Comment by starspangled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by starspangled | Hacker News Reader

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Here's another one - "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election in 2016".

I have never seen an accepted fact checking site answer this, which is very strange since it is such an enormous and grave conspiracy theory if it were true. The Mueller report is extensive and quite conclusive in stating that no such evidence of collusion (conspiracy) was not found. Yet fact checkers are happy to check peripheral and far less consequential claims around the case for some reason (e.g., https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mueller-report-no-obstruct...), but are strangely hesitant to address the elephant in the room.

Or for another example, there were many false or poorly substantiated claims made about covid and vaccines during the pandemic. I saw "reputable" fact checkers address a certain set of those claims about the virus and drugs, but were strangely silent when it came to a different set of claims.

So fact checkers don't even need to provide false content at all, they can be very political and biased simply by carefully choosing exactly what "facts" or claims that they address.

Another example: fact-checking prominent race activists in 2020. The public was grossly misinformed about the scale of police violence against black Americans: https://manhattan.institute/article/perceptions-are-not-real...

But even straightforward stuff goes unchallenged. Jada Pinkett Smith released a movie trailer claiming Cleopatra was black. When NBC covered the issue, they couldn’t even bring themselves to fact check her. They did a “he said, she said” article asserting that Egypt contested whether Cleopatra was black: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/queen-cleopatra-black-egy....

I think someone said it but there's a difference between facts and making an inference about those facts. The evidence in Trumps case was maybe he had a conversation with a person of Russian descent on Day X. That in itself is a fact. Does this fact or other facts like it mean he "colluded", whatever the definition of colluded means, is a matter of opinion. Even in a legal framework, where "collusion" has a definition, its still up to a jury which can get it wrong. Fact-checking is extremely complex as you are alluding to and cannot be simplified the way it has been thus far

Sure, but the fact is that there was never any solid evidence showing that Trump did collude with Putin to hack the election. That's contrary to what many high level politicians were claiming, the fact is that they falsely claimed there was "ample evidence" proving Trump colluded, and they never produced it. That's what was never fact checked, because it is inconvenient, and it would show that many high level people who insisted on there being "ample evidence" to prove collusion were actually being dishonest about it.

Well there is a lot of connections between Trump and Russia. Wiki here shows quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates... I'm not interested in auditing the entire thing, but like I said whether what occurred was "collusion" is something that cannot be fact-checked as it will always be a matter of opinion

There's a lot of connections between a lot of people. Obama tried to secretly transmit a promise to Putin that he would "have more flexibility" after his election. How do we know it wasn't Obama who colluded with Putin? It was his whitehouse overseeing the 2016 election. Why doesn't any fact checkers check that fact and come up with "inconclusive" because they are unable to prove it false? Because it's political.

Trump Putin election hacking collusion was always a wild baseless conspiracy theory. Sure there is no absolute proof he did not, and there is various incidental connections and circumstantial evidence you could arrange to fit some crazy narrative. But what it not in dispute is that many people lied and mislead claiming to have "ample evidence" of collusion, when no such thing was ever produced.

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