Facebook's only Dutch factchecker quits over political ad exemption

>>> The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook’s only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network’s tools that suppress distribution of misinformation.

Imagine the years of training and sheer innate genius that the people at nu.nl must have had to make them appropriate arbiters of truth and fairness in the news. And while these giants of verity at nu.nl could have been expending their talents of truth and reason in physics, or medicine, or even making money in business, instead they choose to run an online news website. What a blessed country the Netherlands is.

Fact-checking is misleading, because it makes some people believe that facts are completely objective and you can verify or disprove them without any bias. In the end, most fact-checking outlets just repeat propaganda of the political parties they align with.

It makes sense that they lasted longer than Leiden University before quitting, then. Facebook couldn't even make the token concessions needed to keep at least one low-effort rag on board?

As a fact checker you have a lot of leeway of what is the subject of your fact checking. For example if there is a controversy over the height of a building that seemed to split opinion into two groups the highists and the lowists. If you wanted to write an article 'debunking' the highists claims you could find the most extreme claim about the height of the building then refute that claim and then claim the highists claim had been debunked.

If you pay attention to snopes you will see on some of their fact checks of politically controversial topics they will take this line where they will either weak man a position or strong man a position depending on what result they want to produce.

In the realm of media, there's a lot of equivocation with the word "fact". I believe in the existence of objective facts in the general sense. But when we're using the term in the context of our current media environment, a lot of "facts" are actually conclusions that contain heaping helpings of opinion, if you really dig into them. There's a lot of telling you what to think and not a lot of bare facts, because who wants to read boring bare facts? Assuming the bare facts are even reported accurately between the place where they were collected and the final reporting (see almost all popular science articles, where even when "facts" are being reported they still get screwed up).

Here's a common set of "subjective facts": "Policy X will help group Y in manner Z." along with "Politician A voted against X and therefore hates Y." As I've commented before, even the apparent objective fact that "Politician A voted against X" isn't necessarily as factual as it may seem since it's a common tactic to have X bundled in with a whole bunch of other things, and you don't know whether A voted against X, or voted against boondoggle B buried in the bill, or if X was in fact the only thing the politician agreed with in the entire bill and was forced to vote against it because everything else was worse, or if they agreed with X and voted against it as part of some other political deal, or what. Even the "bare fact" "Politician A voted against X" can be treated in a way that turns it into an effective lie, even if it is nominally 100% true. That is the sort of "fact" we deal with in the media environment all the time, and it isn't as objective as we'd like it to be.