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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

We just want to see how and what is defined as “false info”.

As any one who’s read snopes or fact check, while the fact checks often point out actually incorrect information, some of the time, they reframe the question/narrative, assume an inaccurate scope or apply semantics in a convenient way and label something that isn’t necessarily false as not false that reflects the bias of the author.

It leads to a basic mistrust of what’s “false info” and what is not “false info” and so some people have a hard time trusting these types of studies and the basic premise that platforms should ban “false info”.

I feel Twitter’s community notes function is actually pretty good at combatting false info without creating a centralized source with the above issues.

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> I feel Twitter’s community notes function is actually pretty good at combatting false info without creating a centralized source with the above issues.

I agree, it's pretty good. Except when it gets applied to one of Elon's posts and then mysteriously disappears.

https://x.com/CardQueenEileen/status/1655061481862619136

BirdWatch ("Community Notes") is a simple reproduction of reddit top comments on Twitter. And like u/spez, Elon just can't seem to resist hopping into the database and monkeying with things.

Surprisingly little is actually a solid fact, most political things are opinions and socially constructed.

We are lucky if there is hard data at all to support some decision.

This was my first thought as well.

But thinking about it more, we are not saying that all information has to be true or that someone can't be wrong.

I think it is also easier to identify obviously false information than it is to identify true just due to the nature of discovering things. It is easier to rule out than identify. That also helps combat the "censorship" claims.

So it seems like it would be seeing a pattern of false information. Maybe they do legitimately believe what they are saying because they fell down some rabbit hole. But if a majority of subject matter experts would say something is false and that happens over and over again for someone, than they are likely not contributing much to the platform.

> As any one who’s read snopes or fact check, while the fact checks often point out actually incorrect information, some of the time, they reframe the question/narrative, assume an inaccurate scope or apply semantics in a convenient way and label something that isn’t necessarily false as not false that reflects the bias of the author.

Do you have an example of this, on Snopes or another fact checking website?

The Media Very Rarely Lies [0] explains how the game is played and it provides a couple examples.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies

allsides.com has done reviews of the fact checking websites. The last one for Snopes was in 2021, it says:

"We reviewed the numerous instances of Snopes' left-wing bias that we found during our June 2020 Editorial Review, such as slant. We also noted a number of times that Snopes had recently interpreted things in favor of the left, including when it "fact checked" a subjective opinion on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), when it defended Gov. Andrew Cuomo by saying an accurate tweet about him was "Mostly False," and when it "fact-checked" satire from humor website The Babylon Bee (an entry Snopes then had to edit following criticism)."

-- https://www.allsides.com/news-source/snopes

They claim Snopes has a "Lean Left" bias.

So a few things... one, I don't think you can say a fact checker is slanted one way or another by finding a few examples of a bias; how do we know there isn't an equal or greater number of instances where the examples slant the other way? You would need a systemic analysis of all the articles with some rubric for grading.

Second, I find issue with the examples they did use. They say the tweet was actually true, but it doesn't seem that way to me. The tweet argued that Cuomo said that the vaccine being developed under Trump was bad, but the thing he actually said was that he thought the roll out plan would be bad. Very different.

>> I don't think you can say a fact checker is slanted one way or another by finding a few examples of a bias

Allsides does a systematic review. Those are a few examples from the review. You can read about their process for determining bias at https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-method.... One part of the process is an editorial review:

"The panel looks for common types of media bias such as slant, spin, sensationalism, and story choice. We review the outlet’s homepage, headlines, recent articles, photos, and other content dating as far back as six months using online archival tools like the Wayback Machine. Taking into account all perspectives, panelists individually assign a number, between -6.0 and +6.0, that they believe best represents the bias of the media outlet. These numerical ratings are then transcribed into a weighted average."

>> The tweet argued that Cuomo said that the vaccine being developed under Trump was bad, but the thing he actually said was that he thought the roll out plan would be bad.

The statement that Snopes fact checked was "Did Gov. Cuomo Say It Was 'Bad News' Pfizer Vaccine Progress Came Under Trump?".

Cuomo said "The good news is the Pfizer tests look good, and we’ll have have a vaccine shortly. The bad news is that it’s about two months before Joe Biden takes over, and that means this administration is going to be implementing a vaccine plan."

If someone is going to call the original statement "Mostly False", then yes, I would consider them to have a left bias. Cuomo is saying that it is good that we had vaccine progress, but bad that it happened before Biden was President. That sounds like an awful thing to say, and from my perspective, Snopes is covering for Cuomo who said something he would probably in retrospect like to have said in a different way.

I would say that reading about the fact checks of the Wuhan lab leak theory during the pandemic were a pretty good example of this, where just because something might likely be of "natural origin" doesn't mean that it didn't escape from a lab.

So they would criticize someone who said it leaked out of a lab with evidence that suggested that the virus wasn't man made. However, that evidence doesn't really have much to do with:

1. Could a virus of natural origin escaped from a virus lab unmodified? 2. Could a lab that was engaged in research trying to modify a virus have accidentally let the virus escape and the research was the actual source of the virus?

To be fair, I personally don't think anyone can say for sure what really happened, but by manipulating the scope of the question to a very narrow man made virus escaped from a lab when the original speaker just said it leaked from a lab, your claim can easily be labeled as false.

Leave it up to the courts to decide. It seems to be the only place that the truth matters now.

If you cannot reasonably prove you acted in good faith - or cannot prove you did not knowingly make false statements it’s (and now that they are proved false you retract and remove) then you are a problem.

What that looks like in actual practice I don’t know but burying our heads in the sand and saying “it’s to difficult to stop” is not a good position to have.

Even if "banning false info online can improve discourse" that wouldn't make the required censorship OK. Either we're an Enlightenment society, or we're not. Which is it?

We most certainly are not an enlightened society.

Community notes seems to get stalemated as soon as any demagogue starts saying things that aren't true. The demagogues followers make it so the community note never appears.(Just look at all the false stuff elon musk has tweeted.)

Our entire current system of spreading information seems to allow liars who get popular on basically false outrage bait to have a huge megaphone. I'm not sure how to stop this without a centralized authority shutting it down.

> Our entire current system of spreading information seems to allow liars who get popular on basically false outrage bait to have a huge megaphone. I'm not sure how to stop this without a centralized authority shutting it down.

Centralized authorities are immune from demagoguery? You would throw out the first amendment to protect us from liars getting megaphones?

This isn't a 1st amendment issue.

Before social media things were generally better and we didn't have big groups like qanon or people storming the capital trying to end democracy.

Back then we did have centralized authorities doing quality control on the airwaves.

Bonus army would disagree there. Dispersed with tanks.

That was almost 100 years ago. I'm talking about 20 years ago here.

A centralized authority shutting down conversations is not a first amendment issue because of qanon and January 6th?

>The demagogues followers make it so the community note never appears

>Just look at all the false stuff elon musk has tweeted.

>allow liars who get popular on basically false outrage bait to have a huge megaphone

Do you have any kind of evidence or proof, for any of these claims? It sounds conspiratorial and emotional, especially when you say "it seems" about something that is the opposite of what I've seen in the CN program.

>I'm not sure how to stop this without a centralized authority shutting it down.

This honestly comes off as satire.

I've seen proof on twitter before. People showing the downvotes on corrections of demagogue posts.

Twitter is littered with high profile false information with no community notes. So the system isn't working.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/12/community-notes-is-great...

https://x.com/CardQueenEileen/status/1655061481862619136

You can't really shut it down, but you can protect the right of opposing points of view to have their own big megaphones.

We could shut it down, but we don't.

I only see the end result, but generally when there is a community note, it tends to be something obviously false and I agree with it.

That's basically the whole game in politics right now. Spread lies to your base, then when called on it, turn around and say "Well, 50 million people believe this is true. We need to respect their opinion."

And I'm not saying both sides do it equally.

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