Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

skrowl wrote: post #44

crucini wrote: 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…

I've seen this argument before.

A: the solution to unwanted speech is more speech. B: OK. A: Also pg is a lizard from planet Nibiru. B: That sounds like bullshi- A: OMG CENSORSHIP

Nobody is silencing dissenting opinions, they're disagreeing with them and questioning their validity. Don't dish out criticism if you can't take it.

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

#62

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 7:15 PM UTC

BummyMon wrote: post #51

anigbrowl wrote: post #34

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…

Which is the correct approach if you need a debunking of whether there are alligators in the swears, but if they are expanding their business to fact checking moralistic/political claims, how would that then differ from you seeking them for for moral guidance?

if they are expanding their business to fact checking moralistic/political claims

I'll worry about that if/when it happens. I have no difficulty distinguishing between factual and editorial content, and I generally only consult Snopes after I've done some research of my own and drawn a preliminary conclusion.

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

#63

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 7:24 PM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #55

dang wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That disclaimer was only there so the rest of the post wouldn't seem patronizing.

Perhaps you should have focused more on avoiding a false equivalence of fact-checking with journalism, as if a) Snopes were an originator of news and rumors rather than being responsive to them, and b) their popularity relied on a perception of the founders' personal integrity as opposed to a history of providing verifiable links to contrary information and narrowly reasoned argument.

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

#64

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #10

rokosbasilisk wrote: post #2

I would have agreed with this article until the forbes story broke. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dail... It makes snopes look worse run than a college newspaper. I also agree with the forbes article in that we need much much tranparency and openess from our fact checkers.

There's a lawyer's saying that when the facts are against you, you pound on the table. The Guardian won't even repeat, let alone attempt to refute, anything published in the Daily Mail. Just let that sink in for a moment: the Guardian is unable to dispute the Daily Mail on a factual level on this one. Instead they talk about everything and anything else rather than discuss the actual subject matter in the reports. "N…

OK, but why should we take the Daily Mail's say-so that this factual subject matter is of great significance? (And if it is, would they be OK with similar investigations into the private lives of the Daily Mail's editors or publishers?)

Seems to me you're in such a hurry to have a trial that you've decided not to wait for a crime to take place.

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

#65

Post by Natsu » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #54

Natsu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lawyer's saying that when the facts are against you, you pound on the table. The Guardian won't even repeat, let alone attempt to refute, anything published in the Daily Mail. Just let that sink in for a moment: the Guardian is unable to dispute the Daily Mail on a factual level on this one. Instead they talk about everything and anything else rather than discuss the actual subject matter in the reports. "N…

We don't need the Grauniad to refute stuff in the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail will print a full page front page, and then retract it in a tiny correction six months later on page 12. From New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2013/12/man-who-hates-libe... > In the files of the Press Complaints Commission, you will find records of 687 complaints against the Mail which led either to a PCC adjudication or to a…

Hmm, that's true, though, isn't it? They'd be able to sue under UK libel laws if it wasn't true.

You're certainly right that the Daily Mail isn't someone I'd trust much, but this sort of thing ought to be verifiable--I mean, the courts themselves may well have public documents regarding cases put before them, etc.

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

#66

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

cloakandswagger wrote: post #22

justinlaster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to give a Forbes article more credence than Snopes? I still haven't seen anyone point to a substantive example of why Snopes should not be trusted.

Here's one: The former porn star/professional escort that David Mikkelson divorced his wife to marry is now an administrator at Snopes. No amount of mental gymnastics can get me to look past those red flags.

former porn star/professional escort that David Mikkelson divorced his wife to marry is now an administrator at Snopes

So because David Mikkelson either divorced his wife and married his assistant, or divorced his wife and hired his mistress, you worry that he might be corruptible, given the right incentives. OK, although this kinda skates over the fact that their consequent unreliability would be obvious to others and thus reduce the market value of their service.

I'm not clear why you keep mentioning the fact that the other woman was a former porn star/professional escort. Are you trying to argue that sex workers are inherently untrustworthy people or something?

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

#67

Post by rokosbasilisk » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 9:01 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #60

jtbayly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allow me to correct your corrections about what is actually going on. In other words, let me fact-check your fact-check. You beg the question by claiming that only "self confirming nonsense" and "propagandist nonsense" will be hidden from the public, calling any position that sees cause for concern about censorship "a pretense." However, you offer no evidence for your claim that only these types of content will be af…

Your whole post is a huge straw man. You say 'the objection is against setting official truth-setters' but nobody was proposing that and the post you're replying to to never even mentioned Snopes. The reality is that Facebook - responding to consumer demand - is partnering up with several commercial fact-checking outfits, in addition to tweaking its algorithm to select from something other than sensational content th…

Can you prove facebook is really responding to consumer demand ?

The whole fake news narrative popped up over night to explain Trump winning at impossible odds.

Id say people were fine with filter bubbles truth be damned as long as the outgroup got smeared.

Its also disingenious to say its not hard to see how the fake tag could be abused. Oil companies have spent fortunes trying to get climate change labeled as fake, and look how successful it was.

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

#68

Post by mst » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 9:01 PM UTC

jtbayly wrote: post #53

whybroke wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 propagan…

Allow me to correct your corrections about what is actually going on. In other words, let me fact-check your fact-check. You beg the question by claiming that only "self confirming nonsense" and "propagandist nonsense" will be hidden from the public, calling any position that sees cause for concern about censorship "a pretense." However, you offer no evidence for your claim that only these types of content will be af…

> If we take their past performance as evidence of what is likely to happen moving forward, we will see, just for example a conservatives shut out of the public conversation for saying exactly the same thing a liberal is given a pass on.

There are definitely examples of fact checks of very similar claims being resolved very differently, and the further left person in question being the one given gentler treatment. I'm not sure how you'd effectively test the dataset to determine whether this is just statistical noise, though.

On the other hand - whether you can test it or not, the question at hand seems to be about perception of bias rather than actual bias. I wonder if an adversarial style system wherein, say, both supporters and detractors wrote up their best cases for why something was true/false and then the best arguments were presented as some sort of a ... duel? ... would provide better information. Crowdsource the arguments well enough and the classes go away at that level, and using the resulting information to filter might be rather more useful.

The only things I'm really sure of here, sadly, are that doing nothing doesn't seem to be working particularly well, but every time we attempt to do something we find that doing nothing looks increasingly like at least a local maximum.

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

#69

Post by mst » Sat, Dec 24, 2016, 9:03 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #11

camtarn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[edit] I completely misread the comment above as asking Hacker News to link to the original source article, not for the Guardian to have linked it. My bad, and I agree with the parent. For any other reputable news source I'd totally agree - but in this case, it's poor form to give the Daily Mail your ad revenue. This is not any regular newspaper: it is a mouthpiece for an organised hate campaign aimed at stirring up…

If you're writing a journalistic article and you're criticising something, you better have a very good reason for not linking it. They barely summarised it. The reasons you gave don't rise to that level. If the other critique I made—that they don't actually mention anything wrong with the mail article— wouldn't be the case, it wouldn't be as bad. But the fact that they didn't make any substantive critiques of the art…

> If you're writing a journalistic article and you're criticising something, you better have a very good reason for not linking it.

I think "I want to talk about their attitude to fake news, not further spread the salacious details of their only-sort-of-related coverage" is ... a reason.

I think saying basically that, and providing a link afterwards that one would hope readers would choose not to click, would've been a better approach from a broadsheet.

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

#70

Post by Turing_Machine » Mon, Dec 26, 2016, 11:26 PM UTC

justinlaster wrote: post #45

Turing_Machine wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

A great deal of what Snopes does (particularly in recent years) is much closer to "opinion" than "fact", especially when they start labeling things "mostly false" or "mostly true" or whatever. You can't do that when you're dealing with actual facts.