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I'm not commenting on US fact checkers but the concept made its way to my country of origin some time ago. As I suspected, it turned out to be completely biased, often ignoring or softening the controversial topics that affect their side. It's the same old journalism trick where they claim to be neutral and dedicated to the truth but in reality they all have their own agendas, which seems unavoidable (nowadays or since forever?). The main issue is people believing that their favorite fact checker is the most neutral and thus using their content as absolute truths.

Glad to see that the concept is now completely unpopular in my country and we're back to the usual terrible journalism where there's no controversy in stating that.

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Similar observations here in Germany. Those fact checkers pick the facts that supports their agenda and leave out others. Framing is in place just the same. And it does not matter if you look at left or right journalists or left or right fact checkers, it is all the same.

What agenda?

Correcting desinfo is a legitimate goal and if you think there were errors made, well, fact check them.

I dont like this 'agenda' labeling because its the exact opposite of a factual discourse, it implies malicious intent.

As usual, what looks great on paper often falls short in reality because humans are involved. Who could argue that the concept of fact checkers is inherently bad? After all, they're supposed to chase down all the "disinformation" you mention, and they're there to ensure "factual discourse" to prevent "malicious intent." But if someone opposes fact checkers, they must be a pesky leftie/rightie/whatever label fits, and surely they're against the truth... because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!

In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers, and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking, why cannot everybody agree with me?

You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.

Bias != Agenda

And the hole fact checking concept falls apart when you prematurely conclude a dialog. This is the most valid critique to any political participant and way more on point: botched online discourse.

I am not concluding that fact checker are bad by nature, they are at worst, incomplete, imbalanced ... biased like any other political participant. Shutting them down with visas or labeling them as malicious will not foster the dialog.

Who do you thinks pays for these "fact-checkers"?

The fact is that people were censored based on so-called fact-checkers. It's not as innocent as some jackasses online calling themselves "fact-checkers"... It is so far beyond that, I feel sorry for you for seemingly not knowing. Go start with the Twitter Files as reported by Matt Taibbi.

And taibbi has no agenda?

I'm not going to argue the point that the man is perfectly impartial on everything. But of the people who reported the story of the Twitter Files, I trust him the most. He doesn't need to be perfectly impartial to convey what you need to know.

Nobody is actually free of bias. That absurd pretense of impartiality is only in the conversation because "fact-checkers" claim to have it, and that claim is used to promote censorship. Though it matters when journalists are biased by personal views and their funding sources, that is inescapable and consistent with their rights to free speech. Censorship is not.

> because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!

Of course a fact checker has an agenda. How else do they decide which fact checking to prioritize? It's not like a single person or organization has the ability to fact check everything about every topic.

A fact checking group with an emphasis on correcting mistakes about Catholic teachings is very unlikely to provide fact checking about water rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nor fact checking statements about British tank production during the Second World War.

> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?

I can't make sense of that argument. Which organization could that even be?

> To me, it was just journalism in disguise

It can also be journalism. Newspapers, magazines, and even podcasts can have staff fact checkers. The origin story for The New Yorker's famous fact checkers was to avoid libel after printing a false story about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

That is, the clear agenda of the New Yorker's fact checkers is to minimize lawsuits and enhance the reputation of the magazine among its current and future subscribers.

I therefore see no problem in fact checkers having an agenda as I can't make sense of how it would be otherwise.

> In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?

Perhaps there's so much lying being spread on modern social media that one organization would be end up drowning in work:

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?

How do you hold the truth? Even if there was only a single fact-checking organization, and they had no institutional or personal biases, they still wouldn’t own the truth.

If you gave even just one example we would understand better

Nobody is going to give a singular example because their entire position rests on them being unbiased, but fact checkers are biased. But if you point out what you believe the fact checker's bias might be, that in it of itself is a bias, and now you're no longer trustworthy by the metrics you yourself set forward.

>(...) because their entire position rests on them being unbiased, but fact checkers are biased

Sorry but this completely misses the point. I can't speak for everyone who dislikes the whole fact-checking thing but I can speak for myself since I'm the OP. What I'm saying is that nobody is truly unbiased, not that fact-checkers are biased.

In fact, I go further and openly state that not only are they biased, but many of them even have an agenda. Yes, media outlets have an agenda, and that agenda may go against your interests - why is this a shocking point on this forum? @wakawaka28 has expressed this much more clearly than I have below, anyway:

Can you give an example of a fact check and a bias you believe it has?

Do you have any proof of this?May be it’s just the matter of they don’t have resources to fact-check everything?

The fact-checking organization "Correctiv" (which was one of the first that got the privilege of marking shared links on Facebook as "disinformation") falsely claimed the right-wing AfD party planned to deport millions of non-Germans in a secret "Masterplan" ("Remigration") which of course did not happen which was confirmed by a court and later by Correctiv themselves.[1] This false report was repeated on every TV station, print and online magazine but the correction was not as widely shared (most people don't even know that the report was fabricated). Keep in mind that the Correctiv report lead to mass protests against the AfD and reactions from a lot of companies and government officials, so it had a HUGE impact.

The government also funds projects from Correctiv (a common pattern for these "N"GO's).

[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/correctiv-verhandlu...

You just engaged in this Sealioning (see sibling reponse), and it worked :)

Outside specific examples, I can never tell what anyone thinks when they're concerned about journalism and bias. As far as I can tell random citizens are no better at spotting it and their own pov drives what is or isn't bias.

Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...

And frequently they are simply contradicted by broadly available evidence.

Do the following exercise.

In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong.

Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories.

It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.

Generally, the fact checkers hired for newspapers and the like aren't attempting to assert any sort of correctness, just that the sources actually exist, said what was claimed, etc.

A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.

No, the fact checkers exist to pick their sponsors' preferred sides when there are multiple sources. They have little or no actual expertise of their own but the mere terminology leads the uninitiated observer to directly believe that the "fact-checked" view is objectively true. Everyone else is forced to do the constant rhetorical work of re-explaining why fact-checkers are not what they purport to be.

>A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.

Ultimately, fact-checkers are just journalists who attempt to claim a monopoly on truth. Censorship does not work, and can only be tolerated in a free society in VERY limited circumstances, usually after due process. The censorship we've seen during covid and since "fact-checkers" entered public dialog in general is absolutely not acceptable in any way. I don't have a problem with the existence of so-called fact-checkers per se. The real problem is that it's false advertising and a blatant attempt to rally for censorship of wrongthink. If you want censorship, move to North Korea or China, and leave the rest of us alone.

When a newspaper makes sure its reporters aren't inventing stories, it's basically North Korea. Got it.

I can't tell if you are serious or if this is just a god-tier straw man but it's all wrong. If I didn't find it so damn annoying, I'd call this response a fact check. First of all, newspapers don't turn fact-checkers on their own employees. Maybe if some of the employees are supposed to play the part of controlled opposition, it might happen. But fact-checkers exist to discredit information from other sources. Secondly, fact-checkers were used as a pretext for silencing people all over social media. This happened extensively in the West, including in the US, and many politicians still crave the power to deanonymize and silence their opposition under the pretense of misinformation or hate speech. Finally, people can decide for themselves who is credible, and nobody is trustworthy enough to decide for everyone what is true. That even goes for most so-called objectively knowable information. The importance of having a free market of ideas is perhaps proportional to the tendency for people to lie or misrepresent the facts. People are not as stupid as the proponents of fact-checking would have you believe.

> First of all, newspapers don't turn fact-checkers on their own employees.

It's a totally normal job at newspapers, magazines, and the like. You can easily find such jobs, and the publications themselves write about it:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/the-history-of...

That is a little interesting but those are not the fact-checkers I'm talking about, nor the ones that the post is talking about (since they mention tech companies). Don't hold me to that. Maybe there is some overlap because working for a media outlet might count as a credential in the eyes of the people who appointed them to work in social media. In any event, so-called fact-checkers were used as a pretense to censor social media and silence contrarians. I obviously have no problem with legitimate researchers, especially if their job is internal to particular news agencies so that they can avoid lawsuits for libel or whatever.

This is not new. I can call myself Bearer of the Unassailable Truth Who Is Beyond All Doubt or Criticism but that doesn't make me any more accurate than the next guy.

The "Fact Checker" title is is meant to describe the task the person seeks to undertake. The evidence and argument they provide gives their opinion weight.

The real problem here is that people read a title, or look at how confident someone is, or how well dressed, neat, polite, white, young, old, nerdy, worldly, good looking, well spoken or enthusiastic and think that is means anything at all as to the validity of what they say.

I had some contact with an evangelical congregation many years ago, and I remember a woman saying something like, "Everyone has their different spiritual gifts, mine is just that I know if a message is from God." That creeped me out, obviously. She was basically claiming exclusive veto on anything anyone might say.

But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.

Surely in these situations, the fact-checked information is more knowable than God. The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. The woman with a hotline to God cannot possibly provide any proof of her claims.

Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.

> The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position.

Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?

There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"

The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.

At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.

> Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?

In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.

> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"

There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.

> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts

Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.

Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?

> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense

I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.

In the context this woman was, they DO take bible verses as justifications. Not "logical reason", for heaven's sake. Expressing it that way suggests you're stubbornly refusing to think about contexts other than your preferred one, how others see the world. That seems to happen a lot with techies online.

I'm not asking you to accept how someone else sees the world as truth, I'm asking you to understand that it's how they see the world. Seems pretty important to understand the impact of a policy like trying to elevate professional institutional fact checkers in the media.

> Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.

That is not the question. The question is, was "citing" 60 anonymous authorities who claim to have evidence you're not allowed to see, going to convince anyone who wasn't already? If that was the attempt, I'd say it's a symptom of the usual "online techie autism" - people with bad theories of mind, bad ability to understand other's people thinking, who think they've got everything that matters worked out (those other people are just stupid anyway, don't you know).

You should ask, are the sort of institutional fact checkers we have now a useful institution? Or maybe more, the ones we used to have a few years ago. Even most of them have given up after the fiasco of Trump's second election.

> I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God.

I was talking about specific people. You don't know them better than me.

> However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.

Ridiculous. That's like saying right-wing grifters like, what's her name, Candace Owens, or the one who recently jumped ship, Marjorie Taylor Greene, are brave and principled for breaking with their side's orthodoxy. They're not. They're just trying to be one step ahead of events, one hour ahead of their time (no more!) and are terribly bad at it.

Your poor harassed institutional fact checkers may deserve pity for the outcome, but they are not brave, they just bet on the wrong horse, and they may well swing back in power and authority soon anyway (though not for long, because they're part of the problem they imagine themselves the solution to).

Well, people call it the gift of discernment.

The New Testament instructs the elders of a church to evaluate the messages brought by people who share a message or claim to prophesy. We're also instructed to "test the spirits" to see if they are from God. And to search the Scriptures in order to see if what people say is consistent with the teaching that has been given from God.

If you don't believe in God, divine revelation, and God speaking to people in their lives, then I'm not sure why you'd find her assertion creepy, it might make more sense to just find her and the entire Christian belief system false and mostly irrelevant.

At any rate, I doubt she was claiming spiritual authority over everyone else as you put it, more like saying God gave her a spiritual spidey sense or BS meter to help her personally and to help caution her local congregation or the people in her life.

It's a le legitimate claim within Christian teaching but I can't speak to her use of the gift. People's use of spiritual gifts isn't autonomous, but prophecy, preaching, administration, hospitality, discernment, and so on should be regulated within the Church body by the oversight of other Christians.

Since "truth" is more of a philosophical concept than anything else, IMHO the problem with "fact-checking" is largely rooted in the framing of it.

Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic.

I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".

During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.

> Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".

This is in fact (no pun) what every fact checker I've ever consulted actually does. I assume a lot of people just read the conclusive "Lie"/"Truth", and don't bother with the paragraphs of reasoning and sources they're basing the conclusion on. If there are faults with sourcing evidence, logic, or anything in between, that's where the issue is, but the concept is fine.

Maybe instead of "fact-checking", they are instead called "rebuttal" or 'counter-point'. This framing may be more accurate most of the time. But for the instances where the initial point is objectively provably false, like 'the earth is flat'.

Mike Benz does a nice job of covering the US State department using this for political purposes in other countries.

Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal.

And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.

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