Meta is a business, and only does what benefits the business. That is why no one should rely on fact-checking done by Meta.
Not that facts matter much anymore anyway...
Correct, and in any kind of healthy society, we’d tell them to get off their dead corporate asses and stop enabling the boiling of people’s brains in a vat of political nonsense language for profit for the same reason we outlawed leaded gas and asbestos: because there are things about products that are more important than their profitability, and sometimes (at least in theory and at a time long past) we were willing to tell businesses “yes we know this makes you money but it’s also corrosive to our society and/or the people in it, so kindly knock it the fuck off.”
Nowadays we’re seemingly much more prepared to just feed everyone’s sanity to the industrial shredder that is the attention economy.
I find myself more and more disappearing in software & math; at least these things I can factcheck and I happen to like them more than anything else anyway. Build stuff; test andor prove things. Discuss with others without the vitriol of politics.
i wonder how such ppl go through their daily lives. do they need a fact checker when they are at the barber making conversation? or in the pub? or are factchecks only needed on the internet because it someone is some kind of source of ultimate truth for ppl? i find this shit confusing as hell.
People who think they factcheck themselves more often than not just default to believing whatever confirms their biases. Which, nine times out of ten, just means blind cynicism towards whatever the mainstream or status quo says.
That's why pointing out the right's entire platform is made almost entirely of contradictions doesn't change anyone's mind. They don't believe what they believe because it's internally consistent or coherent; they believe what they believe in because if it's correct, it substantiates the other things they already believed in, and/or it reinforces their existing biases. Tons of folks I grew up with will support the Republican party till the day they die because they came from a Republican family that voted Republican because they ARE Republicans, in the literal, identity way. The fact that basically every Republican policy demonstrably makes their lives harder is irrelevant; voting Democrat would be a break from the identity they cohere with that goes back generations.
For as much as the right endlessly whines and moans about "identity politics" it's really the only thing still holding their voting bloc together at this point.
(Also that's strictly the popular vote numbers, and doesn't account for the electoral college wherein millions of votes in both directions meant nothing because either the population centers overruled the will of rural voters or failed to do so and was itself overruled by them but I digress)
The issue isn't people "changing to the dark side," the issue is how energized the voting bloc for each party is, and how important they feel voting for their candidate is. Trump, for reasons beyond my understanding, gets his voters fired up. I honestly can't fathom how anyone can listen to that man speak and think he should be in charge of a lemonade stand let alone a country, but they apparently do. Much ink has been spilled ruminating on why Harris couldn't get it done, and the top theories seem to boil down to a few things:
* The most obvious: she's a woman. We haven't yet had a female president, and I don't think it's possible to ignore the role sexism has played in getting Trump in power when both the elections he's won thus far were against women, separated by one he lost against Biden, who besides being a man, had little really to get people excited, apart from not being Trump. Though after 4 years of Trump, not being Trump was probably more attractive too.
* The second most obvious: inflation is fucking obliterating America right now, and regardless of why you think that might be, or how stupid you think the following logic is, it holds historically true that people hold the White House and the party that occupies it responsible for things like that. The fact that Trump's few declared policy ideas are virtually guaranteed to make the economy worse in numerous ways wasn't enough to sway people from that either, or they simply didn't think about it that far (see the google trends for a massive surge in searches about "what are tariffs" after election day)
* The third most obvious: Harris' campaign was pretty middling. She didn't win a proper primary to secure the nomination; it was basically announced in the 11th hour that Biden wasn't going to run for re-election and instead of the standard process to select a nominee, it was basically a hand-wave and suddenly Harris was the candidate. And like, I didn't hate her (and did vote for her) but I'll be the first to tell you her campaign was... aggressively mid. There was a huge swell of support when she was announced to be replacing Biden but that seemed to be less a "pro Harris" support as much as a "thank goodness it isn't Biden" support, and the latter just didn't have the staying power to sway people long term, or keep the base energized.
Doing fact checking in a way that satisfies everyone is an intractable problem. I'd abandon it too. As a shareholder, this is just good business sense and I'm glad they did this. If y'all care so much about the facts you can contribute to Community Notes yourself.