This didn't seem to stop multiple MSNBC hosts from shouting about Russian election meddling, long after the Justice Department dropped such claims and related charges.
Fact-checkers have occasionally made serious errors, and in other cases made arbitrary, premature, or flimsy judgments of ambiguous situations, essentially passing off opinion as fact. From what I've seen, these errors and arbitrary judgments tend to favor the liberal side. Scholars will need to remove these errors and arbitrary judgment calls from the "misinformation score" and see whether there continues to be a big partisan gap.
Again, my gut feeling is that the conclusions wouldn't be changed much. There's plenty of genuine right-wing misinformation out there that isn't tied to erroneous or opinion-based fact-checking. But a paper like this really needs to get down to brass tacks about what exactly is being called misinformation, or it will only be yet more ammunition for political and culture wars, and won't provide any scientific enlightenment.
I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. Dissenters on all sides are at least sometimes unfairly treated by the mainstream fact-checking institutions.
I think you can fix the errors and exclude more opinion-based "fact checks" if you review the underlying data carefully and transparently. Whether those fixes and exclusions close the gap is currently a matter of opinion, and I think we should try to do better than just everyone just having their own opinions on it. That's my whole point.
It’s like saying that all police action in the United States is righteous and legitimate (you simply need to exclude all actions which are not). What is the value of such a tautological study/statement?
"Certain segments of the left" still believe that the Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump that they're using to puppeteer him to their own needs. The left has no business lecturing anyone about misinformation.
That wasn't the actual claim, it was that the hookers were peeing on the bed in the hotel room with Trump.
(The actual interesting bit was that a video appearing to be that did turn up, and after examination, turned out to be a fake that someone put a considerable amount of effort into. I do wonder who, and what they were hoping to accomplish with it).
For what it is worth, the laptop is far from the smoking gun people seem to think it is. The data is a mess and the story of how the data was acquired still makes no sense. The only thing that has been verified so far is that some of the emails did pass through GMail.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-...
The “left a laptop at a repair shop” part is of course bizarre, but makes about as much sense to me as anything else that Hunter seems to have done in his life.
He was also on the board of BHR during the same period and acquired a significant stake at a discount. AKAIK, these facts are not in dispute.
The part that is potential scandalous (and disputed) is that he was in these positions to peddle influence with his father and even kicking back compensation with his fathers explicit knowledge and approval.
Joe Biden is in a position of trust in government, and the defense against this has basically been “I have no idea what Hunter was doing and those were legitimate business arrangements”. However, if that’s untrue then it is obviously influence peddling and scandalous. I’m not really taking a position here, but it makes no sense to claim that simply because Hunter Biden is not in government, this is irrelevant.
Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc.
The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).
> Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
As for the Hunter Biden laptop story, what's the issue? I just want to know specifically.
Some portions of Hunter Biden laptop have been proven true (the emails on the laptop are legit) but people were banned for spreading hacked content (deapite it not being hacked) and spreading Russian disinformation.
That’s a lazy argument from ignorance, and can be dismissed out of hand by Hitchens’s Razor.
(See “philosophical burden of proof”)
For example, if someone killed a bunch of people and the head of the FBI said, "A black guy is doing it!" with no real evidence then I think banning it might be more justified. Now it may turn out that a black guy is the one doing the killing, but that doesn't make the pronouncements of the FBI head justified (although I'm sure the FBI head would feel justified).
We are not talking about the head of the FBI. If the head of the CDC said something like this you may be have a better comparison. Even if the CDC said something like this it wouldn't impact health so it probably shouldn't even count as harmful content.
Facebook explicitly banned the theory and later unbanned the theory.
YouTube demonetized some videos about the theory, but I am not sure what the current status is.
Pretty clear censorship on Twitter and other social media sites.
https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/blob/main/M...
Have all of the emails on the laptop been verified, or is it still just that one?
> The key here is who is defining misinformation.
We should respect the processes that are used to establish truthful information, even if it is occasionally wrong, rather than the noise makers who are occasionally right.
In other words “who” should not be a factor in determining misinformation, but “how”.