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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

"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 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

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.

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.

> 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.

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