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Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

theguardian.com

41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he married a pornstar means he doesn't do the research properly, wat?

>The former porn star/professional escort that David Mikkelson divorced his wife to marry is now an administrator at Snopes She now works as an admin for Snopes. Read the entire comment before kneejerk replying champ

So someone can't function as a normal, honest employee (what is an administrator? Sounds like either a forum admin or glorified secretary) after they've participated in the sex industry? Or is it the infidelity that bothers you? Either way you're the one with a knee jerk reaction.

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because he married a pornstar means he doesn't do the research properly, wat?

>The former porn star/professional escort that David Mikkelson divorced his wife to marry is now an administrator at Snopes She now works as an admin for Snopes. Read the entire comment before kneejerk replying champ

So? What does a porn and escort background have to do with one's ability to be an administrator?

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#44
post #26

Applying the idea of "fact checking" to politically charged topics inherently raises problems. Snopes was a good site to find out if there were really alligators in the sewers. The Forbes article cited by rokosbasilisk here seems to demand a high standard of quality from fact checkers - but who is to pay for it? Now, The Guardian chose some headlines to illustrate this story with. Presumably the Guardian considers th…

Some political activists have no choice but to yell "Fake News!" to rationalize censorship now, because they basically used "Racist!" to censor views they didn't like so much that the word no longer has meaning. It makes you wonder what will come next.

The funny (or sad) part is that silencing dissenting opinions via means like this is the very definition of fascism, but the people so quick to yell "fake news!" now are the same ones who were calling their friends fascist on social media 2 months ago just for supporting a different presidential candidate than they were.

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never seen anyone give a good reason why Snopes should be trusted. Their impressive library of detailed articles in where they factually report on myths and conspiracy theories?

"Factual reporting" according to whom?

According to the epistemological principle of not being proved wrong while containing a reasonable amount of evidence to indicate that their report is in all probability true.

Why are you asking such a vague, open-ended question?

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#46

I learnt from Popper that the facts are theory - laden and from Feynman that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. This whole attempt to control the discourse is doomed. There's no such thing as objectivity - ones understanding of the world is shaped by one's experiences and who one is, and that's true for institutions too. Character matters for an editorial institution, as does form. Snopes built its re…

>There's no such thing as objectivity

Obama being born in Kenya is objectively false.

Podesta running a child-trafficking ring in pizza places around Chicago is objectively false.

Moon landing and flat earth conspiracies are objectively false.

Thinking that Global warming is a hoax created by China is objectively false.

I hate to bring up the cliché of "post-truth" but when you say things like "there is no such thing as objectivity" it is difficult not to do so.

I'm not directing this at you in particular, but it's a common line of argument. Say Snopes write that the claim that Global Warming is a hoax is false, or that Obama isn't a secret Islamic radical. When they dispute something that many people believe in, the argument from a depressingly high number of people is not to scrutinise the facts that Snopes used and come up with flaws in their reasoning.

It is to vaguely accuse them of being "globalist", say that their argument is not valid because their founder did something, and that there is no objective truth.

Reality is complex, but the problem arises when people use this complexity to mean that any belief they hold, however unsubstantiated, cannot be falsified because everyone has an (((agenda))), which is defined as holding any view, on any subject, slightly different from their own.

Sure, I think Snopes should be looked into, like any institution with influence. But I am far more interested in journalism that extensively rebuts many of their arguments- and they have made a lot of arguments, rather than providing fodder for the inevitable future ad-hominem rebuttals.

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#47
post #7

It's poor form for the guardian to not link the original article, at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4042194/Facebook-fac... The guardian article is a hit piece, and a poorly written one at that. It gives very little information and a lot of vague or indirect criticism. (Makes you think how much more effective hit pieces can be when the writer actually has something to work with: even this will probably convi…

It's a hit piece, but then so is the Daily Mail article, and the DM has been a scandal sheet for most of its history.

[deleted]

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#48
post #44
post #26

Applying the idea of "fact checking" to politically charged topics inherently raises problems. Snopes was a good site to find out if there were really alligators in the sewers. The Forbes article cited by rokosbasilisk here seems to demand a high standard of quality from fact checkers - but who is to pay for it? Now, The Guardian chose some headlines to illustrate this story with. Presumably the Guardian considers th…

Some political activists have no choice but to yell "Fake News!" to rationalize censorship now, because they basically used "Racist!" to censor views they didn't like so much that the word no longer has meaning. It makes you wonder what will come next. The funny (or sad) part is that silencing dissenting opinions via means like this is the very definition of fascism, but the people so quick to yell "fake news!" now a…

It is less a question of censorship and more a question of removing egregiously bad "news" that is explicitly written to collect views.

If you believe flagging false headlines like

“Michelle Obama DEMANDS Americans PAY UP To Give Her Mom A Cushy $160k Pension”

is fascism, and that advocating war-crimes and bringing back libel laws like Trump did is not, I don't know what to say.

There is a whole industry set up to profit from making fake news that they know is false: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-macedonias-fa...

If you think any attempt to reduce profiteering by knowingly generating fake news that gets millions of shares is fascism, I'm not sure what isn't.

I'm not sure if there has been any 'transition' from accusations of racism to fake news. The "birther" controversy, especially the way it treated by places like Brietbart was both racist and fake, I doubt that you dispute that. Trump retweeting Stormfront infographics that claim ridiculous stuff like 90% of white murder victims were killed by black people is both racist and fake. This is hardly a "liberal" or globalist position, even Fox news called out Trump on that.

Regardless of political orientation, objective facts do exist. I don't believe in censorship, but I think if a site wants to flag a post saying "reasons why the moon landing is a globalist conspiracy" as false, I'm not going to cry that it's literally fascism.

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#49
post #26

Applying the idea of "fact checking" to politically charged topics inherently raises problems. Snopes was a good site to find out if there were really alligators in the sewers. The Forbes article cited by rokosbasilisk here seems to demand a high standard of quality from fact checkers - but who is to pay for it? Now, The Guardian chose some headlines to illustrate this story with. Presumably the Guardian considers th…

Authoritarians will do everything in their power to replace fact based journalism with messages that support their ideology with no concern to accuracy. The very definition of authoritarianism means the public doesn't need to know what's going on and all paths to victory are acceptable.

It is a problem we have not faced in free societies but do now. It is the suppression of information and its replacement by propaganda with no connection to reality. It is the world of Putin's Russia, a world we in the west have not experienced.

And it is not necessarily driven from the top down although casting doubt on what constitutes a fact is core to the maintenance of power in a dictatorship.

There is pretense that changing Facebook's algorithm from favoring profitable self confirming nonsense to being balanced with factual posts is some an obscene from of censorship rather than a fix for a broken algorithm. This as absurd as claiming Google is censoring when it changes it's search to give results the user wants because no user wants to be fed inaccuracies by either Google or Facebook.

Incredibly we're now saying it's censorship just to adjust a ranking such that propagandist nonsense (that the user didn't want) is no longer quite the top result.

Indeed the argument has now deteriorated into the surreal position that no-one (e.g. Snopes) should dare even post corrections to politically motivated lies because that is somehow censorship. And certainly no-one should promulgate those correction let alone use them. This is exactly the Kafkaesque logic that reveals the underling motivation is actually the exact opposite of free speech.

Re: Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it throw all their journalistic credibility into question? When I consult Snopes, I care about the predictive power of the the information they share, ie whether it will inform me accurately enough to guess where the story will go. I use it for additional data points rather than to form a conclusion, although I appreciate the thoroughness when they go to the trouble of exploring historical context etc. So th…

I'm going to answer this question under the assumption that you truly don't understand some of the core tenets regarding journalistic integrity. On the surface, your argument is correct; the facts are the facts, and no amount of moral corruption will change that. Things get hairy when you remember that our world is anything other than black and white: facts can be distorted, misrepresented or ignored to deliver an en…

Please edit personal swipes, such as the first sentence here, out of the comments you post to HN. This comment would be fine without that.
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