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"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.
Imagine a forum that works in the following way:
1. You post similar to here.
2. Any post that has a claim is flagged. The poster, or another commenter has 24 hours (or some time period) to link to both a page and specific text (similar to how Google highlights search text when visiting a link) that supports the claim.
3. Once a claim is attached, posters can vote and downvote how well the source(s) support the claims (claims themselves are not voted/downvoted).
4. Sites are whitelisted and blacklisted by looking at the total percentage in which claims are sited with sources that are downvoted vs. up + downvotes.
5. Posts that do not receive sources for claims are deleted.
I feel like the only reason this isn't already done is because it was dramatically decrease the amount of posts and increase friction around posting. Posters would have to be careful to assert nothing in their post.
It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.
Turns out fact checking is hard and costs money. What's surprising is that Meta, which has capable staff and lots of money, can't seem to be bothered to do it properly.
How do you fact check someone who has more expertise than you? How do you fact check a brand new fact?
I think it's reasonably fair for the policy for nobodies posting on social media to be that "new facts" (or "original research" in Wikipedia parlance), particularly those which may be harmful to public safety or marginalized groups should be either unpostable, or considerably reduced in how far they're able to spread organically (shadow-banning).
If you don't like it, go to some other social media network. For my part, I'd be content with a Facebook feed where none of the posts I'm seeing are "new" facts. OTOH, I'd also be content with a FB feed that was exclusively pics of my friends and their kids and very little news or politics at all.
Turns out fact checking is hard and costs money. What's surprising is that Meta, which has capable staff and lots of money, can't seem to be bothered to do it properly.
How would you do fact checking "properly"?
I'm actually more for community tools to do moderation correctly and for content to be moderated by "people I trust" within the community. So for example if someone who I've marked as trustworthy on science reporting marks a science story as fake news it's flagged for those of us who have marked the flagger as an authority.
People will say you are just encouraging echo chambers like this but I actually think it's inevitable and we all live in echo chambers. Having your views challenged is extremely hard work that we don't always have time or the inclination to work through day to day. Everyone is watching a different movie.
I prefer to do my own fact checking.
I prefer to do my own fact checking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you fact check someone who has more expertise than you? How do you fact check a brand new fact?
Expertise isn't a cure all. An example is the famous Minux/Linux fight. Tanenbaum was a distinguished professor, arguing with some guy on the internet who built a kernel. "Is a monokernel a viable way to build a first rate operating system?" Fact Check: operating system researchers widely believe that monolithic kernels are a fundamentally flawed way to build a system... The premise that there are some specially endo…
Not the best way to make an argument against fact-checking.
Turns out fact checking is hard and costs money. What's surprising is that Meta, which has capable staff and lots of money, can't seem to be bothered to do it properly.