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zahlman

It's trivial to find examples. I put "fact checkers were wrong" into DDG and turned up:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-f...

https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95

https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-informati...

Even when they aren't wrong, they can be biased. See for example:

https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-politifact-fa...

Also, compare and contrast how they handled Sanders and Trump's presentations of substantially the same claim:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/13/bernie-san...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/20/donald-tru...

There's an entire site dedicated to pointing out more examples, aptly named https://www.politifactbias.com/ . They show their work in great detail.

It's trivial to introduce bias by simply being selective about who you hold to greater scrutiny (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...).

View on HN

> Trump says the unemployment rate for African-American youths is 59 percent.

> In May, the bureau said the employment-population ratio for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 41.5 percent. Flipped over, that would mean that the unemployment ratio - although such a statistic is not published by the bureau - would be 58.5 percent. That’s pretty close to the 59 percent figure Trump cited, Sinclair noted.

> Mostly False

Crazy

> But there are differences between the ratio and the widely used unemployment rate, which Trump used in citing the percentage.

> The unemployment rate reflects the number of jobless people who are actively seeking work as a percentage of the available workforce - defined as those who have jobs or trying to find one.

> The May unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent. The rate for whites in the same age group was 9.1 percent.

> The employment-population ratio is a far broader measure that counts all civilians in its equation - even those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job. In the 16- to 24-year-old category, it includes high school and college students who are not employed or seeking jobs.

In the examples you provided, they mostly deal with hotly-contested information around Covid-19, where there exists countless amounts of incorrect information, politicized reporting, and straight up propaganda. I'm not surprised that Facebook's fact-checkers got a couple articles mislabeled, especially if they blended in with the wave of genuine disinformation that accompanied the pandemic.

Given that there seems to only be two articles that are listed as falsely reported as misinformation (the Reason article and the BMJ article also mentioned in the Telegraph report from today), I have to assume that there actually aren't that many large errors on the part of the fact checkers. If there were more than two or the mistakes were much bigger, then the free speech advocates would never stop mentioning it.

There can definitely be bias when it comes to fact-checking, I wouldn't deny that. I also think that education and knowledge sharing can be greatly harmed by social media incentives to provide the most "engagement". Having an actual human in the process somewhere introduces some error but also cuts down on a lot of the dumb crap that would otherwise spread.

You asked if I saw examples and said that you haven't seen any examples; I showed you examples.

There certainly are more examples, and the free speech advocates I know do talk about the subject generally quite a bit.

One I just now remembered: Dr. John Campbell (https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching) has run into issues with this and has pointed out many other cases where established "knowledge" about Covid that we were previously not allowed to criticize, turned out to be objectively wrong. These disputes have resulted in many other people being censored despite later being shown to be correct, or at least reasonably justified by the best information available at the time.

This is someone who was proactively warning about the potential severity of Covid well before others, and advocating for proper hand-washing very early on (before more science emerged suggesting that skin contact is a relatively minor transmission vector). In the early days of the pandemic, he was complaining loudly about Fauci's initial mask rhetoric, arguing that the general population absolutely should wear masks and that production needed to step up. He's been doing serious medical content on Youtube for 17 years (sort by oldest to see) and first posted about Covid on Jan 26 2020 when awareness was still low and it was imagined that the virus had been contained to China and presented extensive detail on what little was known at the time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0).

But now he mostly makes videos against "the establishment", out of frustration with their unwillingness to consider new science over dogma.

I apologize for not scouring the internet for examples. If you had not sought those examples out and provided them, I probably would have never seen any cases of incorrect fact-checking in my actual life, but I would have seen many cases of misinformation being fact-checked. If you have to intentionally find such cases or hear them shouted from the rooftops by free speech advocates, then they probably aren't that many such cases.

I don't have time to search through an entire Youtube channel, but I will say this: there are many, many doctors out there with factually incorrect views about medical science. I personally have talked with doctors who think that the Covid vaccine killed hundreds of thousands of people (it didn't). I do not necessarily think this doctor is wrong, but from the perspective of a fact-checker who is given the current best knowledge of Covid it is hard to determine who is making genuine good-faith efforts to criticize vs who is simply repeating what they want to be true.

And for the record, you absolutely are allowed to criticize the establishment views. When it comes to important topics like medical science, however, you may just have additional context added saying that this is a contrarian view which (statistically) is more likely to be false than the consensus. Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.

>And for the record, you absolutely are allowed to criticize the establishment views. When it comes to important topics like medical science, however, you may just have additional context added saying that this is a contrarian view which (statistically) is more likely to be false than the consensus.

This does not match the experience of several people I have followed through all of this, including some I know personally.

>Everybody likes to complain loudly about being censored, but the reality is that their views are just being disputed and information provided that they are going against the mainstream view.

Systems which deliberately restrict access to your work on the basis of its content are ipso facto engaging in censorship. It is not about "getting community noted". Free speech advocates are in favour of Facebook's change; it reflects more speech from more directions. The problem is when state-like authority comes in and assumes the right to judge truth for hoi polloi.

You wrote: "I've not seen any examples of the "official" fact-checkers being wrong; have you?".

So, you do now admit there are examples of official" fact-checkers being wrong?

Specifically, I was talking about in my daily usage, not a widely-distributed article on a single example. Have you personally seen any fact-checking whatsoever, much less fact-checking that is misleading? Or do you need to search it out in order to find it?

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