Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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:

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.

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

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.

> 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.

> 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

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