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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

The trouble with fact checkers was quite evident in the Trump-Harris debate.

As a Harris supporter, I actually agree, I think it was way too heavy handed and hurt Harris more than helped. I’m not sure anymore what the goal of fact checking is (I’ve always felt it was somewhat dubious if not done extremely well).

Any fact checker is going to be inevitably biased. For a debate, there should be two fact checkers, each candidate gets to pick a fact checker.

That could lead to a debate between the fact checkers, which would derail the debate.

Better to not have fact checkers as part of the debate, and leave the fact checking to the post-debate analysis.

Agreed, I always felt like most of the fact checking that has become vogue in the past ten years is designed to comfort the people who already agree, not inform people who want genuine insight.

If you don’t have fact checkers, a debate loses all its value. Debates must be grounded in fact to have any value at all. Otherwise a “debate” is just a series of campaign stump speeches.

The value in a debate is the candidates can directly address the opposition's claims.

They routinely do just that in campaign stump speeches.

Theoretically, yes, but when every second sentence is a lie it becomes impossible.

Non-American here (i.e. did not watch the debate), what trouble became evident?

Were they fact-checking too much? Not enough? Incorrectly?

Only one side was fact checked.

Was it the side that did the vast majority of the lying?

Yeah, the problem is that if one side tells 100 lies, and the other tells 1 lie, you can't correct all 100 lies, but if you only correct the most egregious lies then statistically you'll only be correcting the one side, and if you correct 1 lie from each side, then you make it seem like both sides lie equally. The Gish Gallop wins again.

Especially for live fact checking the greater the number of lies and the more obvious/blatant those lies are the more likely someone is to get fact checked.

We would have to fact check if those numbers are correct.

Oh wait, fact checkers don't work, better just inform yourself and make up your own mind, and don't just believe some supposedly authoritarian figures.

This is the problem, you are clearly biased. She brought up the Charlottesville issue that has been widely debunked; it is blatantly false and well-known to be false. She was not fact-checked. That's the issue.

Only one side made claims like it being legal to abort babies post-birth.

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