Most of which had, in fact, no basis in truth. So no that’s nothing like the Mexican election.
And by the way the covid "fact checking" wasn't based on "truth", it was at political request of White House as Zuck later said, and he did later called the FB fact checking a censorship when disbanding it.
Btw, how many top world infectious diseases scientists were among FB “fact checkers”?
[1] The government decides which scientists specifically.
It's often hard to establish scientific consensus. When it's not hard, it can take a long time. Cases such as climate change are as easy as it gets: models are always a flawed approximation for reality, but denying climate change on a scientific basis is almost impossible nowadays because we have too much data and too many converging studies.
About a century ago, the "scientific" consensus in the western world was that there were different human races with very different characteristics, and phrenology was considered a science.
The question of who establishes the ground truth, and who checks the checkers still stands. Science advances by asking sometimes inconvenient, sometimes outright weird questions. And sometimes the answers provided are plain wrong (but not for obvious reasons or malice), which is why reproducibility is so important.
I don't think any entity should have the power to prevent people from questioning the status quo. Especially since censorship feeds into the mindset of the conspiracy theorists and their real truth that "THEY" don't want you to see.
The fact that so much money was given to private corporations, in secret deals outside any legal proceedings, on unproven products, all while censoring any critics, really gave the conspiracy theorists water for their mill.
I believe they would have had a much harder time spreading their misinformation, if they couldn't have the street cred of having "the system" against them. That is, if we had the voice of doctors vs random loonies, instead of our respective corrupt governments vs anyone they're trying to censor.
It's typical for people in science and related fields to use carefully chosen wording, to hedge, and to speak in terms of probabilities instead of certainties.
For a general public who is used to the unashamed and unearned confidence of the usual people who get in front of a camera (politicians, celebrities, pundits) this can make it appear as though the scientific position is one with a less solid foundation, when it's usually the opposite case.
Scientific communication has been focused on insiders for so long that many communicators don't realise how it sounds to the outside world. Even the fundamental terminology is affected - a scientific theory is an overarching explanation that combines multiple pieces of evidence and creates the best synthesis we can on a topic, but to a layperson the word theory means "vague idea".
1% of climate scientists: climate change is probably just something that happens and we can't do anything about it
Legacy media: it's important that we give equal time to both sides of this argument.
Social media: climate change is a lie and you can tell because 99% of climate scientists all agree that it's real! That's how you know it's a conspiracy! You can't trust the institution! Also buy these supplements, they cure covid and cancer and chemtrails!
We're doomed.
Not all fields of study are amenable to the scientific method, and lesser scientific methods are the best possible. We can't duplicate earth and flood one with CO2. We have to reach farther down the heuristic ladder, like studying two glass bottles, one filled with CO2. This can be extrapolated to calculate what a planet filled with CO2 would do, but the maths required is much less accessible.