"Fact checking" serves only to ossify the current view on any emerging discussion. Vatican "fact checkers" kept Galileo under house arrest for spreading "fake news", in a sense.
This is an unwinnable fight, the only reasonable response is to abandon the pretense that opinions are facts, and that most people can't distinguish truth from falsehood.
Fact checking is censorship taken on behalf of protected opinions. This is what Facebook itself has asserted in a lawsuit[1]. It is an political act, taken against political enemies. Schmitt would have a field day in 21st century.
> "Fact checking is censorship taken on behalf of protected opinions"
In this context, it is the fact checks that are claimed to be protected speech.
"Protected" refers to statements of opinions (as opposed to facts) being protected by law against allegations of defamation. For example, if I publish something as a factual statement, e.g., "Mark Zuckerberg is a criminal", I can be sued for defamation (if it is false). However, if I say "I think Mark Zuckerberg is a criminal", I can't be sued for defamation.[1]
Thus, Facebook is defending itself against a defamation suit by arguing that all its "fact check" labels are merely statements of the fact checker's opinion, not actual statements of fact.
In particular, the paragraph quoted in that Twitter post does not refer to any attempt to protect an opinion against "political enemies".
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation#United_States - In particular: 'Defenses to defamation that may defeat a lawsuit, including possible dismissal before trial, include the statement being one of opinion rather than fact or being "fair comment and criticism".'
At no point prior to this claim in court has Facebook ever labeled one of their "Fact checks" as opinion. They've been passing them off as "objective".
I don't see how that's much different than a newspaper running front page stories that asserting that everything John Doe says is inaccurate then a year later saying "oh it was just our opinion".
I certainly agree that Facebook wants its users to believe that their "fact checks" are objective. But the quoted paragraph wasn't intended for the general public to see - it's trying to get a judge to dismiss a lawsuit against them. Facebook would like to have it both ways: credibility for users and deniability for people who want to sue them. I wonder if the judge will be convinced by their argument.
You couldn't have stated this any better or more succinctly. Well said. This is the reality of our current day situation in corporate news media, politics, and the sharing of information on social media with people we care about.
Imagine if CNN interjected in our in-person conversations with friends and family on nearly everything we said -- it would be a nightmare -- and on social media, there is no difference in its nightmarishness or weight, and to think that some millions of people are in full support of such interjections in order to protect their own narrative, because as long as someone powerful is watching out for them to prevent the high crime of "disagreement" viewed as dangerous bullying, they couldn't care less how negatively it impacts society, much less the other side of the aisle's freedom to discuss, debate, and participate in the broader discussions society brings us.
There's a lot of irony in nearly an entire political segment (leftists) in 1) supporting third wave feminism as a means to shut down, specifically men, from correcting others when they're wrong, or simply acting on one's behalf out of kindness (I ain't need no man), and 2) supporting the same behaviors by abusive corporate media outlets and paid commentators acting on behalf of social networks.
fact checking is a normal part of a normal news organization. They all do it and it's above board. I was briefly a freelance journalist at a major urban newspaper and here's how it worked for me:
- as I researched and reported, I kept notes about the source of every piece of info I got.
- as I wrote, I noted that source every time I stated a fact (using phrases like "according to")
- my editor asked me in general whether I had done all this - and during the editing process drilled down on several facts I stated and what the basis for them was.
- A factual error once crept into my story through the headline, which was written by a different editorial team. It was a minor thing, but it was a big deal, my editor was super stressed, and they issued a printed retraction.
- This was all inline with the general policy followed by a 300 person newsroom.
- Editor's year-end review is partly based on the number of retractions issued.
- The culture of the organization was such that if a known error made it into print, and there wasn't a retraction, that would be basically a scandal.
Fact checking has only become a PR management tactic that arrived in the 2000's, only as the cost of sharing your mind rapidly became zero. Before the widespread adoption of the internet, you were limited to broadcast and print. You could pay for a license from the FCC, or license a station with cable or go and print and distribute your text. Very little incentive for non-commercial work and certainly no avenue for simply anybody to say anything in a way that can spread easily.
Just because someone can use something to destroy and hurt humanity or smaller or larger groups of people or living things... doesn't mean we should let those bad actors have their way by not using them for good, which is the whole point.
Listen to yourself. You are allowing MSM to manipulate the meaning of things in your mind.
You literally just suggested that fact checking in general is bad and should go away. I know you think that everyone is operating under the context of malicious/false fact checking, but that is my point: you all have undergone a paradigm shift in which you allow the meaning of words to change based on false flags and what mentally ill people are claiming is "fact checking".
Stop.
Everyone should be learning critical thinking and fact checking. Uneducated and vulnerable people need to understand this and see the difference between someone else doing it for them, and they themselves being able to see clearly what is happening to their lives.
"fact checking" is bad. I'm not sure what the good version of it you imagine. By "fact checking in general" do you mean pointing out when someone is wrong? The parent comment sees fact checking as one thing: propaganda used to shut down heterodoxy. It has nothing to do with facts or truth.
Fact checking is simply applying some standards to information. People do this in their own minds every day. Outsourcing it to others can be dangerous, but it's not inherently so. If you choose to believe something you read, you're placing your trust in someone else - a news organization, government, friends, family, whoever. If an organization set up for fact checking has published standards and list the violations of those standards when they deem something to be false or misleading, then why shouldn't you trust them? To be clear, I'm not suggesting Facebook fits the bill here - you attacked the very idea of fact checking, which, when done right, is a valuable thing to have in society, unless you just literally trust no third parties that present information to you.
If fact checking is bad, why are you wrapping it in quotation marks? Is there a difference between fact checking and "fact checking" implied here, and if so, what is that difference? Please elaborate.
In 2020, talking about the lab-leak theory was labelled "misinformation" and brutally purged from social media by "fact-checkers". In 2021, major news outlets started talking about it, and then it suddenly became ok to talk about it on social media again, and the "fact-checkers" did a complete 180 on the issue.
They're not checking facts, they're just enforcing the mainstream view. The mainstream view is often correct, but sometimes it isn't, and then the fact-checkers are just horribly wrong, and suppressing actual debate on the merits of an issue.
I think people kept it taboo for as long as they could because: people were literally dying due to low vaccination rates, which were caused in large part by such specious conspiracy theories. Fact checkers did not do a 180, it is still widely considered a conspiracy theory, and its very existence harms public health even if there's a remote possibility it's true.
“Some scientists agree that the possibility of a lab leak should be examined as part of the ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19, though they have expressed concerns about the risks of politicization.”
The Wikipedia article is frankly disgusting. The two options are natural origins or leaking from a lab and currently there is more evidence for leaking from a lab. There is no debating this. The Wikipedia article has already chosen a conclusion with no evidence and also is slandering the other possibility for political reasons while simultaneously saying that it can't be the other potential cause because it might be politically motivated. Absolutely disgusting. I expect better from Wikipedia
This reads like a lot of mental gymnastics attempting to excuse the inexcusable.
You argue that blocking debate is a righteous act because the theory's "very existence harms public health". I'd counter that the gagging of a concerned public breeds distrust that is vastly more harmful than allowing debate would have been.
Unfortunately this wikipedia article serves effectively as yet another type of political "fact checking". Multiple virologists have stated that the only evidence in existence currently points to a lab leak. Labelling it as a fringe or destructive "conspiracy theory" is complete BS and it's not even conspiratorial, it's called a mistake and lab leaks have happened in the past.
Fact checking is just censorship. It's literally a group that gets to decide what is an acceptable view and what isn't. How is that not just plain censorship?
You can certainly argue that censorship isn't always a bad thing. But calling censorship "fact checking" is purposely misleading.
Still waiting for the apology from all the people who said that this was all very necessary to combat misinformation and save democracy, and that any suggestions that this could possibly have bad outcomes was relying on a slippery slope fallacy, and not to be regarded.
This story is literally about a single instance. By that logic, a single instance where fact checkers proved something was false is enough to justify their existence.
As the BMJ article points out, Cochrane has had the same problem, and it's not like these are the only two cases. There have been huge numbers of statements by high profile experts and professors being labelled as fake news by journalism interns at "fact checkers". You may not be aware of them but this is a very frequent problem.
No, not by that logic. The logic is "some people claimed that claims of the possibilities of bad outcomes were instances of the slippery slope fallacy, and now that the bad outcomes were actually realized, they should apologize, because something isn't the slippery slope fallacy if things further down the slope have actually happened". That's not even remotely connected to anything you said here.
I don't think it's unwinnable; we don't want FB to arbitrate between competing scientific opinions, we just want them to blackhole Magic Healing Water and Covid Vaccine 5G Drone Tracker type bullshit.
It may be true that it's hard to draw a clear line between bullshit and almost-bullshit, but it's hard to draw a clear line between porn and almost-porn and they somehow manage to do that okay.
edit because apparently this wasn't clear enough: the way you distinguish science from bullshit is not by evaluating the claims (that's what I am arguing we should not trust Facebook to do). One is a money-making endeavour and the other isn't, and that's the basis on which they are distinguished. Even the worst science is not festooned with ads.
I'll say it again: "Facebook doesn't do a good enough job of evaluating accuracy" is a trap, and it's a trap they desperately want you to fall in to. If we get to the point where we put any value in FB's evaluation of any scientific claim, we're already into dystopian sci-fi territory, no matter how good a job they do.
YMMV, but I don't think social media companies have done well at all regarding the latter with erotic works.
Every single (semi)-erotic artist i know has faced a daily struggle of avoiding their work (and livelihoods) being demonetized somehow - whether it be shadowbans, straight up sudden bans, deactivations of accounts under false pretenses, etc. One could argue there's a difference between 2D art and "live action porn' but I'd say as an artist the line is a lot fuzzier than most think, as there tends to be a suspicious amount of activist work that tends to get shoved under the "porn" rug because it makes it easier to hide dissenting minority opinions.
This is a political fight. The mistake is believing in some sort of disinterested, unbiased institution adjudicating truth separate from influences of interest groups and political power.
The existence of power-centers like giant social media monopolies guarantees they are targets for political interests to hijack that power & censor opponents. Even if you could snap your fingers and magically populate these dominant platforms, and media/journalist institutions as well, with good faith actors (even here they are limited by their ability to actually know what is true), this wouldn't be a stable equilibrium and would in short order be populated and/or lobbied/pressured/swayed by political opportunists.
The difference is that one doesn't need a special education to identify porn. The average low-wage content moderator at Facebook likely does not have the scientific background to distinguish between bullshit and science. Case in point, this article.
That's a good analogy (bullshit -> porn), and we would expect a system that is working as intended to be having precisely the kind of animated discussion around what is bullshit and what isn't that this open letter from BMJ represents.
This is an unwinnable fight, the only reasonable response is to abandon the pretense that opinions are facts, and that most people can't distinguish truth from falsehood.