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Comment by andr | Hacker News Reader

I know some of those fact checkers. They are career journalists and the bar to tag a post as disinformation is extremely high.

To tag a post, they need to produce several pages of evidence, taking several days of work to research and document. The burden of proof is in every way on the fact checkers, not the random Facebook poster.

Generalizing this work as politically biased is a purposeful lie.

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Even granting all that you say is true, it would be trivial for there to be bias in such an apparently rigorous process. All that is required is selective application of the rules.

Did they even have authority to take down posts? That was always Meta's call. The fact-checkers -- which were separate news orgs -- would tag posts.

Yes, you are right. I believe tagging significantly reduced the chance of seeing the post in your feed, so it was similar in effect.

> was similar in effect

Not really. Because if you make the argument that it was censorship then you have to say that any feed that is generated by an algorithm is censorship because the company is determining what, among what all users post, you should see, allowing certain posts to bubble up to the top and others to fall to the bottom.

>...the bar to tag a post as disinformation is extremely high. To tag a post, they need to produce several pages of evidence, taking several days of work to research and document.

Why was the Hunter Biden laptop story thus categorized? As I recall, "several days" did not elapse between the New York Post publication of the story and its suppression on social media.

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