Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, I'll take you on one of the crown jewels that "the Right-wing Trolls" use to discredit Fact Checkers.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

Read it.

The point of the claim is that Hillary Clinton had her phones destroyed. This is true, but the Fact Checkers cannot allow this to be true, so what is an honest Democrat-leaning Fact Checker to do?

Easy, you muddy the claim and add to it: the Right-wing Trolls aren't claiming Hillary had her phones destroyed. No, I've decided that they're claiming that she personally destroyed them with a hammer! AHA! Got you Right-wring Trolls! That's definitely not entirely true.

Verdict: MIXTURE. Clinton did not personally, with her own hands, use a hammer to destroy phones.

So you see, this is what Fact Checking is. When the truth needs to be denied, you muddy the waters, you add irrelevant details to the claim that no one really cares about, and then use those details to claim that the original statement is not true.

And look, the issue isn't that this is being done, it's that it's being presented as fact checking, which is why I distinguish between fact checking and Fact Checking.

Here’s another example:

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

> 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."

It should go without saying that there’s no single, universally agreed upon definition of anything, thus giving a convenient way to dismiss any inconvenient claims.

Out of curiosity what do you think they should do differently? They confirmed the subject's criminal activity immediately at the top of the article. Only after that do they talk about the definition problem, which you appear to agree with to some degree.

Well she bombed federal buildings, that’s pretty clearly terrorism. They just don’t care because she’s on their side.

Maybe the problem here is the boiled down ternary, true, not true, mixture. That gets further aggregated until they can same big stats like “Party X made 80% false claims” while the other party only made 20% false claims, because their false claims have been conveniently softened to “mixture.”

I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Is there a profession who seeks to learn or explain the truth that the American right hasn’t accused of bias?

I don’t think I’ll find the answer in an article about Hillary’s cell phone.

I can't imagine there is. Many on the right will literally accuse Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN of policial bias if a single story doesn't lean the way they feel it should.

That snopes article is much more reasonable than you're making it out to be.

Did you actually read the article you posted in question? Because it does accurately lay out the facts, disputes the claim Trump made specifically and does not exonerate her. It sounds like you're letting your world view warp what the article actually says.

Trump's tweet literally said that Hillary smashed the phones with a hammer. He already got the benefit of more engagement on a exaggerated tweet. Why shouldn't he deserve some mild pushback?

> Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, 'bleached' emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?

that’s the tweet. I don’t think there’s a significant difference between “hillary smashed her phones with a hammer” and “hillary had someone smash her phone with a hammer”, especially when a 128 character limit is a factor.

I could say “I fixed my iPhone’s screen last weekend” when I really just got it replaced at an Apple store. The fact that I personally didn’t replace the screen doesn’t matter.

If the debate was “is hillary clinton strong enough to smash things with hammers” and this was used as evidence, it’d be misleading. The debate was “is hillary clinton suspicious”, and having her phones smashed with hammers is suspicious regardless of whether she did it herself or had someone else do it for her.

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