really understanding and improving upon.

>This will have hard-to-predict consequences that may or may not be better than the status quo. We're trying to find a balance between free speech and misinformation. Harsh punishments are a blunt weapon.

We're already down the path of hard-to-predict consequences. The root cause of GROWING engagement with misinformation is the architecture of social media. Social media needs to find balance with free speech not the other way around.

>Not sure how this would solve the problem under discussion. It would merely spread it over a larger surface area.

Two reasons why it might help. Moderation makes more sense in the context of smaller communities. The corrosive nature of social media is in large degree how it's been executed. We need a diversity of examples to see what works and what doesn't.

I think part of the problem is the polarisation in and of itself. It leads one to think that there are only two sides to any story when, in fact, there are usually several.

I believe that this push for fact checking lately is a symptom of a larger problem. How often is there genuinely a single, correct version of events, and then an incorrect one, at the scale of humanity we're talking about?

And why is it hard to bridge that gap? If you take to social media, it can be really hard to have a conversation between two politically opposed groups of people without it immediately jumping to aggression.

Flat Earth News is an old book now but it's a worthwhile read still.

Agreed! The chain:

"Fact" checks > Polarization > Poor discussion > People retract to their own bubbles where discussion isn't hostile > Insular communities with groupthink 1> Sharing of content that is agreeable to the group, but factually incorrect 2> Not checking factual accuracy of content because it would be offensive to one's loyalty to the group

I think this is more or less how you get to beliefs like "Communism isn't bad, it just hasn't been done right yet," or "Social media are pushing the narrative with fact checking," or "Vaccines and masks are a deep-state conspiracy."

It would be too much of a shock to have your own beliefs challenged in such a fundamental way, so there has to be another way out where you can rationalise it instead. This provides some comfort but the trade-off is you take a step further into the rabbit hole.

Yeah, keeping in mind both the well known problems of censorship and also our societal shitshow driven by disinformation campaigns and other outlandish groupthink, I've got to ponder synthesis here.

I'd like to hope that most of the problem is engagement amplification - eg social media's "algorithmic" editorialization for which they're not even S.230 immune (yet no one has taken them to task). Would things be so polarized if these companies didn't create personalized filter bubbles to drive engagement? Traditionally one's professed opinions had to survive in the scrutiny of the larger social sphere. Now no matter what you say, you're immediately given a soapbox and a tiny receptive audience.

In the long run, big social media like Facebook can only end up being lame, exactly how the nightly news has been - "the revolution will not be televised". Mass media inherently caters to the status quo, because at the very least it's owned by people with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Which points to increased routine filtering that keeps conversation within a nice small Overton window as it has traditionally been - that is to say, lame. In a way the rise of Zuck is an aberration indicating that when you get insanely powerful, there is no large mahogany table of stuffy old guys that sits you down and immediately brings you into their conspiracy "or else" - rather the overall dynamic happens slowly.

I also hope there is a growing up process being done by non-internet-natives newly buffeted by raw unfiltered media, en masse. Twenty years ago I was exposed to chemtrails theories, NSA mass surveillance, 9/11 was an inside job, Austrian economics, sovereign citizens - ideas that put you directly at odds with society, with differing kernels of truth (or not). No matter how much some resonated with me I was never going to start steadfastly preaching back in the real world, because the impedance mismatch was too large. Eventually you gain a sense of wisdom about the implications of these various theories and the cost of acting on them (regardless of their validity).

What I see missing today is any of this wisdom - sure vaccination could be a government sterilization campaign, but since you've made it through life so far generally trusting institutions including large corporations, perhaps following the actions implied by the conspiracy theory is imprudent. Maybe I'm being overly hopeful too, or this dynamic won't be reached because of a critical mass creating its own social proof, or it will take a few old generations to pass on and new generations steeped in the Internet's hostile noise to develop collective social wisdom.

Or maybe global communication is just the Great Filter.

> I personally think that fact checking is potentially damaging to society but so is the ability of social media to spread misleading claims.

sadly, fact checking can also spread misleading claims through social media. As others have pointed out here

I am 44 and if I had to sum up what I've learned in my life into one concept it would be this:

The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain. Therefore, be open to new ideas, but slow to accept anything as absolute truth. Those in power push narratives. Conflicts of interest make data questionable. "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases. And often we simply learn new things.

Therefore, I can think of very few things more damaging to society and free speech than "fact checkers". Almost always I find that their "facts" are nothing more than the "opinions" of the most powerful and influential group at the time, and are usually entangled with politics. In short, "fact checkers" don't actually understand the definition of what a fact is, but are quick to declare them, and this is contrary to my experience of real, actual truth.

You're over-complicating this.

Facts come from studies that have been published which are disproven four years later when finally repeated.

So for a couple years at least, it's always clear what the truth is.

Truth, real truth, never changes - which is why it is so important to be slow to declare it. Our best collective understanding at a particular time is exactly that, but that is different than truth or fact, because often that understanding turns out to be wrong, which is why it is so crucial that dissenting opinions are heard.

Truth that never changes is not beneficial for planning. I recommend you find a more useful, relative truth.

Don't get me wrong, it's important you know the real truth, but that isn't often the one you gain much from promoting.

Promoting actual truth can be rather damming at times.

Relative truth is more dangerous for planning.

I don’t plan to exit my apartment through the window because I know there’s no relative truth of what will happen.

Quick relative truths are used because the alternative is getting burned alive.

The absolute truth in your statement is the threat of getting burned alive. You make the decision to escape based on that absolute truth and then you choose the route based on relative probabilities to survive. But you wouldn't even be trying to escape at all if not for the absolute truth that a fire will kill or severely harm you if you stay.

An actual unchanging truth is extremely beneficial for planning. But if you're planning with open eyes, you know that what you actually have are probabilities based on what you know when you make the plan, which I believe to be GP's point.

Anyway, there's no other definition of "truth" that isn't a mockery of the word as used. In practice you work with the closest you can get at the moment, but you don't redefine your terms down to match.

There is no such thing as relative truth.

You mean belief, which causes major problems when conflated with truth.

Belief is useful for planning, but needs a separate static truth to have predictive value.

I think it would be interesting if you could share some examples of what you believe to be real truths that never change.

It gets harder to disprove things when you ban anything that goes against the temporary truth

So you want to censor fact checkers?

Limiting speech (of anyone) is a band-aid for poor critical thinking skills. No speech would be dangerous if people were smart enough. Unfortunately we just don't value intelligence or education in America, and that is the real problem.

No, don't censor them. They should be allowed to post "this is false" all they want in the comment box, just like everyone else is. They just shouldn't get special powers, like blurring out your article and putting their comment directly over it, instead of in the comment section.

So you want to censor Facebook?

What in my comment led you to that conclusion?

You're saying that Facebook should be compelled to host speech and that its employees may, at most, make a comment about that speech in the comment section.

How would you feel if I told you that you must put a campaign placard in your front yard, and that if you don't like it you may always put a post-it note under the sign expressing your discontent?

Where did the comment say that Facebook “should be compelled” to do anything?

> Where did the comment say that Facebook “should be compelled” to do anything?

Here:

>>> They should be allowed to post "this is false" all they want in the comment box, just like everyone else is. They just shouldn't get special powers, like blurring out your article and putting their comment directly over it, instead of in the comment section.

The ability to decide which pixels to serve from a server you own isn't a "special power". It's free speech.

> "Telling someone which pixels they can't serve is censorship."

Ignoring the extreme irony of people supposedly on the left arguing to protect corporate rights and personhood (of an absurdly wealthy megacorporation, no less), this is the same argument as "Telling a shop owner which $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting freedom of association." once used by bigots. In both cases, yes, it is but both are public accommodations and it serves the greater good to require that they serve everyone equally.

The problems with Facebook can't be solved by censorship, either of Facebook users or of Facebook itself.

To be blunt, your comment is presumptive, confrontational, and unpleasant for no reason. My point of view on this is obviously more nuanced than your lazy straw-man.

In fact, I address this whole set of issues very explicitly in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726829

> to protect corporate rights and personhood

In the comment I posted, had you bothered to read the whole thread instead of jumping down my throat, I say:

>> Should a company the size of Facebook get Section 230 protection? Probably not. Should government officials be allowed to use social media sites for official business? I don't think so. Should campaign finance laws be strengthened and ad spends on social media sites subject to much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be broken up? Yeah.

>> I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the company than "no more moderation".

Far from advocating protecting corporate rights, I'm arguing for the dissolution of legal protections which are much more valuable to Facebook than its free speech protections.

Moving on to the rest of your comment, you say:

> this is the same argument as "Telling a shop owner which $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting freedom of association

Yawn. Who cares? This is not an instructive or insightful comment. It's a meme that has been repeated on every thread on this topic for close to a decade at this point. It doesn't really tell us anything about the nature of the problem.

There are many ways to check corporate power. Compelling or restricting speech is not the right tool in the case of Facebook. Censoring Facebook as an intervention is too weak, too susceptible to abuse, and doesn't address the underlying problem.

Go look at actual attempts to implement something like what you suggest. E.g., Hawley's legislation which would allow Facebook moderation powers (which is, frankly, necessary for any community with higher utility than 4chan). But which would also have a panel of political appointees decide, based on Facebook's moderation behavior, whether it should keep Section 230. Surely you see how that is ripe for abuse, right?

Again. The problems with Facebook can't be solved by censorship, either of Facebook users or of Facebook itself. That is not a defense of Facebook. Quite the opposite.

Speaking of irony... I'm literally the only person in this thread advocating for a solution to the Facebook problem that doesn't involve censoring someone/something.

It’s not at all the same argument. The key difference is “$PROTECTED_CLASS”. It’s perfectly legal for a shop owner to refuse service to anyone as long as it’s not based on a protected class. That should hold true for Facebook as well. If they censor people based on a protected attribute, such as sex, then they should be compelled to offer equal service. In any of these cases being discussed, they don’t relate to protected classes.

That's a circular argument. The reason $PROTECTED_CLASS became a protected class is because people saw the unjustness of their treatment and agreed that they needed to be treated equally, backed up by the force of law. If you were placed in the year 1800, by your logic you'd be saying that $FUTURE_PROTECTED_CLASS doesn't need to be treated equally right now because they're not a protected class. Clearly, that's not valid. The unequal treatment is the problem; not being in a protected class is irrelevant to that.

It isn’t circular at all. A immutable class of person is different than a pice of content.

The argument is that certain people (fact checkers) have special powers from the perspective of Facebook. I'm not arguing that it should be illegal for Facebook to do this (which they indeed have the right to), but that it's morally wrong.

I am not the OP, but yes, I certainly do want to put pressure on the censors. It is a very reasonable thing to do.

How?

I think we should bring back a version of fairness doctrine [1] or right of reply [2] targeted at platforms.

There are other ways of pressuring them at different levels as well: demanding moderation transparency, regulating them as we do for utilities, supporting competitive alternatives which respect free expression, etc.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply

Liberals have dreamed of restoring the fairness doctrine ever since Reagan administration killed it for public airwaves and ushered in the era of right wing monopoly of talk radio.

I know that it was killed by Reagan's FCC, but I really don't have a good understanding of their motivation.

The Wikipedia article quotes someone in the Kennedy administration as saying: "Our massive strategy [in the early 1960s] was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."

So it kinda seems that weaponization of complaints was part of the issue.

Do you happen to have any pointers or comments on Reagan administrations reasoning, and the efforts by liberals to restore the doctrine?

You can read all about it in that wikipedia article. The long list of liberal efforts is in the section labeled "Reinstatement considered - Support"

I still don't get it.

"The Fact Checkers (TM)(R)"... what are they in this case? They are employees working at the behest of the owner of the property of which you are a guest.

Should a company the size of Facebook get Section 230 protection? Probably not. Should government officials be allowed to use social media sites for official business? I don't think so. Should campaign finance laws be strengthened and ad spends on social media sites subject to much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be broken up? Yeah.

I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the company than "no more moderation".

But compelling speech is also a violation of free speech. If you demanded that I post your article on my personal homepage, I'd politely tell you to bugger off. And if you insisted that I should have to do so, I'd consider you an enemy of free speech.

Apparently you don't feel the same way about FB.

But where does that line get drawn?

And what, exactly, is FB allowed/not allowed to censor (and don't be glib, the answer "nothing" is functionally equivalent to "make FB 4chan" and I think you'll find fewer than 1% of the population that is radical enough to think that would improve things)?

Who decides?

We don't have good answers to those questions. They're fundamentally questions about who gets enormous amounts of political/economic power. Power corrupts. But even if we did have good answers to these impossible zero-sum questions, we still wouldn't really have a decent solution to the underlying problem.

The problem with platforms like FB isn't primarily caused by the content of any particular speech and so can't be solved by censorship of FB users or of FB itself. The wariness about FB is reasonable, but the instinct to solve the problem by censoring FB itself is all wrong. It grounds out a massive political struggle and doesn't even solve the underlying problem.

Fact check: They never said they wanted to censor fact checkers.

Just because you claim to be a fact checker shouldn't allow you to censor others.

The inability to censor others in a public forum isn't censorship. They can still post as much as the next person.

The problem is that Facebook used fact checkers to censor others.

It'd be better if we didn't need them and journalists did their fucking jobs of checking their own facts instead of relying on others to do it for them.

>"In short, "fact checkers" don't actually understand the definition of what a fact is, but are quick to declare them, and this is contrary to my experience of real, actual truth."

I'd go a step further and assert that these "fact checkers" play fast and loose with the definition of words and the meaning of language. Here is the absolute best example I can think of:

"Did a ‘Convicted Terrorist’ Sit on the Board of a BLM Funding Body?"[1]

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."

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

Edit: I apologize for the unwieldy formatting of this post. But I keep finding more disturbing content from the snopes article that I must share.

>"In her memoir, Rosenberg wrote of her 1984 arrest in New Jersey that “there was no immediate, specific plan to use the explosives” with which she and Blunk were caught. ..."

>"Earlier in her book, Rosenberg indicated that she was comfortable, at least at one point in time, with bombing government buildings:"

>"proven record of using bomb attacks to influence the wider American public and advance their cause. As such, a supportable (though not definitive) case exists for claiming that the crimes of which Rosenberg was convicted in 1985 were indeed acts of domestic terrorism."

The author(s) are making every rhetorical excuse they can imagine. Yes, she admits in her book she was comfortable with using them. Yes, she did technically get caught with them. But you must keep in mind that there were no immediate plans to use them.

>"In any event, despite the existence of a definition of domestic terrorism in federal law, a discrete criminal offense of domestic terrorism does not exist, and did not exist in the 1980s. As a result, even if Rosenberg’s activities perfectly met the definition of domestic terrorism currently set out in federal law, and even if that definition existed in the 1980s, she could not have been charged with, tried for and convicted of domestic terrorism as such."

Look, dear reader, even if everything you learned about this situation is screaming "domestic terrorist", you HAVE to understand that by definition, she can't be one because of all the technicalities I have shown you. Case closed.

Yes, this is one of the most shameless examples of "fact-checkers" being partisan flak-catchers

And at the end of the day, the underlying issue is the intent of sharing this info on social media in the first place. Susan Rosenberg's position as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents is intended to imply that BLM itself is a terrorist organization. No amount of fact checking is going to help in this scenario.

>No amount of fact checking is going to help in this scenario.

Sure it will. You can flag it as false, and make sure nobody can see the posts.

>"to imply that BLM itself is a terrorist organization. No amount of fact checking is going to help in this scenario."

It seems to me the answer to this dilemma is to replace her on the board of directors. Scores of other CEO's and board members have been dismissed or asked to resign over far less. I'm no PR expert, but her background and connections are certainly eyebrow raising, despite all the attempts to hand-waive or dismiss them. Surely they have a large pool of talent from which to draw a replacement with a less problematic history?

This. Many other organizations are similar degrees of separation from individuals who could plausibly be labelled as terrorists or similar, but I doubt many of the people furious at labelling this claim as "mixed" would demand fact checkers also rate such articles as wholly true if the subject of the headline was an individual closely linked to, say, the Republican party, Fox News or the NRA. And yes, if you want to believe that BLM is a terrorist organisation then the Snopes article provides enough accurate detail about the bad stuff Rosenberg did for you not to change your mind, just as any self respecting fact checker has to acknowledge that however dubious certain insinuations might be, Oliver North et al exist.

I don't think "serves on the board of" counts as a degree of separation.

In the spirit of the discussion.... just as a screen tap counts as a 'zero-length' swipe, serving on the board of directors is a zero-degree separation. But it is still a degree of separation. /s

I could be wrong here, but “Thousand Currents” does not seem to be an alias for “BLM.”

"Serves on the board of an organisation that provides funding and administrative support to" sounds like a degree of separation. Unless you were talking about Oliver North...

Him too

> Susan Rosenberg's position as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents is intended to imply that BLM itself is a terrorist organization.

Or, much more reasonably, that it is an organization unconcerned with violence affecting innocent people.

"In short, "fact checkers" don't actually understand the definition of what a fact is, but are quick to declare them, and this is contrary to my experience of real, actual truth."

Fact checkers know exactly what a fact is rather they don't like people to know the truth, they instead want to push information that benefits them in some way.

During the presidential debate, Trump was talking about how wind mills kill "all the birds", indicating that there are in fact downsides to wind power.

All the "fact checkers" were brought in to discuss how there are other, larger threats to birds, like cats and buildings etc.

Clearly this wasn't a "truth finding fact check", but more of a "don't let Trump score any points" fact check.

This is where the distinction between fact and opinion is important.

Whether a person was convicted of a specific crime is a fact. It's true or false. People can disagree about whether the trial was fair, the law was just, etc... but there is an objective truth as to whether the conviction occurred or it did not.

The Snopes article lists the crimes Rosenberg was convicted of, which do not include "terrorism" or anything equivalent to that. She was convicted of multiple offenses involving weapons possession and identity fraud. The article goes on to list numerous other offenses involving a prison break, several armed robberies, and planting bombs for which she was charged, but not tried or convicted. It is therefore correct to say that she is not a convicted terrorist.

The article provides more than enough background for a reader to form the opinion that her activities constituted terrorism, and indeed that is my opinion.

The problem is that fact checkers doesn't have the same standards for every side. If this was about some right wing group that had a member with such a background in a leadership position they would absolutely have marked it as "true, this person is definitely a terrorist, just look at all this evidence!".

Can you provide a pair of examples in which Snopes, Politifact, or a similar mainstream US-based fact checker used clearly different standards for what constitutes a question of fact based on the political orientation of the subject?

They wouldn't even write an article about anything like this if it was the other side. She did work directly with convicted terrorists, she was charged with terrorism but that charge was dropped as a plea deal with those convicted, she was convicted with helping those terrorists. And if they wrote one article because it became a big deal they wouldn't have picked the "convicted terrorist" phrase to fact check, rather they would have fact checked "was X a terrorist" or similar and it would have gotten a clear yes, everything points towards this person was a terrorist.

Choosing what statements or what formulations of statements to fact check is also a part of the bias. People just read the headline, if they read "fact check, X was not a 'convicted terrorist'", they will read that as "X was not a terrorist", the fact checkers knows this and uses that to their advantage when picking the sentence to check and the verdict that will follow.

Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak [1][2]. Politifact literally retracted their claims on calling lab leak a conspiracy theory [3]. Reality is all these mainstream media is trying to control the narrative with rhetorical tricks.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/

[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

[3] https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/

I'm surprised they put mixture when a simple no would suffice.

There is no conviction of terrorism on her criminal record

>"a simple no would suffice. ..There is no conviction of terrorism on her criminal record"

Can you see why people object to this kind of legalistic thinking? If you follow the reasoning that only a conviction of terrorism qualifies one as a terrorist, what implications follow from that?

The point is that only a conviction of terroism qualifies one as a convicted terrorist. Just like only a conviction of murder qualifies one as a convicted murderer. If someone killed someone else, was convicted of manslaughter, but you personally think it was murder, you might feel justified in calling them a murderer. But it would make no sense for you to call them a "convicted murderer."

At which point, I would say we have successfully deflected off of the word "terrorist" and allowed ourselves to get stuck in in the non-impactful rut of fixating on "convicted".

Which circles back to my original point that the fact-checkers often resort to manipulating language in order to arrive at the verdicts they present. I find this kind of misdirection incredibly dishonest - both intellectually and ethically.

I couldn't really disagree more. Convicted is the key point here. Anyone can throw around the word 'terrorist' to describe someone, but conviction is a concrete fact about the legal system. The people calling this woman a "convicted terrorist" are leaning on the convicted. Without it their claim would feel much less weighty.

e.g. lots of people have called Kyle Rittenhouse a 'terrorist'. Say he had been convicted on one of the charges against him - would it be fair to call him a 'convicted terrorist' just because some people feel he is a terrorist, and he was convicted of something? Clearly not.

"Rosenberg is a convicted criminal who planned terrorist acts" is a far more defensible claim, so why not just say that?

By your definition, no successful suicide bomber would ever be a terrorist, because the dead do not go to trials.

Of course they would, they just wouldn't be a convicted terrorist.

Osama B.L. and I both belong to the same category of "not a convicted terrorist", yet that fact seems quite misleading.

I don't see how it would be misleading. Despite various indictments, AFAIK bin Laden was never convicted of anything. There are many categories you share with him, e.g. "people who didn't live in the seventeenth century" and "people who have never been in my kitchen."

In your view, do adjectives not matter for facticity, only nouns? Could we fairly call Osama bin Laden a Russian terrorist or a female terrorist?

But there are plenty of people who are widely believed to have committed terrorist acts without being convicted... Wouldn't you call those people terrorists?

What about pejorative adjectives describing conduct that isn't actually illegal, such as shouting at restaurant wait staff over perceived mistakes? Am I allowed to call that person a "jerk"?

It would be plainly ridiculous to insist that we can only apply adjectives upon conviction by a criminal court. That's not how adjectives work.

The people who destroyed the WTC on 9/11 died in the act. There was no trial that would convict them posthumously of terrorism, given that we do not judge the dead (well, not anymore: it used to be a thing, see [1]). So, their criminal records are clear of terrorism convictions.

Does that mean that I will be labeled as a spreader of fake news if I call Mohamed Atta [2] a terrorist?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta

I don’t think fact checkers are an enemy of free speech. The entire foundation of science is build upon the process of being able to fact check each other’s findings.

There has also never really been a period in western civilisation where the news media wasn’t heavily controlled and fact checked by powerful editors.

The real issue isn’t fact checkers, it’s that Facebook isn’t held accountable.

If we want a functioning democracy, we need to stop giving major corporations a pass because the manipulation that happens on their platforms is created and run by users. That’s not how we treated News Papers and it’s not how we should treat Social Networks. If Facebook has really been a knowing participant in genocides, then Mark Zuckerberg belongs in the Haag as far as I am concerned.

The scientific method does not presume to produce or check "facts". Real science is based on probabilities. Individuals have to set their own criteria as to when level of probability they want to classify as a fact.

Fact checkers are totally an enemy of free speech. They flag posts saying that is so called "information" is inaccurate and that people shouldn't be able to see it.

If it is false is it really right to flag the post. I mean yes it is false but as Americans we are suppost to have free speech when we don't.

> If it is false is it really right to flag the post. I mean yes it is false but as Americans we are suppost to have free speech when we don't.

Your first amendment right to free speech is a limited freedom from the government stating that the government cannot stifle or compel your speech. Facebook is not (yet) the government, so the 1A protections do not apply to Facebook. After all, if Facebook were forced to host content they didn't want to host, that would be considered compelled speech.

I would argue that if a post is verifiably, unequivocally false it is right to flag it as such. Maybe limit its reach in "discovery" platforms but still show it to followers/friends. This is a very, very small percentage of posts (think: "the earth is flat," not "do vaccines really work?"). These warnings should link to reputable, peer-reviewed research as a primary source and a reputable secondary source for those who don't want to read the research paper.

> I would argue that if a post is verifiably, unequivocally false it is right to flag it as such.

The incentive to move the bar lower will lead to constant lowering of the bar until we're back to where we are today.

> If it is false is it really right to flag the post. I mean yes it is false but as Americans we are supposed to have free speech when we don't.

Good thing nothing that happens on Facebook ever spills over into other countries.

On a non-sarcastic note, I find it interesting that you didn't engage at all with the comment about Facebook and genocides. It's easy to sit in an ivory tower and play philosopher on topics of corporate censorship like this. What's less interesting, but far more useful, is evaluating whether Facebook should do more to moderate when their platform is actively used to orchestrate genocides in several separate places on earth.

> "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases

I get where you're going here, and I don't totally disagree, but that's not "just" what experts are. Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.

It's good to be skeptical, and it's important to understand that experts have bias too, but there's a difference between someone who has passively consumed information in a biased manner and an expert who has dedicated real research to arrive at their viewpoint. Being able to consume and be critical of information from biased experts while still benefiting from and being enriched by their knowledge and expertise (instead of disregarding it because you disagree) is I think the crown jewel of "critical thinking".

>Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.

Are we still talking about Facebook fact checking experts?

> there's a difference between someone who has passively consumed information in a biased manner and an expert who has dedicated real research to arrive at their viewpoint.

Which camp does the fact checker fall into?

Jamie Metzl lays out an incredible delusional narrative constructed by health experts about the Pangolin/intermediate host theory for Sars-COV-2 origins, 4 hours of in-depth discussion, highly recommend. Experts made a U-turn but not because of typical respectful scientific protocol of discovering new facts (and therefore changing their minds), but rather due to peer-pressure, politics and group-think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I

It honestly makes me really nervous for the future. There is a LOT of distrust in experts that I see across the internet (and here in HN).

While there are bad actors, consensus is generally going to guide you closer to the truth than fringe experts. What does the community of experts who have studied this say about it? Is it something generally accepted by the experts or is it something that most experts disagree with?

It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study will succumb to bias. Climate change is the poster child here. Where experts disagree isn't that it is happening and caused by man, they disagree about the degree that it will be a problem (With all of them agreeing it's a major issue). Yet, I've often seen it claimed that those experts are all biased and this fringe expert funded by Koch research is really the one to be trusted (which, shocker, finds we should be burning MORE fossil fuels!)

Trust in scientists is too high when they keep pumping out studies that don't replicate, and don't publish the original data and methods used to reach conclusions.

I wholly trust science that independently replicates and the fact that it's missing from the process means much of what we see is less than wholly trustworthy.

Not all fields of science are created equal. Whether or not studies are replicated or data is available will depend entirely on the field of study.

Certainly, a lot of the social sciences and "soft" sciences have a fair bit of replication/data problems. That said, the biomedical, environmental, geologic, and chemical sciences by and large have really solid data and repeats of that data. The areas of sciences we have a harder time controlling for are those where it'd be unethical to get better data and examples (nutritional science, for example).

There are far too many fields of study to lump all science into the same bucket and call it all untrustworthy.

A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal. When, in fact, some studies are far better than others and carry a much larger weight of truth.

> Not all fields of science are created equal.

But FB, and other platforms, treat them as if they are when making their decisions on what to censor. FB even trusts so called "independent fact checkers," who don't even claim to be scientists and write mostly on political topics, to act as arbiters of truth.

> A bigger problem is that scientific journalism treats every study as being equal.

And it's these journalists that FB is relying on for its determination of fact, not the actual scientists.

Then stop censoring. Look at what happened in this post. Experts said X, the author said Y, and Y was censored because it disagreed with the experts. Later the experts admitted that X was incorrect. Of course, the experts, who ended up being wrong faced no consequences, while the author who ended up being right was censored. The experts are essentially a privileged class whose opinions are considered to be true by default, and when they get things wrong, it is assumed that this is just a good faith mistake, and forgiven. Everybody else is assumed to be wrong by default, and spreading politically motivated misinformation. When they are right it is assumed to be a fluke and swept under the rug. In this environment the only logical response is to mistrust the appointed "experts." If they are what they say they are let them defend their point against all challengers.

> Then stop censoring.

And stop dissembling. For instance, Fauci's early statements on mask-wearing were calculated to preserve the supply of N95 masks for medical personnel. However laudable the intent, it betrays what I imagine is an endemic world-view that the masses must be manipulated, rather than dealt with honestly.

This morning, an NPR report about the new CDC quarantine guidelines acknowledged criticisms/allegations of corporate lobbying for the policy change and internal fears of staffing for critical services, which was followed-up by a "follow the science" platitude.

Facebook's actions keep being cast as if there is a completely open, level, neutral field that the censorious fact checkers are now distorting. But that's not the starting point. Facebook already has its thumb -- if not both hands and an elbow! -- on the scale, as far as what content is dispersed. The view is distorted to begin with, by Facebook choosing what is promoted and what is not.

They may not be doing a particularly good job un-distorting it, but it's not a choice between pure and free exchange of information and censorship. It is between whether Facebook is going to manipulate in both directions -- promoting and taking down -- or just one.

(Note that I don't think either of these choices are particularly good. I would prefer that Facebook did neither.)

Expert consensus has some value, but it's often too subject to inertia and fails to adjust fast enough to new evidence. Up until 1982 the medical experts told us that peptic ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food. Except that was totally wrong.

https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.asp...

What else could they be wrong about today? Often when you really dig into consensus statements you find that they're based on a handful of old studies which don't really meet modern evidence based medicine criteria.

The problem I have with statements like these is they focus on the misses while ignoring hits.

Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?

What about the expert consensus that azithromycin is an effective treatment against (most strains of) streptococcus? Is that consensus wrong?

You are correct, expert consensus will be wrong at times and it will take a fairly large push and evidence to change course. However, for every example of the experts "getting it wrong" there are 100s if not 1000s where you are better off following the consensus. Further, as time goes on, the process of developing consensus improves itself. It looks for faults that lead to bad conclusions and corrects for those faults in future studies.

It is a truth that experts and their consensuses will be wrong. However, if I follow and accept what a strong expert consensus says about something in that field of study 99% or even 99.99% of the time, they will be right. Or said another way, if you make the claim that "This expert consensus is wrong" You'll be right 0.01% of the time and wrong 99.99% of the time. Unless you are an expert in that field of study and you have a bunch of very strong research backing the claim, you've got no footing to really go against the consensus.

“Expert consensus says that washing hands prevents the spread of disease. It's been like that since the 1950s. Has that consensus been wrong?”

WRT Covid, yes that advice was wrong and has been abandoned as Covid isn’t spread by surface transmission.

> The problem I have with statements like these is they focus on the misses while ignoring hits.

That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.

The issue isn't that experts are wrong or change their stance when the data changes. That isn't a problem and is exactly how things should work.

The issue is when politicians and leaders treat "expert opinion" as settled truth. Our decisions and policies need to be crafted knowing that experts are wrong and the situation changes when the data changes. Instead, politicians and leaders hold up expert opinion as settled and let the blame fall on the scientists, researchers, etc. when they "miss". If their work was not co-opted by politicians there would be no issue.

> That's how trust works. It only takes 1 miss to lose it.

No, that’s only how things work when you are looking for a pretense to ignore expert advice.

How am I supposed to judge expert advice if I lack the technical knowledge? Blind trust?

What else can you do? Really? How can you trust or distrust expert advice without the technical knowledge?

Most of the reasons for distrust I've seen have basically boiled down to "I don't like what the expert is saying" or "They were wrong once, obviously all experts are wrong about everything".

It’s definitely a soft skill, but roughly for me it’s: - assumes good faith - doesn’t attempt to control others - doesn’t show disdain of their out group

Obviously knowing somebody personally makes this much easier.

I agree that expert consensus is more often right than wrong. However you have no scientific basis for claiming that they are right 99% of the time. You just made up that number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown, and indeed unknowable.

My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.

Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.

given that knowledge is practically infinite (bounded only by the expanse of the universe), you'd actually expect the correctness of scientific consensus to asymptotically approach 0. that is, we're waaaaaay more wrong than right, and waaaaay more often, before we get it right, especially as knowledge gets more fractally intricate and expansive.

That'd only be true if expert consensus covered all knowledge. It doesn't, nor does it opine on all possible knowledge.

Saying correctness approaches 0 because knowledge is effectively infinite would be like saying our ability to do math correctly is 0 because there are an infinite amount of numbers. Or, that our ability to write correct software is 0 because there are infinite possible programs.

no, those are not analogous at all. knowability is literally a subset of all knowledge, which pushes into a void that expands faster than we can enumerate. it's hubris to think otherwise.

> you'd actually expect the correctness of scientific consensus to asymptotically approach 0

Scientific consensus correctness is calculated as true assertions / all assertions.

If we stopped making assertions, today, the scientific consensus correctness would be fixed at whatever level it is at. The amount of knowledge that hasn't been studied has no bearing on the correctness of scientific consensus. That's a number that is finite with a denominator squarely fixed by the number of assertions that happen as human knowledge expands.

The assertion 1 + 1 = 2 will always be true. If that was the only assertion the scientific community ever made and had consensus over then they'd be at 100% correctness. It doesn't matter that you can also calculate 1 + 2, or 3 + 5, or an infinite number of numerical combinations. The denominator is the assertions, not the unasserted assertions. It doesn't matter that knowledge is "fractile" or whatever. Because, assertions by the scientific community are pretty much always couched as "Given the current data, this model fits best". Newtonian physics isn't "incorrect" it's incomplete. This is the same for most knowledge with that "fractile" understanding.

The only way you approach 0 is if our fundamental understanding of reality is completely fundamentally flawed, but then, that'd be an unknowable knowledge.

that's trying to artificially constrain knowledge in a way so that your prior assertion is true (reminiscent of the incompleteness theorem). that's a common way that people become simultaneously self-certain and wrong.

scientific consensus has no hope of outrunning even what humans in general know, let alone every scientific conjecture ever made, most of which aren't disproven, but rather merely discarded. and all that is a tiny speck next to everything that's within reach of human knowledge, which is miniscule next to everything that could ever be known but is forever beyond our reach. it really does approach 0 at the limit.

I'm not "constraining knowledge" I'm not saying it isn't theoretically infinite. I'm saying that the amount of knowledge has no barring on whether or not an assertion is true.

Further, the scenario of this entire thread is about current and future scientific consensus, not past consensus. The fact that protoscience said that that you need to balance the 4 humors to cure illness does not affect current scientific consensus which soundly rejects that notion.

The number of assertions we have scientific consensus on is finite. The number of those assertions which are true is a finite number. The infinite nature of knowledge does not change that ratio because, again, we aren't making assertions about everything that is knowable.

The entire point of this conversation is "What is more likely true, what the experts say or something else?". You are making the claim that because scientists don't know what every atom in the sun is doing, they can't correctly say that the sun will rise in the morning. Because, their knowledge of the sun is an infinitesimally small percentage of everything there is to know about the sun.

My point is, scientists aren't making assertions about what every quark in the sun will do. They aren't making assertions about the temperature of every square inch of the sun. The assertions they are making are far more broad and, shocker, likely 90+% true. Which circles back to my main point. If an expert tells you "The surface of the sun is roughly 6000C" That's a correct statement.

If you aren't going to address this in your next comment then don't bother because I'm done with this. You are being purposefully obtuse.

> However you have no scientific basis for claiming that they are right 99% of the time. You just made up that number. In fact the actual accuracy rate is unknown, and indeed unknowable.

> My subjective impression is that expert accuracy rates vary widely by scientific field. High energy particle physicists might actually be hitting 99.99%. Psychologists and nutritionists might not even be at 50%. Epidemiologists are somewhere in the middle.

All fair points that I don't really disagree with.

> Experts lose credibility when they make sweeping recommendations based on flawed or limited research rather than remaining silent as they should. Once trust is lost it takes a generation to regain.

I don't think it's quiet as binary. I agree, they should limit recommendations based on the data and be very open when "the data is limited and more information could change our recommendation".

But I don't think that means they need to be silent when data is limited, just careful with communication.

Health experts are in the worst position for this sort of thing. In a pandemic situation, data will simply be limited and action required to prevent lose of life. You can't just sit back and do nothing.

But, I'd agree that you need to be very open and frank about why you are taking actions and how confident you are that the actions you are taking will be effective. COVID hasn't been handled perfectly in that regard, but it could be worse.

As for trust and credibility, I think a major social issue we have is that we are quick to distrust experts over being wrong or mistepping on any given issue but for some reason we are extremely forgiving of religious leaders and politicians that repeat platitudes we agree with. I'm not advocating for blind trust in experts, but I wish it wasn't so reactionary, where any wrong statement causes people to lose all trust in expert credibility. That's not something I could control anyways.

Actually action is not required. In the medical field if you aren't legitimately confident about the effects of a particular action, both positive and negative, then it's better to sit back and do nothing (while conducting additional research).

"First, do no harm" is a fundamental principle of medical ethics. Unfortunately iatrogenic harm from over treatment is still a serious cause of injuries and deaths. The default should always be to do nothing unless there is clear and reliable evidence to support intervention. That applies equally to pandemics as to other situations.

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/9728/to-err-is-human-building-a-...

I understand that politicians might sometimes have to take rapid actions based on political factors. But don't deceive the populace by falsely claiming those actions are supported by scientific consensus.

I worked first hand in a research group. the 'experts' are extremely political, and anything that doesn't fit their political agenda is ignored, and if the study/experiment doesn't fit their political agenda they keep trying or fudging the data until it does. I'll give you an example,

I noticed a map of obesity overlaps very well with a map of diabetes. high alcohol consumption mapped very well with the areas the prior map didnt correlate. in other words, in areas where obesity was not correlated with diabetes, there was high alcohol consumption. paper worthy or worth looking into? no. I lied to a different section of the group and said these were areas of increased correlation, and it wasn't alcohol but soda consumption. They immediately wanted to seek grants to write papers.

You can see how this leads to junk science. if you ignore things that dont fit your political agenda and only research things that fit your agenda, that's junk science. it gets worse because when the data doesnt suggest the political agenda pushed, they try to 'account' for other factors or re-run the study in a different way until it says what they wanted it to say. worse case, it doesnt get published.

The experts are not to be trusted.

Is that related to the “reproduction crisis” science is going through right now?

yes because results are jelly beaned. If you keep changing what to measure for success criteria until you get what you want, you are more likely reject the null hypothesis even though you should not have OR if you dont publish results that doesnt fit your political bias, the 1/20 ones that do get published and also incorrectly rejected the null hypothesis

> It is nearly impossible that an entire field of study will succumb to bias

It's happened before, especially when a select few command the majority of the field's grants/publications. If you are interested in how this could happen, here's an example of where basically the entirety of the Alzheimer's disease research field of study succumbed to bias:

https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarte...

as well as the HN discussion on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21911225

Experts have spent more time tuning their biases. If someone claims to be free of bias then they dont understand training sets and inheritance.

> Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.

One thing to note though is that the less mature a field is, the more gaps there will be an expert's knowledge/models. Doctors in the 1940s were regarded as medical experts, and yet many were actively promoting cigarettes. History is littered with "experts" whose expertise was outrageously wrong or misguided in hindsight.

So I say people should judge experts by the maturity of their field and in the context they are providing expertise on.

A civil engineer is giving expertise on whether a building will collapse or not? You'll likely get extremely reliable expertise you can count on.

A doctor is promoting a glass of wine a day for health reasons? Take it with a grain of salt.

but that the best advice we can get now

Be careful: that salt will give you high blood pressure! Or not, depending on which medical "expert" turns out to be correct.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find an actual expert who would make the general claim that salt consumption will cause high blood pressure, as opposed to a claim that some people are salt-sensitive, or that high salt diets are positively correlated with high blood pressure, or something else.

Part of the problem is that non-experts tend to summarize expert information in ways that alter or omit crucial points, and then people are disappointed when the crib notes version tends to be inaccurate.

Yes I was being somewhat flippant. Besides genetic susceptibility, the current research indicates that the issue with salt is more due to osmolality than quantity.

https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/

And yet the medical experts still get it wrong by oversimplifying the issue and making dietary recommendations based on quantity.

https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/high-blood-pressure/c...

I had a discussion about this with a doctor. I asked them for their opinions on sodium to potassium ratios by age group and sodium loss through sweat. I got blank stares and the subject changed. I've had far more fascinating and informative discussions with nutritionists and fitness coaches, not to suggest they are a definitive source of knowledge. I find it ultimately best to research things on my own and take all scientific papers with a skeptical grain of salt.

A physician probably learns the physiology of sweat glands, mechanisms for how the human body regulates sodium and potassium, and diseases caused by regulatory mechanisms not working. Unless they had an interest or read a study, I’m not sure I would expect a physician to know that, and in my experience a lot of physicians are reluctant to speculate.

Nutritionists and fitness coaches are much more willing to speculate in my experience, with the caveat that they may not have the same education as a scientist as a physician does.

To be fair, an expert not answering a question that they don't know the answer to is a good outcome. The real expert for your question would be a researcher in the specific field, or perhaps the rare doctor who has taken an interest in following such research.

I had been cutting caffeine out of my life for awhile. Ended on ER where they stuck an actual bag of caffeine to my IV. Felt like I was in a comic.

Also that much caffeine really sucks.

Are you implying that salt does not raise blood pressure? Because I am pretty sure you are wrong. But be free to share RCT's showing it is indeed a false association.

Your surety is misplaced and unfortunately you're not even asking the right question. The relationship between salt and blood pressure is a complex, multi-factorial issue which can't be adequately summarized in a comment here. The best explanation I've heard is this interview with Rick Johnson, MD who is one of the most prominent researchers in that field. It's long but worth a listen.

https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/

I don't really care how complex it is. Split people between two groups, offer food with half the salt to one group and see what happens. No need to overcomplicate.

One issue is the undisclosed interests. Something tells me that doctors who were promoting cigarettes were paid to do so. Just like we've seen experts saying that oil /CO2 has nothing to do with climate change or health issues. This kind of collusion should bring criminal charges both to the experts and to the ultimate party that funded the misleading research.

The other issue is the lack of education and basic critical thinking among a high proportion of population so you find yourself in a world full of conspiracy theories and fake information. For some reasons I thought this issue can be found only in 3rd world countries but covid openned my eyes...

So, here's the challenge.

A doctor is promoting vaccinating your child from COVID?. Should that also be taken with a grain of salt?

What about measles?

How do you draw the line?

How do you help others - suspicious of authority, and being actively manipulated in a culture war to distrust anything a "progressive" tells them - to draw the line?

I think it's impossible. The only way is to say that "Doctors are experts. They have been wrong before and they will be wrong again. Experts doesn't mean getting things 100% right. But it definitely means getting things more right than you, most of the time. So trust them, even if as new information develops, the advice will shift".

By the way both sides in the culture war believe this. FOX News finds their own experts. They find the 0.1% scientists that don't believe in climate change and give them 60% of the airtime. But they still appeal to experts.

> But it definitely means getting things more right than you, most of the time. So trust them, even if as new information develops, the advice will shift

You're advocating giving up all agency and placing 100% trust in a person. There are endless examples in human history as to why this is dangerous. There are very few as to why this is good. "Just trust me" is generally regarded as something said by a person you should not trust, and for good reason.

> How do you draw the line?

You do your best to evaluate the information on your own and find sources you trust. The latter is nearly impossible when an issue becomes political.

> find sources you trust

And those sources will consist of...who? Perhaps, people who have spent time and effort learning about the topic, a.k.a. "the experts"?

Spending a lot of time on one thing does not inherently make you trustworthy. I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

It makes you knowledgeable. You should pick knowledgeble people to trust on complicated topics and you shouldn't base that trust on if those people tell you what you want yo hear but on their ability to acknowledge nuance and change their minds when they see new data.

You’re starting to get it with your last points. There’s a lot of factors that go in to determining trustworthiness. Being knowledgeable is a prerequisite for trusting somebody.

> You're advocating giving up all agency and placing 100% trust in a person.

Not at all. Placing provisional trust in am expert about a specific opinion you are aware may change in the future is completely different from "giving up all agency" or "placing 100% trust in a person. Nothing in that advice tells you not to check the opinions of a few different experts to be sure you aren't being misled.

> The latter is nearly impossible when an issue becomes political.

It's not that hard. You find experts who seem to do a good job of acknowledging nuance and don't seem to be trying to make their facts fit a narrative.

What you don't do is trust someone because what they say on completely different topics matches what you believe or trust someone because they consistently give you the answers you want to hear. Doing either of those is worse than just blindly trusting experts.

> How do you draw the line?

Again, maturity of the thing the expertise revolves around is important here.

Since covid has been around less than 2 years and child-approved covid vaccines have been around for less than 1 year, I'd take a recommendation to vaccinate my kid against covid with a grain of salt. Especially since covid itself does not appear to impact children the same way it does adults (<0.03% of covid deaths have been children, etc.). Since covid is a highly politicized topic at the moment it's hard to tell if the doctor is recommending the vaccine because he actually feels it's beneficial vs. recommending the vaccine because despite feeling like it's not terribly beneficial, he's feeling pressure from governments to push the vaccine because they want to get kids back into schools.

Measles vaccines have been around over 50 years, have a proven utility and track record, and are not currently politicized. Plus measles is way more deadly to kids than covid, so in that case it's more cut and dry.

So my philosophy is to take covid-related advice with a grain of salt until the expertise around it is more mature. I think in 5 years we will have a much better idea of how necessary child covid vaccines really are (as well as how necessary cloth masks really are, etc.).

By the way, when I say "take with a grain of salt", I don't mean "don't give your kid the covid vaccine". I mean "Probably still give the kid covid vaccine but reserve the right to harbor doubts that it's actually necessary and quietly suspect the current political climate is putting pressure on hospitals to push the vaccine regardless of the actual merits of the vaccine"

> being actively manipulated in a culture war

People you disagree with aren't the only ones being manipulated.

Not every subject needs to be "both sided". In the modern progressive/conservative divide, there is no pure synchronicity between how people of different political persuasions approach their support of ideas. Namely: One group stays pretty consistent with their preferences; The other shifts position depending on who's proposing it.

The Data: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/7hjdap/the_last_pr...

'field maturity' could perhaps say something about the likeliness of trustworthy information/advice overall, but says nothing about the trustworthiness of the expert themselves.

in fact, the nominative 'expert' is a political injection, practically begging for appeal to authority to shut down critical thinking. expertise has little correlation to trustworthiness, given that it typically gets overwhelmed by the politically-interwined 'esteem'.

there is no shortcut to doing the hard work of triangulating the best information out of many biased opinions, including so-called 'experts'[0]. this is true of news, reviews, and commentary of all sorts.

[0]: similarly noted in a different context here, along with it's grandparent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29678221

Right, and part of the problem with an "ah, who can know the truth" approach is that it absolutely will be weaponized by bad faith actors. It's really easy to be loud and persistent with a lie if no one calls it out because "who knows, really".

A parallel to this is something I saw in Italy where a number of people complain that "all the politicians are corrupt". This provides cover for the really rotten politicians, because it puts the ones shoveling money to their cronies in the same category as the basically honest guy who's trying his best to actually do something positive for his constituents.

“the problem with an "ah, who can know the truth" approach is that it absolutely will be weaponized by bad faith actors.”

So are pens. Do you have any idea of the magnitude of horrors that have been committed by the stroke of a pen? Should we ban pens?

But fact-checkers aren’t experts. And experts don’t claim their research conclusions as facts.

But the problem is that expertise is used to shut down debate...that is the reason why it is controversial.

People do not disbelieve experts because they think they are experts themselves. They disbelieve experts because the argument today is: I am an expert, I am right, if you disagree with me you are likely a danger to other people.

What has changed is the attitude of "experts" to other people. And I say "experts" because it is also increasingly common for people who have expertise in one subject to claim that they have expertise in another subject, and use that authority to elevate their claims beyond contention.

It isn't about scepticism or some kind of re-interpretation of scientific truth...it is one group of people attempting to use their authority to force through their view of what society should be like. If you want to see what the looks like, China is led by "experts"...it isn't pretty. I think Covid has brought this to the fore because you have scientific "experts" ruling on societal and political issues, not because people necessarily disbelieve those claims (ofc, experts and politicians are very clear to make this unclear...they want you to believe that the people who oppose them are lunatics, they aren't, they are rarely people who deny Covid is occurring or deny vaccines work...they just have different political views which suggest different solutions to those problems...there are no experts in politics, that is why we have voting, "experts" today are attempting to shut down debate, shut down politics, and would shut down voting if given the chance).

Also, another big issue is that experts undermine themselves. I can only speak to what is happening in the UK but experts here have made predictions that were fairly consistently untrue - https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios - people did not disbelieve these predictions at the start, they disbelieve them now because the evidence is clear: the predictions are consistently wrong, and consistently used to justify a political decision that the "experts" want (one that has massive externalities in areas that the "experts" don't know about...paragraph 3 again). This happens, no-one can predict the future, no-one can predict the course of a pandemic 100%...but the problem is that the "experts" are saying: we can predict this, we are correct all the time...again, this is something totally different. Again, what has changed is the experts, not the people.

Have the spectator really not updated this page since October?

Poor form fellows, very poor form.

No, the page was created for "freedom day" (and the consistent predictions that it would unleash an apocalypse).

That makes more sense. It just surprises me that I've seen far more links to this page in the past few weeks than I ever did back then.

I served as a juror on a criminal case, in which the prosecution seemed to want to make a big deal out of DNA evidence found on some clothing. In turn, the defense wanted to dispose of that evidence by having an expert say that DNA evidence was unreliable. The expert they brought in was someone who admitted their knowledge of the field was only based on an article they read.

So the percentage of experts who spend real research on a question appears to be less than 100.

There is a long, sad history of trial courts improperly convicting defendants based on pseudoscience testimony by "expert" witnesses. We now know that forensic analysis of things like hair samples and bite marks is mostly bullshit. Even fingerprint and ballistic analysis has a high error rate. Unfortunately jurors often assign expert witnesses a level of credibility that they don't deserve.

There are astrology “experts”. The idea that someone is an expert is very difficult to establish. Many times I discover that “expert” doctors who give public health advice don’t understand the difference between correlation and causation. Experts are made in a biased environment. Those who could get rid of their biases would probably be filtered out by that same environment.

Yes. What most laypeople don't understand is that finding cracks in the work of experts has real rewards for other experts, because of the scientific method. Therefore, it is unlikely that a layperson will find those cracks first.

> Typically experts are people who have spent far more time than other people doing exactly what you're describing: slowly sifting through and cross-referencing data, asking questions, digging up resources, and testing hypothesis.

For sure, but that's not at all how fact checking is implemented today. Most of the critique is related to the silencing, discrediting and deplatforming of reporters and professionals (i.e. experts by your definition) that express a different interpretation or selection of data. Even if it was enforced through gate-keeping by merit, it would still be massively subject to bias and political capture.

It's abundantly clear that fact-checking is at best using Western authority consensus, which is much more narrow than even scientific consensus, which itself has a majorly flawed track record in recent history.

What fact checking is effectively doing is treating information, debate and ideas as a form of hazardous material, too dangerous to be freely exchanged, unless certified by chain of custody through the supply chain of truths. Independently of the do-gooders' commandable intents, the result is predictably Orwellian. The systems, processes and bureaucracies for policing speech are rapidly expanding during this pandemic, see e.g. the Trusted News Initiative[1] and check their partner list. (There are of course countless other moving pieces.)

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...

I think the broader lesson is: Do not fight authoritarians with more authoritarianism.

The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain. Therefore, be open to new ideas, but slow to accept anything as absolute truth.

Talking about trying to find an "absolute truth" is disingenuous. Yeah, we absolutely know 1+1=2, but it's impossible to absolutely know how a stock will perform. Often times, a situation doesn't call for finding "the real" or "absolute" truth, but coming to a conclusion using only the best info you have on hand at the moment.

In most cases, you can find the best info. You have to know how to find it though, how to weigh one source against another. It's like the old proverb about teaching a man to fish rather than giving them a fish. Learning "how to fish" is something you're taught in school, but then again, there are those in power that are making it harder to get a proper education. That's something to be wary of. They aren't just taking our fish, but our ability to fish.

I think what I'm trying to say is that because absolute truth is so hard to determine, it is imperative that people have the ability to decide for themselves from the data what they believe to be true, even if it is "wrong" (because sometimes what is "wrong" turns out to be true in the end).

I'd go a step further and add that many "truths" are also conditionally dependent on time and the current state of the world. It used to be true that aluminum was more valuable than gold, now that is no longer the case.

> "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases.

This is an absurd and false statement, and is a perfect summation of why so much mis/disinformation floats around and is so popular in today's online world.

Experts do indeed have their own inherent biases. This part is a glib truism because experts are people, and all people have biases which both consciously and unconsciously influence their decision making.

But that is not "just" what experts are. Experts are people who have, by definition, expertise in a given subject matter. Unless you too are an equal expert in a given topic, experts--once again by definition--know more than you do in that field.

It doesn't mean you need to take what they say as gospel, so to speak, but it does mean that when the choice is to listen to 'random person on the internet' versus 'someone who has studied something for years and has made valued contributions to the field', the two-despite both having biases-are not on equal footing.

"Experts" are wrong all the time. I have doctor who didnt even order my mri with iodine last week, because hes a fool. He didnt even know that was an option. He also didnt know ultrasound to find an injury was an option. I know more than this doctor on ligament tears and how to treat them at this point and thats supposed to be his job. This is just one example but I find new ones every week where "experts" in all fields have no clue what they're doing.

This obviously isnt to say all experts are not knowledgeable, but theres plenty who are not and often they are in charge. Thats why taking their opinion as ultimate truth without question is dangerous.

Yes, there are people who are shitty at their jobs. Again, this is a glib truism. There are shitty doctors and programmers as much as there are shitty waiters and binmen.

> Thats why taking their opinion as ultimate truth without question is dangerous.

Agree. Which is why I explicitly stated:

> It doesn't mean you need to take what they say as gospel, so to speak, but it does mean that when the choice is to listen to 'random person on the internet' versus 'someone who has studied something for years and has made valued contributions to the field', the two-despite both having biases-are not on equal footing.

I'm sorry that it sounds like you have a shitty doctor. The solution is to find a better one, not to renounce doctors.

Ehh. When I was a kid we called this an appeal to authority. Experts are wrong all the time. Experts disagree all the time. Just like some random person on the internet.

An appeal to authority fallacy occurs when that appeal is made to an irrelevant authority. An example of an appeal to authority fallacy would be if a podiatrist touts their DPM credentials when making claims about the efficacy of Covid vaccinations. This is an appeal to authority fallacy because they are not involved in vaccine research or a related field. An example that would not be an appeal to authority fallacy would be if a car mechanic told you you're getting the wrong bulbs for your car, and then explain that you were getting fog bulbs when you probably need regular headlight replacements. This is not an appeal to authority fallacy because the mechanic is qualified and explained their reasoning (which you can seek consensus on from other mechanics).

And when experts disagree, it is informed disagreement, not at all like random people on the internet.

> An appeal to authority fallacy occurs when that appeal is made to an irrelevant authority.

You are an idiot. An argument stands on it's own. Who presents arguments is wholly immaterial.

I doubt you actually believe this. Let's take an example: you experience a lot of pain after being in a car accident. Do you: a) ask random people about the pain and what you should do about it, or b) go to the hospital.

Obviously anyone remotely rational is going to go with b). Why? Because they trust that the people there are more likely to better care for you than a random person on the street. And why is that? Because they are experts.

It's the same as the Ministry of Truth. Orwellian and arrogant to the extreme and will always be abused by those in power.

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

I honestly don't know how people navigate in society without this being plainly obvious to them. The number of people who believe most claims can be checked to any level of certainty is genuinely worrying and highlights a fundamental lack of critical thinking within our society, and therefore democratic process.

As you say, most of the time these aren't "facts", but usually opinions or hypotheses based on a subject interruption of some data. The truth is even if 99% of the evidence we have today suggests masks work, this doesn't mean masks work, just that it's very likely they do assuming there isn't some bias in the research. The reason I mention bias is because it's simply true that in the past research on things like contentious subjects like climate change, smoking and various diets have been biased by corporate interest.

I think the problem we have with misinformation today is less that people sometimes believe the wrong things, but they believe the wrong things with high levels of conviction and passion. The first step in the solution to misinformation in my opinion should be to promote an attitude similar to yours -- one of general scepticism and an openness to new information and beliefs.

There was a Stanford professor that argued that "We don't have high quality evidence for masks"[0]. Just asking for more studies to be done. Note the emphasis on "high quality". He was cancelled, fired and smeared by the university and the media.

Here are some studies that probably need to be done more carefully because they conclude "Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."[1]. So what's wrong with questioning and asking for more to be done?

[0] https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/15/stanford-faculty-smear-...

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

Who was fired by university? Certainly not the professor the article you quoted centers on, who, as of posting, is still employed by Stanford according to both Stanford: https://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/people/jay_bhattachary... and his own linked in profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbhattacharya

Kinda ironic, given the topic.

> The truth, real truth, is EXTREMELY hard to ascertain

It’s really challenging for me to speak in a way that’s unarguable. For example, instead of saying “COVID is now…”, saying “I read an article that says COVID is now…”.

The first sentence is arguable, the second is unarguable because it’s my personal experience. How often do you read articles or reporting that state unarguable truths?

Even a slight tweak from “COVID cases are spiking…” to “The NY Department of Health released data showing an X% increase in reported COVID cases statewide” makes a lot of difference in how I perceive the potential bias or truthiness of the content I’m reading.

Strongly agree. A lot of choices are made in the use of language.

This happened a lot with the Jan 6th event. Some even proudly labeling it an insurrection when they made statements I noticed. It was like the language choice was used fearlessly.

The Covid headlines as you mention are another huge one. Ive heard surge so many times and it’s been completely remade into an indication of a massive spike no matter the real context.

Even if the cases really surging, I’ve always hated the use of words that take the ability away from the reader to tell for themselves what happened.

A similar issue is in finding raw video of events, like rittenhouse shooting. So much of the results were subjectively selected clips w the news anchors speaking over it. I don’t want to be told what happened, I want the raw facts.

The truth... the real truth is sometimes even scientifically impossible to find, like it is parodied in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ua-WVg1SsA

I’m a bit older and concur.

One issue driving it is the abandonment of personal responsibility for any aspect of our lives. Americans have it constantly drilled into them to expect authority figures to take the lead on providing our basic necessities, handling workplace disputes, obtaining medical care, etc., why should we be surprised that they’ve lost the ability to think for themselves?

> "Experts" are just people with their own inherent biases.

Experts are usually correct. I have no idea why you would think otherwise. Now, experts in one area often misapply that authority to others where they are not expert, but within their domain they are most often right. And I have yet to see that not be the case.

I swear this is the worse comment I saw on HN, I'm going very political here:

I'm not native english speaker, but calling fact checkers more damaging to society then: fox news, qanon, american nazism, evangelical believes, mormons, all christianity, school schootings, obama being war criminal for drone bombing iraqis, climate catastrphy and propping up islam regimes in saudi arabia etc, war on public transport by motor-lobby, end of democracy in us

I could go for hours, I smell right wing bullshit from miles, or OP is autistic

These are early symptoms of a Truth-Market-Fit approach[1] where "fact-checking" is defined by the financial benefits in keeping a following or customer base. The "Fact checkers" have become Trust Providers. Different groups of people will choose to 'believe' different Trust Providers according to their own views.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/truth-market-fit-unbundling-t...

Colion Noir has a similar tale [0] with fact checkers at politifact, and gives timelines of emails, etc that is pretty interesting. He is all about guns, and of course, the person that 'investigates' him is completely against guns. He was also doxed by politifact. The overall process seems disturbing.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ASAxY0Roo

None of this should be taken as an argument against fact-checking either in theory or in practice. There is no set of fact checking policies that will be free from errors. (Indeed nor are the journalists who write the articles infallible, as they would surely admit.)

What’s important is that the fact checkers accept corrections and recognize that they are fallible too.

After they’ve already imposed their biases and censored information.

It’s ok that I ran over your dog while driving blindfolded - I owned up to it after all.

Fact checking has no benefits other than imposing the biases of the fact checkers. Sometimes imposing those biases is “good”, sometimes it’s “bad”. But let’s call a spade a spade - this isn’t fact checking. This is bias imposition.

Whatever, better to block the spread of medical information from uninformed sources even if a stopped clock is right twice a day. Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm concerned. The misinformation is worse.

Well, the article highlighted above was censored and fact checked for calling out a bogus study used to support nationwide medical policy…

Science does make mistakes but the process in general is thorough enough that they are rarer than idiots dishing out medical advice & spreading fear on Facebook.

Actually most published medical research is false.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

In this case, we aren’t talking about science though. We are talking about fact checking something that accurately questioned the science.

If what is being spread can’t stand up to questioning, then it’s merits need to be questioned even further.

"Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm concerned. The misinformation is worse."

Have you read 1984 or alike? Maybe do so at times.

The BS online surely is bad, but did you know, that you can just buy a MD in certain parts of the world?

So, we are in the middle of a question: which countries MD's do we recognize to speak censor free?

(and who are "we" btw.)

And well, governemnts do have some record of power abuse and missinformation, too. Even the democratic ones. And they take ages to get along and make contracts.

So lots of golden firewalled nations then, but less vaxxer bs online? I am not sure, if this is a good trade.

Even the MDs shouldn't be able to speak "censor free." MDs also need to be, and are, held to truth standards by censors.

But considering medical boards can strip them of their MD, maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false statements.

"maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false statements"

Or a chilling effect of unpopular opinions and facts.

And a much harder climate to find out, what is a fact at all, if you have to be scared, that some government commitee strips you of your right to publish, if they do not like your results.

Lots of MDs have been censored lately.

Thanks, but no thanks.

If I've learned anything in the past 2 years it's that sometimes even random information (Twitter shitposters) is better than deliberately misleading fake information (e.g. early-pandemic WHO announcements).

I've much more confidence in myself (and my own ability to evaluate information) than in any member of any government (or any "expert" credentialed by said government).

unfounded confidence in your critical thinking skills is a huge cognitive bias

Yes, but what alternative is there when health institutions are willing to blatantly lie for political reasons?

There’s plenty of misinformation coming from MDs too. Just because they have an MD doesn’t mean they know anything about topics outside of their specialty.

In science you constantly have MD disagrees. How do you propose to reconcile this? Someone very qualified will inherently be "fact checked" because the information the fact checker acted on was old and outdated.

Anyways this is severely flawed and mistaken because what they're doing today is censoring everyone with or without an MD that their "black box algorithm" disagrees with. You propose keeping up stale information (which IMO amounts to killing people through misinformation not the reverse) and those with the stance to dumb down all information to the safest common denominator are making the social media experience worse for everyone else.

Could we not use the word "censored" where there is no censorship going on?

And no, responding to an article's facts and questioning those facts is NOT censorship. We see that claim all too often these days, and it's absurd.

Censorship is not inherently bad. The USA has never extended the general principle of freedom of speech to the subject of medical information, for good reason. Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over. Organized medical societies must retain a monopoly on medical speech.

In the pandemic, speech about public health was censored less than treatment advice or drug facts would have been. Tens of thousands died as a result. A disastrous experiment in granting a freedom that no one responsible needs or wants.

>Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over. Organized medical societies must retain a monopoly on medical speech.

Instead of censorship like you're advocating for (an approach that absolutely will not work within the framework of the US constitution), we usually solve this by exclusively allowing the organized medical societies to have and show medical credentials. Those who fraudulently claim to have these credentials are viciously prosecuted. The fraudsters are free to push whatever medical advice they like, provided that they do not mislead others into thinking that they are credentialed.

The FDA censors medical speech. There is no constitutional issue.

To my knowledge, the FDA only gets involved when you try to sell things because that may qualify as false advertisement. However, Facebook posts like the ones in question here don't fall under that umbrella.

Disclaimer: I'm fully vaxxed and am happy with the way the FDA is run. My only dog in this conversation is censorship.

It would be very interesting if the outcome of Facebook's contracted checking was to prominently indicate such credential or lack thereof, rather than trying to indicate true/false.

That is not legally correct. The FDA has some limited authority over commercial speech by companies selling drugs, supplements, and medical devices. However there is no legal basis for the government to censor medical speech. It is perfectly legal for a physician (or anyone else) to make bullshit claims like "5G radiation causes COVID" or whatever. Organized medical societies have no special legal standing when it comes to speech.

Of course Facebook has a legal right to censor anything they want for any reason, or no reason at all.

I didn't mean to say that that was the status quo. Just that it would be OK.

> Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over.

Everybody talks about snake oil salesmen in the 19th century, but do you know what doctors were hawking back then? You can find plenty of examples of garbage products not because of the lack of regulation but because of the lack of contemporary science. Even medical professionals at the time didn't know any better -- or else anyone could have asked their doctor about Snake Oil(TM) and known not to try it.

Today nobody is going to believe that you can cure a disease with "Indian blood" or any of that nonsense, because the information on its harms or ineffectiveness is widely available and not seriously in contention.

The problem comes when you get to the medical information which is still in contention today. That's when censorship is the most harmful because when something is still actively unfolding and it's poorly understood with limited data, there is no basis for anyone to authoritatively declare something to be definitively true. And if the thing authorities are telling everyone is false, censoring the people challenging them is the harm.

> And no, responding to an article's facts and questioning those facts is NOT censorship.

Until the "fact check" gets used by platforms to declare a possibly-true statement "misinformation" and censor it, which has happened repeatedly.

Most biases are detrimental (political, cognitive, various phobias), but I'm not sure that a bias toward truth ought to be discouraged. If "in favor of truth" and "leftist" happen to correlate for some particular issue, that doesn't necessarily mean a truth bias needs to be avoided.

Nice username :)

EDIT: hello fellow hunter2

I’m not a right winger, conservative, or whatever. I’m more “leftist” than the average person, so I’m assuming I’m more “leftist” than the average fact checker. That doesn’t mean I’m absent of biases towards things that are not true.

The fact checkers are not using the scientific method or any sort of standard based one evidence to make their determinations. They’re using politically aligned news sources and their own opinions.

I’ve not yet seen any news by CNN or MSNBC or any other “reputable” news source be fact checked even though I know they regularly mislead and lie (maybe they have been and I’ve missed it - would love to see that). I’ve seen obvious bullshit by conservative media outlets be fact checked. And I’ve seen cases like this article where actual facts are superseded by political opinion.

I’m not advocating for avoiding a truth bias, but that’s not what’s present. We can act all high and mighty and pretend like the left is guided by science, but it isn’t. We’re guided by what our side says is true and don’t question it and don’t look at the science. When someone actually looks at the science and negates what our side says, we fact-check it and say it’s misinformation.

They don't even own up to it after the fact. Fixes are implemented in the "shadows". These things reek and smell like politics.

I wish I had an alternative to social media.

I wish I had an alternative to social media.

That's like a drug addict saying, "I wish I had an alternative to heroin."

The cure is to detox and move on. Nobody "needs" social media.

This is usually the place where the pedant HN crowd (many employed by social media companies) like to imagine a bunch of hypothetical edge cases and pretend that the .0001% situations where social media is useful somehow outweighs the massive harm that social media has done over the last decade plus.

This is your brain. This is your brain on social media. Any questions?

Couldn't you just stop using it? Get a subscription to a local newspaper and call it a day?

  > I wish I had an alternative to social media.

You honestly believe that you don't? That's the problem right there.

Most of the time, you need to mail them a dozen times to get the “fact-check” tag off from your articles. If their fact check is proven to be false (which it usually happens) they do not voluntary alter and take back their fact-check. They are quick to jump for bogus fact-checking, but not for taking back their wrong fact-checks.

Fact checking has no benefits? Really? How about reducing the spread of harmful misinformation? Or is that not a good thing?

I misphrased it, the “good” result of imposing your biases I was referring to is preventing the spread of misinformation in places like Myanmar where genocide is rampant and amplified by social media. If there were no theoretical benefit, social media platforms would have never been pressured to start fact checking.

Imposing your biases is a neutral action that can have good or bad results. But it’s not in defense of the truth.

What about anti-vaxers? Harmful misinformation isn't confined to places like Myanmar.

I don't see how you can just say it's "imposing your biases" to fact check things. The fact checking may be influenced by your biases, but "vaccines are safe and effective" isn't a bias. It's the truth.

The issue of fact checking is the centralisation of truth. Errors of fact checking have a much higher impact on society than the influence of news sites. Secondly, we can’t assume all fact checking will be honest mistakes forever. Someday someone will be down right corrupt and will abuse this power.

I think your "someday" is now.

I think it promotes false certainty.

Also note that the fact checker errors are not random uncorrelated errors. Fact checks are performed through a political lens. The subconscious question is asked, how will this affect <policy agenda>? If something is factually correct but could lead to <bad outcome> then the fact checkers will consider that when choosing how to check the claim.

For instance, in the article that was censored was about faults in the study that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in schools. The fact checkers read that as a claim that masking does not help limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in schools, which is not what the article was about.

On the contrary, it seems that the anti-vaxx misinformation is what's political. I've never seen such strong resentment of vaccines, public health policy and science in general until Republicans came out against vaccines in 2020 for political reasons.

I think you are conflating censorship with errors

If a censor makes a mistake in censoring a book and later admits it, did he not censor it?

To call something fake news when it is actually true is not an error it is deliberate manipulation of information and is censorship not an error. Deliberately misunderstanding something is also not an error but disingenuous. Why is this so hard to understand?

Sorry, I've misunderstood your original comment / lost the context between it and the parent comment. I had somehow read your comment to mean that it's an error, not censorship.

I was not very clear in my comment.

These people aren't making honest errors. They are censoring opinions they don't like. It's becoming increasingly more absurd as time goes on.

By who though? Facebook?

Fact checking can certainly only be done in a transparent process with democratic legitimization.

Anyway the idea to take on the responsibility for fact-checking seems kinda awful if I were a corporation I'd try to hand that over to someone else, there is going to be a lot of trouble in that area in the future.

What's important is fact checkers will never be right all the time, and we should have an inherent UI design to account for that and/or convey it to the user rather than the current "witch hunt style" where anyone who posts content is vilified and attacked until a later correction is made (which of course is done under the shadows without the erring entity making any kind of update to your audience that they were wrong).

Maybe we shouldn't have ran this experiment instead?

Maybe they should stop calling themselves fact checkers and use a label like "our thoughts on this issue" like most people do when giving their opinion. Elevating their opinion to the level of fact is arrogant and antisocial. Don't understand why anyone would defend this other than perhaps a belief that the "fact" checkers will always be inclined to "fact" check in favor of their ideological bias. History shows monsters rarely obey their creators once they get powerful enough to break free of the creator's control.

Internet Fact-Checkers with de facto censorship capabilities funded by shady corporate interests. What could go wrong?

takes a look at facebook no moderation at all could happen

Lots of things could go wrong but nobody realistically expects perfection.

Do you think the fact checkers have ever taken down anything that was total bullshit and potentially harmful? Probably, right?

So some things could go wrong, but hopefully many more things go right. I also hope the process isn't static and evolves after failures like this one.

> So some things could go wrong, but hopefully many more things go right.

I think way, way more things go wrong than right with "fact checking".

This was all figured out in 1517, letting the clergy be the sole arbiters of information does not end well.

It couldn't have been figured out, because we kept the 1st Amendment for a reason. We figured not having the ruling class/big corporations/government/big media be the sole arbiters of information truth doesn't end well either.

Yeah and they figured out how to deal with disinformation on social media too, which existed back in the 1500s.

I bet most of what they take down is bullshit claims like Bill Gates put a tracking chip in the COVID vaccines.

> Do you think the fact checkers have ever taken down anything

Aren’t the people who take things down censors (not fact checkers)?

See if you can spot the difference in these two headlines:

"A Study That the CDC Used To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."

"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."

Which one makes it seem like some evidence used should be discarded?

And which one makes it seem like Mask Mandates have been proven to be a Junk Science?

See that word "The" in the headline the author used? That sure makes it sound like the single source of evidence was wrong, and so therefore the conclusion is wrong.

If you want to be really safe, and not clickbaity, you could even go for,

"Mask Mandates May Be Effective, But One Study the CDC Used Had Deeply Flawed Methodology."

That's only four characters longer than the original one:

"The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."

Flagging content with is_clickbait actually sounds quite a lot nicer than is_false ... You might be onto something.

Facebook makes money by hosting click bait.

Facebook is worried about public perception if they host false information.

The financial incentives are all wrong, and people make money with click bait headlines, so we're going to watch companies like Facebook wrestle with this, and sometimes make what we consider to be "the wrong call."

My guiding principles reading news stories:

1. Fact checking is usually biased. 2. The more sensational the headline, the higher the chance of garbage journalism and bias. 3. The more boring nuance the better the chance of accuracy.

If I was building a news ranking engine I would use these principles. It would probably be at least somewhat useful in filtering out the garbage, except no one would use it because the articles near the top wouldn’t get people to click, and the only possible revenue stream would need to be paid since it can’t be optimized for engagement and still function.

Might still be worth prototyping though?

I once heard someone on a podcast (forget who) propose that the #1 thing that the social media platforms could do to promote accuracy is to establish a "moderation filter" -- something that looks for extreme language, and down-weights it.

It's interesting to think about what the unintended consequences of this might be. An entire media of passive-aggressive political intrigue?

Boring can also have bias, frequently in the form of damping bad news or a painful action.

On HN, shutdown and departure posts tend strongly in this direction. It's a general and widespread PR tactic.

There's also the distraction (or bread-and-circuses) model of propaganda. The former Page 3 Girl in the Sun, sport, celebrity gossip, or horse-race political coverage come to mind.

People trusted media. But then media was exposed as partisan, and then as outright liers.

So fact checkers were invented.

Now fact-checkers are exposed as being partisan, and sometimes outright lying (see BMJ vs FB fact-checking fiasco).

So we need to go deeper, we need to invent something new, above fact checkers, which will be trusted again.

What could such a thing be?

> What could such a thing be?

I think we need a fact checker for the fact checkers. I propose we let the fact checkers fact check themselves.

slashdot did just that 15 years ago.

So fact checkers were invented.

No, fact checkers existed for decades before social media. Even before the internet.

I've worked in newsrooms as recently as the 1990's where there were fact checkers. Usually nice people with many very large, expensive books to double-check things.

But when the media companies became beholden to Wall Street instead of the public, the fact checking departments were the first people cut in the name of "maximizing shareholder value."

That was followed by consultants ( * cough * Broadcast Image Group * cough * ) who constantly pushed for more and more "breaking news" hype and convinced news managers that it was more important to be first than to be right. The public ate it up and it became a feedback loop.

I could go on, but this isn't the place for it.

Or, we can just educate our population with albeit dry, but acceptable methodology to identify what is and is not fact.

Teach us to fish.

> acceptable methodology

Does this exist? At least a methodology that doesn't mean I need to study the subject area deeply?

Maybe soon people will "trust" some NFT or the owner of that NFT in the Metaverse...

These "fact checkers" are nothing more than a means for big tech and big media to push their increasingly authoritarian "progressive" narrative. Until more people realize this and just walk away from FB and other platforms it's going to continue. There's hope though, look at the relative readership / viewership of independent journalists and podcasts relative to mainstream media. When CNN has a clip of a reporter standing in front of a bunch of burning buildings with a chyron that reads "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" even the dimmest among us has to see that they are not a news organization. There are plenty of examples for every other mainstream media outlet as well.

Ah yes, the complaint of "progressive big media".

You know the first time I decided a media outlet was pushing an agenda? When Fox News famously asked its audience as it went to break if Obama's fist bump was "a terrorist fist jab".

This isn't a "progressive" narrative; it's whatever narrative fits the interests of the company. Sometimes it's progressive, such as when it comes to social issues. Oftentimes it's conservative. I've yet to see CNN etc laud unions, higher taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, etc, even in stories they were reporting on where it would make sense (such as the high cost of private healthcare, or times it didn't cover something ludicrously expensive for someone because reasons, etc)

I anticipated the typical "But fox news but fox news but fox news" which is exactly why I added the last sentence to my comment.

The "complaint" is on point. Most of the major US mainstream media outlets are indeed biased in a particular direction. See for yourself: find a list of major news outlets [2] and check their political leanings [3][4]. Fox is mostly an outlier.

You could perhaps argue that they are more "woke" than "progressive".

[1]: And many other institutions, see https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-libe...

[2] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=News_media_in_the...

[3]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

[4]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

One of the biggest issue with fact checking, is that fact checkers don't try to see if something is true or false. But they guess what people are going to understand from a post and then says whether or not those understandings are true or false.

For example if you say "There is no evidence that mask has helped reduce the spread of covid". You will probably be fact checked as false, because they think people will understand "Masks don't work".

Well, that would be a valid thing to note as false.

Perhaps you meant "in this particular study, there is no evidence that mask use helped reduce the spread of COVID", in which case, yes; people will understand it as "this study showed that masks don't work" rather than "this was a poorly conducted study"

Many people on social media read only the headline, not the full article. (Including here on HN.)

So, it’s arguable that this should be taken into account by fact checking. A title that is misleading is a problem even if the article body itself is scrupulously accurate, since way more people will see the headline than read the article.

This is known and weaponized. A site will intentionally publish an accurate article with an inaccurate or misleading headline. If it is flagged by fact-checking, they get several more cycles of engagement out of complaining about the “unfair” or “biased” fact check, and especially if they get it reversed, as in this case.

In this case the original headline was “The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science.” That is misleading because a) the CDC considered far more than one study, b) which study “convinced” them is impossible to prove and a matter of opinion, and c) “junk science” is an uninformative pejorative.

If the headline had been “One Study the CDC Referenced When Considering Mask Recommendations Had Problems,” it would have been more accurate and less likely to be flagged. But also less useful to Reason in attracting attention and advancing a narrative.

I'm interested in the eventual outcome of this case:

> "This case presents a simple question: do Facebook and its vendors defame a user who posts factually accurate content, when they publicly announce that the content failed a 'fact-check' and is 'partly false,' and by attributing to the user a false claim that he never made?" wrote Stossel's attorneys in the lawsuit. "The answer, of course, is yes."

I hope there is no settlement if it proceeds.

The mental gymnastics to contort labelling of posts as defamation is so laughable. There's nothing defaming about "we had X group review this post and they found it was False." It doesn't matter if X group was incorrect in their assessment- what matters is that statement ("group reviewed and their finding was --") is purely true.

That's not defamation of character (which would be "this poster is lying"), it's a true statement about an opinion that was reached ("fact checkers consider this article False information"). It's a subtle, but critical distinction. They don't have a case, IMO.

The text generated and written by Facebook says:

> False information

next paragraph:

> Checked by independent fact-checkers

If you want to get to subtle and critical distinctions, a straightforward reading of the above is: "this is false information. the fact that it is false was checked by independent fact-checkers."

A reasonable reading is that facebook labels the information as false and that that was *confirmed* by fact-checkers.

If they mean to say: "fact checkers labeled this as false and so we are hiding this information" then they should say so plainly, no?

The whole concept of corporate censorship is such a BS. How can you possibly build a system that could dissect truth from lies on such a scale?

And yet for some reason people demand more and more censorship and blame Facebook for "not doing enough". How come?

it isn't a question if it can be built. we know it can't. the question is whether it can result in a better outcome than no moderation whatsoever.

What to believe nothing just live by my intuition which says ignore all for profit biased media and only believe in long term science..years and years of data.. cause an example the CDC in December recommending against the Johnson and Johnson shot which they previously recommended in early 2021 ..omg ..they are still trying to figure this all out out. My intuition says China knows a lot to all and Covid will further accelerate them to becoming the super power of the world... the world just sits by and let's it happen..has helped them get there too. Ughh

Human nature never changes, for an entertaining take on our current situation see part 3 of Gulliver's Travels published in 1726

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jonathan-swift/gullivers-t...

Fact checking just seems like another business we haven't hired to solve a problem generated by the platform itself. I find that the problem here isn't fact checking, it's just the control of these private social media platforms is too broad.

This points to why there needs to be a clearer mechanism of rights for an individual's content. Meta owns a free license to not only repost your work, but also to modify and generate derivative works from it. What I don't understand is what they own when it comes to public content shared via links. Given the success of AMP, I suspect the answer is "you don't own much of anything on the internet".

DRM so far has been successful at allowing content generators to counteract the control of content providers. I sometimes wonder if we need easier personal DRM. Then, if some provider decides to misrepresent you, you can just yank the license. Or at least, there should be some kind of contract between the license holder and the provider.

Maybe web3 helps here? I'm still leery of putting all your eggs in a centralized blockchain system. But other than PDFs, I can't think of other approaches you can take.

If a fact-check is ever found to be wrong, isn't that proof that the fact-checker is claiming things to be fact, when they aren't?

I'd support a licensing system for this, at the individual and company level. If Facebook fact checks are ever wrong, even once, they lose the ability to call anything they do a "fact check". Same reason certain ice creams are now "frozen dairy desserts".

The underlying problem in the case this article describes is one of classification.

Fact checking every claim is a lot of work, so fact checkers find a widely-circulating claim to check and generalize it from whatever various specific claims are in circulation. In this case, it was generalized to "there's no science behind masks on kids". That claim is easy to check, and it's false; there are multiple scientific studies showing that requiring masks in schools reduce covid rates among students.

The author's article did not make that claim or anything that could be reasonably reduced to "there's no science behind masks on kids". Instead, his claim was that the CDC made a recommendation based on a specific study, and that the study in question has serious methodological flaws (the headline phrase "junk science" is a bit sensational). That's a more narrow claim, most of which probably falls into the category of opinion or analysis rather than fact-checking.

"Fact checking" is one of the best scams in the past couple of years. In this case I scare quote it because it really is that specific phrase that I am referring to, not the process or the people. Somehow, labeling something a "fact check" gave whatever was so labeled immense authority and gravitas, merely by virtue of being a "fact check". It also proved it was Platonically Non-Partisan, because Fact Checking is just intrinsically non-partisan, because it's a Fact Check. Do you not trust the Facts?

It was a good gig, but political partisans can't help but spend all the gravitas and authority they can find as quickly as possible, and what you see here is the account drying up. It'll take a while longer to complete that process but I don't expect people to have any more trust in "fact checks" than anything else in 5 years.

"Fact checks" are nothing special. Political partisans have been "fact checking" each other forever, complete with misrepresentation, failures to even read the thing they're fact checking, all the usual errors. They just didn't call it a "fact check". Merely labeling something a "fact check" changes nothing, and quite obviously did not impose any sort of higher standard on the so-called "checkers" either. Nor does Facebook have any authority or capability in any sense of the term to bless any particular "fact checker" with them being anything more that Facebook's official opinion. (In this, their argument in their lawsuit is completely correct.)

Of course, that causes problems. If Facebook indeed somehow has direct access to the Fountain of Truth, they can perhaps be justified in decorating the speech of other people with the Truth from this fountain. If, on the other hand, they're just opinions, that raises a whole host of questions. Why do they feel like they can decorate other people's speech with their own opinions? On what basis do they declare these "facts"? How amazing it is that Facebook, a corporation whose purpose is to serve ads and incidentally provide a service to people to gather information for those ads, are also medical experts, political experts, and experts of all sorts of other things. What accountability will Facebook have when it turns out their opinions, which again I remind you include very strong medical opinions, are wrong? (Don't get too caught up on Coronavirus specifically; having started making medical decisions we can believe they will continue to do so. Even if you believe they have the perfectly correct balance of Truth today, there is no reason to believe that will continue indefinitely. And with their leverage, they have the capability to multiply the consequences of error hugely, perhaps more than anyone else.)

If they are not lofty, impartial experts graciously spending their money to guide the masses to the Truth, then they almost immediately collapse into something more like arrogant jerks who bully their particular biases onto people with the threat of kicking them off the world's largest platform if they don't conform.

One imagines that Facebook would not prefer to be seen that way. They've really bet rather a lot on the Fact Check mythos.

>But that doesn't mean the status quo is particularly satisfying. It's good that the fact-checker reversed course in my case, but needless to say, Facebook should revisit its formal, contractual relationship with an organization that routinely misquotes the people it scrutinizes.

The problem is that Facebook is using fact checkers as a crutch to deal with the problem that...

1. They have a monopoly on the attention of gullible old people

2. As a result of this, anyone who wants to exploit said demographic goes through them

The easiest way to actually fix the problem of gullible old people would be to just ban them from the platform so everyone else can enjoy their free speech[0] in peace. Instead, Facebook deliberately targets them. This is not limited to fake news, misinformation, or right-wing political screeds that you might disagree with; they are also one of the biggest platforms for scammers to sell fake products to that same group of people. Facebook, like everything else these days, optimizes for "whales" with high value to the business, and that just so happens to be gullibility.

Fact checking in this sense is like the "drink responsibly" they whisper at the end of a beer ad. It's not for actual safety, it's to have something to throw at critics during a crisis.

[0] "Free speech" in this context refers to a private platform, not the government. Yes, this is a slightly different definition and Facebook isn't bound by the 1st Amendment.

I was always taught in political science courses that the think tanks did research favoring the right or the left. This was instilled in me long ago - That experts will be used by politicians to do research (on what is a choice) that has findings (again - another choice being made) - which the politicians can use (whether they do and how are choices).

Choices abound in a scenario like this, each one are the typically hidden sources of bias.

I just don’t understand why the fact check thing is seen as credible, to me it’s just a new age version of the think tank dynamic but for a different time.

Note that I’m not saying it shouldn’t be used, as I still will rely on think tank research here and there. But knowing the source of their incentives is important.

“Follow the money”

So fact-checking has become a new way of distorting and censoring articles that have credible sources but seem to disagree with the overall bias of the platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

Maybe one should just go back to the age old saying: 'Don't believe everything you read on the internet.' Given that even these so-called 'independent fact-checkers' can also be wrong.

Who checks the 80+ so-called fact-checkers? Or the 'trusted news initiative' [0], which Meta (Facebook) is part of?

[0] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...

Unverifiable theory, but I think when the news was just the few media companies who ran TV and newspapers, selling a narrative was easy. Look how easily we got tricked into going into Iraq and staying in Afghanistan for 20 years. Now that news is more distributed (as originally intended) by independent journalist on things like YouTube and substack. Not only do these independent journalistic outlets exist, they are more popular than traditional news (TV/print), making various propaganda efforts much more difficult to stick. This is one of several strategies to regain control of that propaganda channel.

Sorry but there was enormous international pushback against it (curiously this is when they started calling French Fries "Freedom Fries"): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governmental_positions_on_th...

I'm sceptical that the population that was "tricked" back then wouldn't be just as easily swayed nowadays. Political affiliation is largely an emotional matter to a great mass of people, and rationality has a limited role in it.

>Sorry but there was enormous international pushback against it

Sure, there was domestic pushback too, but the "trusted" news sources actually countered that pushback by not questioning the government line and bolstered the whole WMD fear mongering. The NYT actually apologized for it after the fact to try to save their reputation.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...

The NYT, et al also refused to publish the Snowden revelations until they absolutely had to (after the guardian pushed it). Same with the Clinton/Lewinsky thing. They refused to report on the Hunter Biden laptop either, which, like it or not, is "fit to print." There were also quite a few anti-Assange articles if I recall.

I've seen multiple hit pieces to defame on "fact check" articles including on Reuters - which prior to that I thought was credible as a brand. These hit piece articles aren't balanced either and I even contacted a site once to ask for citations for their counter-claims - not to mention the other dishonest tactics to diminish someone's arguments/statements, where they didn't actually list any author, where they promised to respond within 48 business hours to all inquiries - but that was months ago and I haven't heard back. These are all for show but people trust them because they look good, just like poorly done science dressed up to look like it's science to the layperson - but then used as a primary citation by bad actors or incompetent ideologues who want to push a certain narrative or toe the line to not cause friction in their life. We need to figure out proper trust networks again, and how to teach/train everyone to be critical - and provide the time for this, and societally, culturally, make this process perhaps the sole thing we put on a pedestal - truth, the base or other side to coin of love.

Many see just the headline, draw conclusion and may then repost / share, many more read only the headline. Click-bate headlines will fall foul. Robby (article author) - just write more accurate titles and the fact-checkers can't argue.

I don't see how Facebook could staff a fact-checking operation with a high quality army of nothing but sharp, critical thinkers who have excellent reading comprehension. Those kinds of people will tend to be educated and have real jobs.

When I first heard about this plan to "face check" articles on Facebook, I was actually floored because it's just such an obviously bad idea. There is always going to be a point where reasonable people disagree about what is correct and what isn't or what should be fact-checked and what shouldn't.

And you're not even dealing with reasonable people.

Even if you limit it to the most egregious cases that just shifts the problem. What's egregious and what isn't?

I actually believe it was well-intentioned. Just... completely misguided. You know what they say: the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Second thought: it's weird to me how many conservatives and conspiracy theorists (it's interesting that there's so much crossover between these two groups) are so keen to dismantle Section 230 when they benefit the most. In an effort for platforms to remain neutral, this nonsense is allowed to exist. If platforms were responsible for this "content", it'd be shut down so fast.

But here's a good thing to keep in mind: from a narcissist an accusation is actually a confession. Trump is a textbook narcissist. Go back and look at his accusations through that filter.

I think it can be implemented well: there will always be a point where reasonable people agree about what is correct.

That point is obviously very, very conservative (lower case 'c'). Reasonable people can all agree that Covid is a thing that exists, for example.

I don't mind Facebook fact-checking against flat-earthers, "it's just a flu bro", or "Bill Gates put 5g microchips in vaccines". Reasonable people from any place would agree those are counter-factual.

But I tend to get banned from subreddits as an anti-vaxxer because, for example, I say my first 2 shots were Pfizer and I refuse to get Moderna for my third one (Moderna is the only one my government currently permits my age group to get). There are facts for and against this position for reasonable people to weigh. It's still often a ban on social-media for spreading anti-vax misinformation though.

There are always casualties to policies of "fact checking". You have witnessed yourself being one. I think it would have been nice to have some better policy or conversation in place for what happens when you become the one erroneously fact-checked, because instead what's happening now is it just happens in the shadows and by the time it happens to you it's too late and you're stuck with this system that actually just works counter-intuitively to the issues that are the most important to you.

It's sort of like the slow eroding of freedoms and transition to fascism that people seem to be fine with because "protect us against COVID" which we're all fine with it until that policy is flipped on them and happens to impact them.

That is the point I'm making: if we're conservative about what facts go into fact-checking, then fact-checking can be valuable.

We are not conservative about fact checking and I gave an example of how I have been a casualty of this.

> It's sort of like the slow eroding of freedoms and transition to fascism that people seem to be fine with because "protect us against COVID"

Oh, come the heck on. I don't know how a reasonable person should be expected to take this seriously. We've been forcing people to vaccinate for a good long time now and I don't think I'm living in a fascist dystopia. Correct me if I'm wrong! Should I buy some jackboots so I can fit into my new reality?

>Even if you limit it to the most egregious cases that just shifts the problem. What's egregious and what isn't?

It implicitly shifts the undertone of everything that isn't fact-checked on the platform from neutral to true. This is not a bug but a feature, as it provides the plausible deniability by blurring the line between "no tag since we can't fact-check everything, duh" and "no tag because we tacitly agree with the narrative presented here even if it is untrue".

Making platforms responsible for their content is ridiculous. Are you also going to make pubs responsible for what people say there?

My problem with these fact checkers is it feels too much like the ruling class/big corporations/government/big media becoming the sole arbiters of information truth again- and we know that doesn't end well.

Anyone who talks of "the fact-checkers" as a sole, unified entity is a complete and total moron who is incapable of having a relevant opinion on anything. No discussion with them is going to lead anywhere interesting or useful as they continue to talk in circles.

There are multiple organizations that check facts. Hell, even news outlets do this. Even we do it. When we check the veracity of a claim, we're being "fact-checkers".

The only reason to cast people who check the veracity of claims as a monolith is to then say we should throw out the whole group.

Stossel, it should be noted, is currently suing Facebook, Science Feedback, and Climate Feedback. He acknowledges that a private company has the right to ban, take down, or deprioritize content as it sees fit. Moreover, different individuals and organizations can disagree about basic factual questions like the science of climate change. But he says that in attributing to him a direct quotation that he never uttered, the fact-checkers committed defamation.

Seriously?...Stossel is a contributor to Reason.

This thread sure attracted the racists, no surprise. They’re furious social media doesn’t let them call people racial slurs online, or let them spread wild conspiracy theories.

As another example of Facebook's 'expert fact checkers', here's the letter recently written to Mark Zuckerberg by the editor in chief and others of the British Medical Journal - which is, as they say, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals.

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635/rr-80

I'm curious as to whether the people on this thread who are adamantly against fact-checking and censoring of any kind also on principle refuse to downvote individual posts or threads on online forums.

A downvote is akin to fact-checking, marking a post with your disapproval (generally of its veracity, although it could be its attitude, logical coherence, or other reason). And enough downvotes can cause a post to disappear, to be effectively censored.

Humans are never the loyalty fans of truth (especially when it comes to social or political issues). Fact-checkers or selective reports or anything else like that is all an outcome of that the majority of us choose to believe what we stand for rather than the simple truth. People become more and more divided until there is no common area, then there is war. History has shown us many times.

Who fact checks the fact checkers? Why we fact checked ourselves and found nothing wrong.

Let's not forget the fact that those teams are also severely understaffed.

The "actionable" part is that Facebook is mis-attributing statements to some sources like "Reason" and John Stossel that they never made.

> But [Stossel] says that in attributing to him a direct quotation that he never uttered, the fact-checkers committed defamation.

I think someone may be able to get a judgement against Facebook if the "fact-checkers" err in this manner.

This all stuff reminds of two kids fighting in front of teacher. What's your opinion on how a person should crack an egg :)

So much drama about such a basic concept. Yes it helps in general to stop the spread, maybe in some cases it's less effective, or not needed at all.

Why on earth people dedicate so much energy to discuss a tiny subset of mask application?

How's that a big deal?

Reason.com has added way too much suffering to my life to have any positive opinion of. Lies like this are still available on their website https://reason.com/1996/06/01/sick-of-it-all/

The problem with fact-checking is usually not the fact-checking. The problem is giving a label as simple as "true", "false", "misleading" to some assertation that can be more complex than that.

It would be nice if a case was brought for libel and all Facebook and the fact checker communication was subpoenaed to show a clear instruction and bias to mislead. Without paying a price they will continue to gas light, lie, influence elections with funding from foreign powers.

As an epistemologist I can only say I never imagined things will get this retarded in my lifetime.

I don't actually like the idea of fact checking. That said, just because it makes X (or X%) mistakes doesn't make it a bad system. Not in isolation. Arguing against it because it isn't perfect is bad faith.

The fact checkers didn’t admit they were wrong, they merely unflagged the article. If this is what the author think passes for logic no wonder they flagged him. Article was garbage clickbait for anti-maskers anyway.

Imagine you’re having a conversation with a friend at a coffee shop, and an employee interrupts you by shouting “that’s false!”

“Fact checking” should be opt-in, at the very least. And blockable, like an uninvited troll

The most funny that whatever you call a media bias... Media is catered towards what people want to discuss. Sadly that's what's people think is important.

Post something genuine, then someone with bad intentions shared it with something fake. Now you are who is contributing to fake news.

If false then anything.

If you exist then something inconvenient.

You can't prove you exist so given that any fact can be rated as anything truthfully.

You little-endians are all hopelessly deluded and your total unwillingness to be reasonable and your constant lying is all the justification required for the behaviour of big endians who are Noble, righteous and completely truthful in that context and i say that objectively. Fact check: true!

Internet fact checkers are merely enforcing their opinions over other opinions.

Facebook, for example, makes the claim that their fact checks are just opinion in trying to defend themselves in a lawsuit.

https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/facebook-bizarrely-claims-its-...

I don't get why that's contradictory or bad. It's FB's website, FB's property. They're quite free to say "In our opinion, this is factual and that is false". They're under no obligation to allow others to say whatever they want.

We wouldn't say anything about a restaurant or bar owner kicking out patrons because they offend other patrons or staff. Why is FB any different?

Because it has become the only bar in town with free booze sponsored by the local hospital handling drunk driving accidents.

Make the social media platforms interoperable, and force them to charge the costs directly to consumers (so that the platforms could compete on price/quality) and people will run away from it like rats from a sinking ship.

So all this "censorship" talk is really an XY problem[1], then.

My honest opinion is that most people who cry "censorship" don't care about truth or actual freedom. They just want their shit to go to the widest audience possible. I'll change my opinion when more of the "censorship" crowd acknowledges that while they strongly disagree, FB (or any other website) has every legal and moral right to "censor" them, because that's also what freedom is about. You can't be for freedom only when it favors you.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Even if there is an XY problem, censorship is so inherently evil that it needs to be stopped even if there's a different problem that we should be solving too.

Is it "censorship" if I throw you out of my Christmas party because you got drunk and insulted my wife? Is it "censorship" if I throw you out of my 2000-person seminar because you keep interrupting? Is it "censorship" if I kick you out for handing out flyers for a competitor on my premises? Are they all "inherently evil" acts?

Keep in mind, I'm using the scare quoted version of censorship because all of my examples are censorship by definition. But no reasonable person would find anything objectionable in them, let alone "inherently evil".

I can't (and won't) stop you from saying whatever you want. But I don't have to let you be on my property to say it. I respect your freedom to say what you want. Please respect my freedom to enforce codes of conduct on my property.

> my property

This phrase is key. The public square is supposed to be 100% censorship free. Facebook stole the public square from us, and is now censoring it as if it were legitimately private property.

> Facebook stole the public square from us

How? Do they control the Internet or the Web somehow? You and I are talking on a non-FB property right now.

And even if it were true, I point you back to my previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726412

All of this "censorship" scare-mongering has the potential to turn into a slippery slope that could seriously erode property rights online. Fix the actual problem, rather than whatever's most convenient for you at the moment.

Well let's say you have a certain agenda as a government, to prioritize a risk/reward ratio over pure freedom, and decides that you can afford to make everyone unhappy but alive by maintaining very strict information control. Say like China does but not just for the party, for the country itself.

You can then prioritize opinions by their reward if correct vs risk of being incorrect. Even if you're incorrect, it's better to be incorrect saying mask are useful, than being incorrect saying mask are useless. The probability of masks worsening the situation is lower (but not null) than the probability of masks improving it.

I don't see the problem with that, it's like saying "veterans fought for our freedom and deserve our respect" instead of "veterans used tax money to oppress foreigners and enforce national policies abroad at the detriment of most people involved, and they did that for money not for the country". There are opinions better not shared by official message to lead the country towards some sort of coherent path no ?

> Say like China does but not just for the party, for the country itself.

> I don't see the problem with that

You're unironically advocating for us to do one of the more evil things that China does.

You re unironically calling "evil" a clearly stated, well defined, historically precedented, very human behaviour China put in place for the specific purpose, like it or not, to position the party before the country.

It's not evil, it's maybe short sighted and selfish, or who knows, the only way to transition to something better eventually. But "evil", resist these emotional adjectives, you make Chinese people just handwave any attempt at rational evolution.

Fact checking is stupid, but if you are serious about it you should fact check religions.

> There are many Republicans and Democrats who want to scrap Section 230 entirely: President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) have all denounced [Section 230's] protections for Big Tech companies.

That's a scary list of people to agree on something. I think all their arguments boil down to "big tech isn't censoring people the way I want them to."

When these platforms were just exercising editorial control it was enough to make them liable for defamation and libel. Now that they are representing points of view, it's time to consider breaking them up. A duopoly of FB and Twitter isn't enough diversity for a rich ecosystem.

> The article in question was this one: "The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science."

Shouldn't be surprising that something so close sounding to anti-masking is automatically blocked. Just tell them if it's an error and they will fix it.

If you arent thinking and talking about Operation Mockingbird and its inevitable successors we dont know the name of you will be missing the plot on this topic.

Why would you want to fact check a social media site like Facebook anyway? The vast majority of the communications there are ultimately expressions of feelings. There is no way you can fact check such a medium into a source of objective fact.

It makes as much sense as having fact checkers in pubs and restaurants. Sure, there is going to be misinformation spread in those places but ultimately the people involved understand that things spread by random people might not actually be true.

Are the fact-checkers actually real people?

I'd imagine if Facebook wanted to clamp down on Coronavirus-related "misinformation", they'd do a sentiment analysis on any phrase with CDC, FDA, etc. and if the sentiment was negative or "bad", then it'd automatically get flagged.

If there is a human in the loop, I doubt they are reading the full article, or have any meaningful expertise. Probably just reading the headline, and clicking approve.

Fact-checking sets up a seemingly-circular definition where "a trustworthy source is a source trusted by trustworthy sources"

It reminds me of a similarly recursive definition in Google's original pagerank algorithm: "A popular site is a site linked prominently by other popular sites". for pagerank, there was a nice way around the issue: apply popularity iteratively.

You can imagine starting with some initial guess (perhaps that every site is equally popular), then score sites which are heavily linked higher to update the score. Then, use those scores to weigh the value of their links (unpopular sites' links matter less, popular sites' links matter more) and evaluate popularity again, and again...

Of course, this is simply a matrix multiplication applied infinitely many times. If the matrix is not singular (which, if your system is sufficiently connected, is vanishingly unlikely), then the final solution will converge to the eigenvector with the largest eigenvalue no matter what your initial guess was. The definition of popularity which seemed which recursive, wasn't. It doesn't matter who you assume is popular to start with, if you apply the definition enough times, you will arrive at the same result.

It makes me wonder if there is a possible computational aid to some of these fact-checking dilemmas, where we don't need to trust anyone a priori to have trust in the whole network. In areas where we can't look at truth as some absolutely thing, that doesn't mean we should we throw our hands up and say "everything depends on who you ask". We can still have a goal of evaluating things that are incredibly likely to be true, false, misleading, etc.

Society has lots of imperfect tools for evaluating information from those who know more than us: We can look at their past performance, we can understand their incentives (e.g. brand harm if discovered), we can check if others disagree, we can use quality heuristics (e.g. superficial flaws can be a sign of deeper flaws), we can gain some small expertise to help evaluate the greater experts. None of these things are perfect signals but they are strong signals.

Currently fact-checking is cobbling together these signals informally, with responsibility spread out culturally among the organizations' internal hierarchy, the fact-checked victims complaining, some outsiders who bother to fact-check the fact-checkers, everyone's subjective trust of brands, etc. I wonder if there could be a more formal way to do this, where sources fact-check each other in a decentralized way. The ultimate score of trust would come not from one single source of authority, but from a global evaluation, which anyone could calculate, of this recursive definition of trust.

It would come with its own set of problems (google-bombing was a common thing in that era for rarely-searched terms) but it still seems like a massively useful tool, and one I've never seen an attempt to formalize.

It's depressing that the majority of the comments here are just reiterating the same trite arguments of authoritarianism.

Whenever even mildly political posts show up on this site , especially regarding US politics, it becomes a shitshow.

For example, you'll find the anti-maskers/covid-deniers arguing that this is proof that masks are ineffective and just another step towards government control. That's despite the author actually saying anything to that effect.

Then you'll have the libertarians (with some Venn diagram cross over) saying that fact checkers don't allow individual thought, without acknowledgihow damaging false information spreading on social media is.

You'll also have well meaning progressives completely fumble the nuance of the situation.

in the end, the issue here is the author wrote a clickbait blogspam specifically to exacerbate emotions, got the expected result and then followed it up with another to capitalize on it.

Their original article had a specifically written title or "Junk Science" to seem more incindiary than the source they quoted (which used "shaky science" instead). That's a dog whistle of a title.

Perhaps Facebook needs more nuance in their fact checking classification with the ability to label something as clickbait , requiring authors to pick less inflammatory titles for their content. I suspect that would go a long way to improving social media anyway. Perhaps it could put the post behind a clickbait warning clickthrough or a strong clickbait text below the article. Or perhaps, like on HN, the post titles could be altered to directly represent the content.

Questions for the guy would be:

- did the title had to be THAT inflammatory (did it have to say "JUNK", did it have to make the link to the CDC reaction to it rather than the main point)

- was Facebook the right place to share such important insight, rather than a research paper, or even a letter to the CDC

- is it the right reaction, in a sensitive period with sensitive misinformation, to further inflame the whole thing saying that not only masks are junks for schools (at least his title makes you think so on facebook), that now it's even fact checkers that are wrong...

I don't know why this guy can't solve problems and just create new ones, but damn he's wasting a lot of people's time and produce very little value outside of more anger, more doubt and more division :D

Not the OP, but my reasoning for all your points.

1- All posts are competing for attention. You live in a society where if you don't get someones attention right away, you're speaking to a wall.

2- The CDC is overworked, behind on response, has a clear agenda, and would likely not do anything. Often making a public outcry or outrage is the best way to reach this bigger slower beaurocratic agencies. Unless you're saying you know someone on the inside and could actually contribute to having a discussion with the right person? Or are you just saying you're good at providing "solutions" without any ability to actually help?

3- Sounds like you are making an opinion that the OP made the wrong reaction, that is your opinion, not something based on fact. Opinions about right/wrong are by their definition opinions, not fact, to be paraded as talking points by "fact" checkers.

His discussion did not waste my time. I for one like to be challenged. But if you don't like going to a place where you have your opinions challenged or strengthened, then maybe you should go to a place with opinions more like yours. I would argue you complaining about someone posting an opinion article online and calling it divisive, is the mere definition of an attack that is divisive. Your post reads divisive and passive-aggressive angry to me (you literally read the entire post and then complained about it wasting time).

I dont disagree with your point entirely: it's important to discuss perspectives. But I disagree he's challenging opinions, he's triggering emotions.

It's not wrong when it's on the latest movie, but maybe he could understand he's talking about health policies for children at school, maybe that could be done with care to avoid blanket statements at risk of deviating the debate from: should they or not wear the damn thing, to: is the CDC a bunch of elitist incompetents wasting our tax money, something I think is uncalled for.

And imagine the damage if he manages to convince there are no fact, that fact checking is impossible and that anyone is entitled to publishing wide reaching random idiocies under the blanket of a sacro saint right to be an idiot :D

"they ignored important factors like varying vaccination rates; and they counted outbreaks instead of cases."

As masks are supposed to lower outbreaks - focusing on outbreaks makes sense to me.

Not the point of the posted article, since it specifically deals with the ridiculous reasons for Facebook censoring the post.

However, you seem to have stopped reading the Atlantic article after sentence you took out of context. "The authors defined an outbreak as being two or more COVID-19 cases among students or staff members at a school within a 14-day period that are epidemiologically linked. “The measure of two cases in a school is problematic,” Louise-Anne McNutt, a former Epidemic Intelligence Service officer for the CDC and an epidemiologist at the State University of New York at Albany, told me. “It doesn’t tell us that transmission occurred in school.” She pointed to the fact that, according to Maricopa County guidelines, students are considered “close contacts” of an infected student—and thus subject to potential testing and quarantine—only if they (or that infected student) were unmasked. As a result, students in Maricopa schools with mask mandates may have been less likely than students in schools without mandates to get tested following an initial exposure. This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."

Your quote is not in the reason.com article linked here. Anyway, text quoted points out incomplete identification of outbreaks, not that it was not right to track them. In fact, it would have made no difference tracking cases because of school district's policy of testing only 'unmasked' individuals.

>Your quote is not in the reason.com article linked here.

No, it's in the Atlantic article specifically linked in the Reason.com article. I'd suggest reading that since the entire thing is based off of it.

>In fact, it would have made no difference tracking cases because of school district's policy of testing only 'unmasked' individuals.

You may want to reread this part...

This creates what’s known as a detection bias, she said, which could grossly affect the study’s findings. (Jehn and McCullough called it “highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students.”) McNutt believes that masks are an important prevention tool in the pandemic, but she maintained that the Arizona study doesn’t answer the specific question it purports to answer: whether mask mandates for students reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2."

Was the study bogus?

Reading the article (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/mask-gui...) from the Atlantic that this article is truncating as well as the original study (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7039e1.htm?s_cid=mm...) you might find that the Atlantic article presents the following arguments towards the point that the study has serious flaws, they are as follows:

1. The author (David Zweig) points to https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/school-mas... as proof of skepticism about the costs and benefits of mandating that children 2-12 wear masks in school. That article begins with the statement "The potential educational harms of mandatory-masking policies are much more firmly established, at least at this point, than their possible benefits in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in schools." but ends with the statement "Do the benefits of masking kids in school outweigh the downsides? The honest answer in 2021 remains that we don’t know for sure." The author has failed to present a coherent thesis for their skepticism, and as it reads it appears that their view actually softens by the end of the piece.

2. David Zweig begins their second critique of the Arizona study with, "This estimated effect of mask requirements—far bigger than others in the research literature—would become a crucial talking point in the weeks to come." yet this is a fundamental misread of the study that happens often in science reporting. They study actually says, "In the crude analysis, the odds of a school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools with no mask requirement were 3.7 times higher than those in schools with an early mask requirement (odds ratio [OR] = 3.7; 95% CI = 2.2–6.5). After adjusting for potential described confounders, the odds of a school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools without a mask requirement were 3.5 times higher than those in schools with an early mask requirement (OR = 3.5; 95% CI = 1.8–6.9)." This is not a causal statement, it is a correlative one. This is to say that the study does not make the point that the mask mandates cause reduction in covid outbreaks, but that those schools with mask mandates clearly experience fewer outbreaks. This conflation is made many times throughout the rest of the article. It matters because, like most science, the study adds to our understanding of reality, and if we misunderstand the science it's likely we are misunderstanding reality.

3. Jonathan Ketcham is quoted, at first without an actual point, as saying: "You can’t learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study". This isn't really an argument so it's interesting that it's made it into the an article on the science section of the Atlantic. It also shows that Jonathan Ketcham may have conflated causation and correlation as well. Without naming them or providing any other attribution, the article then makes an implicit argument from Ketcham's quote: "His view echoed the assessment of eight other experts who reviewed the research, and with whom I spoke for this article. Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of these experts told me, and there may well be contexts in which they should be required in schools. But the data being touted by the CDC—which showed a dramatic more-than-tripling of risk for unmasked students—ought to be excluded from this debate." So the experts interviewed all agreed that masks "may well help prevent the spread of covid" and that there "may well be contexts in which they should be required in schools", but the data in the study we are citing should be excluded from the public discourse. To me, this section requires a lot of brain twisting work. The experts (even those critiquing this study) say masks help (this is not a may well statement). The experts say we might want to mandate masks in schools. But for some reason, this study that finds some valid correlations shouldn't be talked about in the public debate. I find this nonsensical considering the article that wants the public to not use this research in debate must use the research to achieve its goal. If the author really wanted that data to go away it should be doing what any good scientist would do, which is more science. Get some more data, show that the models presented by the study are in fact wrong.

4. Noah Haber is quoted as saying that the research is, "so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse." Great quote for a science article. It's got a lot of information to sink your teeth into. At this point in the article I find that I'm very annoyed by the lack of actual science reporting. It mostly reads as shit stirring to me.

...continued

5. David Zweig makes the argument that some schools are open for six weeks instead of the three. The article has some ambiguity here due to the writing style. Zweig states, "After reviewing school calendars and speaking with several school administrators in Maricopa and Pima Counties, I found that only a small proportion of the schools in the study were open at any point during July. Some didn’t begin class until August 10; others were open from July 19 or July 21. That means students in the latter group of schools had twice as much time—six weeks instead of three weeks—in which to develop a COVID outbreak." It is unclear whether the "latter group of schools" here refers to those open on July 19/20 or to the group of schools with mask mandates. I think it's referencing the dates. Megan Jehn, one of the study's authors responded to this by saying that the median start date for the non-mandate schools was August 3rd and those with mandates started on average on August 5th. She also responded with, "It is highly improbable that this difference alone could explain the strong association observed between mask policies and school outbreaks." I would like to see more disaggregated data in the study but at some point you've gotta believe an epidemiologist when they tell you that your counter point isn't so good. However, Ketcham is quoted again here saying, "If schools with mask mandates had fewer school days during the study, that alone could explain the difference in outbreaks." I agree with Ketcham, that could explain the difference in outbreaks. Does it, though? The authors of the study, who have done the work in this case say its improbable, the economist Jonathan Ketcham says it might explain the diffence. I'm not sure this qualifies as a severe issue in the study, but it's something that could likely be put to rest with a little more public data.

6. Louise-Anne McNutt and Ketcham point to a possible detection error in the study. Namely, "...according to Maricopa County guidelines, students are considered 'close contacts' of an infected student—and thus subject to potential testing and quarantine—only if they (or that infected student) were unmasked. As a result, students in Maricopa schools with mask mandates may have been less likely than students in schools without mandates to get tested following an initial exposure." To this the study authors responded that it is, "highly speculative to make the assumption that identified close contacts are more likely to be tested than other students." This is a little harder to muddle through as we are getting a core argument on designing a reliable study. So, we are looking at the definition of an outbreak. The study states its definition thusly, "A school-associated outbreak was defined as the occurrence of two or more laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases§ among students or staff members at the school within a 14-day period and at least 7 calendar days after school started, and that was otherwise consistent with the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists 2020 outbreak definition¶ and Arizona’s school-associated outbreak definition." The CSTE defines an outbreak thusly, "Two or more laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases among students or staff with onsets within a 14-day period, who are epidemiologically linked, do not share a household, and were not identified as close contacts of each other in another setting during standard case investigation or contact tracing." The confounding factor that McNutt and Ketcham are referring to, which is that if two people are considered an outbreak they could have caught covid from outside of the school instead of each other, is sort of moot here as the paper states they conducted adjusted logical regression analysis against many factors including the, "7-day COVID-19 case rate in the school’s zip code during the week school commenced". That means that detection bias should not be present and we can be fairly certain that the definition of outbreak in this study is both consistent and likely means that the two or more cases are in fact school related.

7. Jason Abaluck makes the point that vaccination status could be a confounding variable. It can be! This is a flaw in the study that the study itself acknowledges. I'm not sure how this is an argument for the study being junk science. It's a little like one of the first probability and statistics examples I was taught. In this example a study was done on Coney Island where the scientists looked at ice cream sales and the number of drownings in the area. They found that there is a clear correlation between them as when ice cream sales went up so did drownings. In the study they unfortunately could not get access to temperature data or visitor counts. They concluded that ice cream sales are a good indicator of drownings. Of course, the reason ice cream sales and drownings are correlated is because people go to Coney Island when it is hot out. They also eat ice cream when it is hot out. With more people going to Coney Island there are more people that are likely to drown. The study did not make the claim that ice cream sales cause drownings, just like this study does not claim that mask mandates reduce covid outbreaks. However, in both cases the indicator is useful. In the case of mask mandates we also have data that shows masks reduce covid transmission in many other scenarios. So, yes, vaccination status is a known confounding variable that I'm sure the authors of the study would like to control for. Since they can't they did the next best thing and established that mask mandates are a good indicator for reduced covid outbreaks.

8. David Zweig attempts to reproduce some of the data himself. He attempts to build part of the data set used in the study for Maricopa county. In the end he gets the list of schools from the study authors. He writes, "Yet it still included at least three schools in Pima County, along with at least one virtual academy, one preschool, and more than 80 entries for vocational programs that are not actual schools. In response to a follow-up inquiry, they acknowledged having included the online school by mistake, while attributing any other potential misclassifications to the Arizona Department of Education." This is interesting, but ultimately the misclassification of some schools does not ultimately change the statistical methods used.

This is it. Eight arguments meant to show, "...the study’s methodology and data set appear to have significant flaws." I don't see the points made as exposing significant flaws. However, I am a simple programmer who studied mathematics and reads technical specifications in my spare time.

At the end of the day please remember these truths. Covid kills a lot of people, mainly the older ones. Covid transmits via aerosolized bodily fluids (coughs, sneezes, breathing), and things like wiping your nose then touching doorknobs where someone does the same in reverse order. Masks, preferably well fitting n95 and kn95 ones, irrefutably reduce the spread of covid. Washing your hands well and often irrefutably reduces the spread of covid. The science here is icing on the cake and it just tells us, sometimes roughly, how much these things help. Beyond those two things the vaccines are an entirely different story (because thanks Trump), but the science is more clear there, they also help.

Fact checking is imperfect, but what's the alternative? Social media where people rampantly share "Pedo lizard people firmly in control of Democrat party" type articles, and various and sundry other garbage. Combine that with Brandolini's law, and the whole thing is just a sewer. As we've seen during the pandemic with anti-vaccine nonsense, this has cost people their lives.

It's easy to point out flaws, but like anything, it's trickier to build something better.

Back in the olden days, they were looked at as weirdos and ignored.

Right, back in the olden days, you'd have a couple of drunk guys at the end of the bar ranting about their BS, and at most, you'd just kind of give them some room. Maybe people might start avoiding the bar if it regularly filled up with angry loons. Now their rants get spread far and wide across the internet.

> Social media where people rampantly share "Pedo lizard people firmly in control of Democrat party" type articles, and various and sundry other garbage.

How do you feel about telephones, public spaces, or even private spaces that allow information like this to be spread? What about books?

It's a lot easier to just go along with things that nobody asked you permission to do anyway than to point out flaws. Also, by "flaws," are you including the opinion that "fact-checking" as practiced is bad and shouldn't be done? That rings strangely; you wouldn't say that somebody telling you not to eat cyanide is pointing out a flaw in your eating of cyanide.

You're arguing in bad faith if you think that books or telephones have the same kinds of dynamics that social media does. And if you want to pick examples from those, no one forces local book stores to carry some racist screed calling for the extermination of a group of people. They can choose to not do that, the same as Facebook can choose to not publish something. The problem is that there are multiple, competing bookstores, so while it's unlikely that most of them are going to publish the racist screed, there certainly exist stores that will carry books with varying points of view. Facebook, on the other hand, benefits from positive network externalities to the point where for some people it becomes 'the internet'.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-... - this stuff has real world consequences. What's the best way to deal with that? I think we all agree that "quash all debate and dissent" is not good. But "just let people post whatever, wherever with no consequences" is not great either. I don't have all the answers.

>"Climate Feedback, a subgroup within Science Feedback, labeled two of his climate change–related videos as "misleading" and "partly false." Stossel's situation is similar to mine in that the fact-checker attributed to him a claim—"forest fires are caused by poor management, not by climate change," in this case—that his video never actually made." ......

>"Stossel eventually succeeded in getting two Climate Feedback editors to admit that they had not watched his video—and after they had watched the video, they agreed with him that it was not misleading, having noted that both government mismanagement and climate change have contributed to forest fires. But Climate Feedback still did not "correct their smear," according to Stossel."

This is the new regime we have created for ourselves. Many of you folks reading this are extremely high IQ, and yet you have supported this system that delegates the responsibility for the ideas you are allowed to consume to knuckle-dragging morons.

Somebody should stop and think about the kind of people that a job like "fact-checking" will attract. It's not high-paying, is inherently boring, and reminds me of a security guard kind of position. I can think of two categories:

1.) Hardcore ideologue hall-monitors who passionately believe in a "cause" and, based on my extensive interactions with activists and religious fundamentalists as a kid, have thinking patterns based in tribal, overly-emotional narratives and tend to be quantitatively illiterate. (You will not find many people who ever took calculus/statistics in either a Pentecostal church OR a social justice protest.) My father is one of these activists, has surrounded himself (and by proxy, me) with these people for decades. The ends always justify the means, and the only information they accrete from the digital firehose is content designed to monetize their confirmation biases.

2.) ne'er do well types, often from privileged backgrounds. You know the type: That person who has travelled to all sorts of very interesting places all over the world (on their parent's dime), provided they had a beaches, nightclubs, and hordes of other western hedonists. They kind of fall into these relatively unsupervised, non-demanding, low-paid but not low-status jobs at non-profits. (I used to do pro-bono work for various DC non-profits, and more often than not my work would be wasted because teaching one of these trustafarian idiots how to use the web apps I built for them was harder than writing the goddammed app ever was.)

We can't trust these people to be in charge of what is true. We can't trust ANYONE, and that's the entire point of the Enlightenment era philosophy from hundreds of years ago. We're just relearning these lessons now.

> Somebody should stop and think about the kind of people that a job like "fact-checking" will attract. It's not high-paying, is inherently boring, and reminds me of a security guard kind of position.

Yea, that sounds inevitable (due to economic constraints).

If I wanted "fact checkers", I would prefer them to be either experts in the subject matter or people with relevant education and enough time to read studies. The result of their work should not be "this is false/misleading", but an "expert opinion" response where they can point exactly what is false and offer references (literature, studies) that contradict the supposed false claim.

Of course we all know that this doesn't scale, nobody's going to pay experts to spend hours reading studies to prove someone wrong on the internet. They've got better things to do.

I wish comments like yours were what we were discussing. This gets to the heart of the matter:

* It is expensive for credible experts, or anyone, really, to meticulously go through and provide the best information available about a subject.

* It is incredibly cheap, easy and fast to spread outright lies.

This imbalance creates a real problem. Social media has made the problem much worse, because it is so quick and easy to spread lies.

This is a tricky problem and simplistic solutions like "there should be no fact checking and no limits" can lead to grave real world consequences.

>"This is a tricky problem and simplistic solutions like "there should be no fact checking and no limits" can lead to grave real world consequences."

This exact statement has been uttered by every ruler in history since the invention of the printing press. (the most popular printed books of the day, other than the bible, were books on identifying witches) If you insist that there be a regulation on what information can be distributed, you have no choice but to put certain people in charge of making these decisions. Sure, you can make them into committees, and have them follow processes, but at the end of the day somebody is paying them, and therefore they are subject to corrupting forces.

The consequence of free dissemination of information isn't heaven, or perfect. It can lead to horrible things. But the consequences of controlling and limiting information by some central arbiter has always led to hell. When in history can you point to a censorship regime and say "yeah, those were the good guys."???

No matter how benevolent the intention, censorship infrastructure has always been hijacked by the powerful for their own interests.

Facebook is a private company. The 1st amendment in the US does not prevent private companies from deciding what they won't publish.

Is it worrisome that so much power is in the hands of a large private organization? Certainly!

It's their platform. They have a right to decide what's misleading and what isn't. You'd expect the editor of the Libertarian magazine Reason to understand this.

Not that i would trust Facebook with fact checking generally, but these people sound to me like antivaxxers who got away on a technicality.

Your post is an Ad hominem style based of reasoning to shut down discussing any of the actual uncomfortable truths behind the post. You used antivaxxer as an ugly label to ignore discussing any of the points.

I guess some people believe Facebook can be fixed. I don't so any honest discussion about moderation processes is pointless to me.

This is my biggest problem with the response to Covid in the USA.. the very "loose" information provided/parroted by officials that are designed to manipulate public perception without simply providing the facts for people to make their own judgments. One of the current ones is how you keep hearing how hospitals are "overwhelmed" and we are running out of beds.. they neglect to tell you the impact of all health care providers that had quit because they refused to take the vaccine. So in affect it was the hospitals own policies that caused this issue. This is why Minnesota has called on the National Guard to help replace all the nurses that quit. There are plenty of beds/ICUs just not enough employees to cover them.

Hi, I have friends and family who are doctors in Minnesota. They were overwhelmed even before the hospitals decided to fire the health care workers who don't listen to health care advice.

Your "biggest problem" is not based on fact.

Your local hospitals in Minnesota are not hospitals nationwide. I have many hospitals in Northern Virginia, DC, and even LA that have been nothing close to "full" for many months of the last year, the media portrayed them as full.

Your "biggest problem" is not based on fact.

The person I was responding to specifically cited Minnesota.

You said "have been nothing close to 'full' for many months of the last year."

A reasonable interpretation of your words is that there was at least one month last year where the hospitals in your area were "close to 'full'."

How long does a hospital need to be "close to 'full'" for the people who work there to feel "overwhelmed"?

The news frequently talks about short staff at hospitals, in my own observations.

Is there any evidence supporting vaccine requirements being a larger source of nurse attrition than burnout?

If you ask a fact checker that, no. Years later when they change their tune, then yes. So the answer is no: because we live in a fact checker society now.

Are you saying that people who don't believe in medicine and can put patients at risk should remain employed?

Are you Straw Manning and Ad Hominem attacking the author in the same post?

Where did he say that these people don't believe in medicine? In fact, being a Doctor or Nurse by definition means believing in medicine and protecting the patient is your job. More so than some random hacker news stranger.

> Where did he say that these people don't believe in medicine?

Refusing to take a vaccine that appears to be safe and reasonably effective despite being in a pandemic and in a field of work that both increases your risk of exposure and increases the potential damage caused by said exposure (spreading the disease around people who might be already weakened by other medical conditions) suggests they don't.

> Ad Hominem attacking the author

Could you elaborate? I don't see anything in my comment that's attacking the author directly rather than their claims which I totally disagree with.

The problem is fact checks would do the damage on a post like yours above, and by the time they're proven "wrong" have done the damage and moved on.

it really is just information parroting/parading, and anyone defending it, is OK with it because its supporting their own "interpretation of the facts". It's wild how polarized we are, but not really, because these things are just further supporting the echo chamber of opinions one side already had.

> So in affect it was the hospitals own policies that caused this issue.

CITATION NEEDED

Are you talking about the 53 Allina employees (out of 27,000) who were fired?

https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/allina-says-it-par...

The 0.2%? That's what you think did it?

And the National Guard - is this what you're referring to?

> The Minnesota National Guard will deploy 400 members to reinforce nursing staffs at long-term care facilities

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/11/22/...

They were deployeed to long-term care. Not ICU.

If you want to make the argument that it was losing staff to vaccine mandates that resulted in hospitals being overwhelmed, I think you have a big hill to climb to make a credible argument.

Please don't use facebook. Use twitter.

Was a /s intended here?

While I’m a moderate Democrat, and no libertarian, [1] I have a lot of respect for Robby Suave, the author of this piece.

He has been very good about pointing out the abuses of the radical left destroying people’s lives for things like wearing a costume at a 2018 Halloween party which the radical left woke mob decides is politically incorrect in 2020. [2] In addition, he has supported due process during the #MeToo “believe all women” moral panic when many on the radical left wanted to get rid of presumption of innocence and due process. [3]

[1] Certain problems require big government to solve: Police, military, roads, and, yes, health care

[2] https://reason.com/2020/06/18/washington-post-blackface-hall...

[3] e.g. https://reason.com/2017/11/16/dear-prudence-meets-due-proces...

I don't know the guy but he looks very preoccupied with facebook drama, with inflammatory titles, and mounting scandal on top of a scandal. There are people who would rather see the liberal left burn alive than convince a few people not to vote for them for this boring reason 1, and this boring reason 2 and...

It's fun to troll online, but respect... I wouldn't ask for it, I don't think he should either :D

It’s fun to troll online

Without more context, I have to assume you’re talking about the articles he wrote which I linked to in the grandparent.

I am not sure how pointing out it was unfair to get a woman in her mid-50s fired because she wore a costume in 2018 the Washington Post retroactively decided was politically incorrect in 2020 is “trolling”. More like, standing up for fairness, compassion, and justice.

I was referring to my own post. That person trolls like I do. I wouldnt ask for respect, I wouldnt give him any: he's exacerbating drama rather than solving the problem with the CDC, simply by using emotions rather than rational proposals.

Something I respect surprisingly is the wapo article https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/blackface... full of various points of views, explaining the issue clearly, taking no special position itself, even going to tell that person felt so bad about her idea of a joke or the reactions to it she left in tear, causing compassion for her in me...

So maybe it's trolling to say the wapo calls an old incident politically incorrect ? :p As an amateur troll myself I get why she found it funny to fight fire with fire and why some people just cant go that many levels of irony and it's hard to sometimes face the reactions to your own trolling. The Wapo itself seems completely innocent of any position and I appreciate the further attempt to paint it as such as good trolling, when they were trying to untroll the debate. Just like wearing a blackface to criticise defending blackfaces.

One day, humans in the future will look in awe that a role such as Fact Checker was viewed with anything less than contempt.

They will also remark on how odd it was that a small little dot in Northern California felt themselves capable of this task, and simultaneously did not understand why they were unpopular with everyone but themselves.

Fact checking is a blunt instrument against the lack of subtlety and polarization going in internet discussions

In fact, about the article concerned, even if correct in essence (and I don't see a reason why not) it is probably not conductive to good discussion. Because it wants to set a tone at the headline level (amongst other things).

> For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question

Exactly! (from the article in question). But it's beside the point. If the study is good or not is a perfect valid discussion, if the CDC has made a good decision it is a perfect discussion, except discussing this in a magazine article is BS.

Because it is assigning blame and picking a side. Wearing a mask in a pandemic is a tiny issue, but it's being blown out of proportion. That study is one of the inputs the CDC takes to take a decision (again, in a pandemic, under pressure and under changing scenarios). And if the CDC is wrong then revert it. Again, nobody is dying for wearing a mask.

So, if fact-checking it was petty, the article itself was petty as well. Nothing of value was lost.

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