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In 2018 Facebook "fact checked" a Babylon Bee article with this headline: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication”. (Babylon Bee is a humor site and clearly labeled as such.) https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008
In addition to the points raised by BMJ and in the comments below, there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish. For example, are their fact checkers conducting their own scientific experiments validating claims and outcomes of a scientific paper? Are fact checkers reaching out to sources from a news article and verifying quoted information? When “breaking news” or “scoops” are reported presentin…
As the letter points out, in this particular case, fact checking is not hard. In fact, this is one of the easiest scenarios for a fact checker to handle correctly. The source is a reputable, top-tier peer-reviewed publication. Even an inexperienced (but competent) fact checker could check run literature searches on the journal, reviewers and authors. This would reveal that they’re working at reputable institutions, a…
That's why the fact check report doesn't mention any specific factual inaccuracies. Context matters, missing context is a problem.
EDIT: see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597047
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you just reinvented the news journalist...
Well, with the decline of newspapers there should be plenty of unemployed journalists who'll be happy to spread some knowledge around FB for a moderate fee? Or - this thought scares me the most - FB actually doesn't care about facts?
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Maybe a bit too simplistic of a description but essentially I agree. They know exactly what they are doing. Companies like FB, which hire them, also know exactly what they are doing. The reason to have these "fact checkers" is to add a layer of indirection and absolve FB of any bias. "It's not us, it's the independent fact checkers who are telling you what's right and wrong".
If they don't perform as expected, they get fired and replaced with another fact checker group and so on.
But the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect infected fact-checking, and turned fact-checking into an extreme danger to democracy (ironic, considering it's supposed to "save democracy"). Fact-checkers are not subject experts; they all seem to believe that you can get to the "truth" after half an hour of Googling. That's not true! Even domain experts might need weeks or longer of research to reach a confident opinion on a topic, and that's with a very strong and wide knowledge foundation.
An obvious impact of fact-checkers' universal Dunning-Krugerism is that they end up biased against certain facts, if they believe those facts to be "promoting harmful narratives". If people hear about Pfizer's mistakes, they might not want the vaccine, so they're biased towards suppressing the BMJ article.
Fact-checking leads to implicit (if not deliberate) paternalism, where information is only allowed to spread if it has no negative connotations. Unfortunately, that means no scrutiny for the FDA, for Pfizer, and a democracy that decays even further. I could give comical examples of recent incorrect fact-checks on European television, where mistake were all biased against narratives that would have harmed the centrist government.
Corporations like Facebook, Twitter and Facebook just shouldn't have this much power.
Could a grassroots cultural movement like the 60s happen again today? One that's anti-authority, anti-elite? Not a chance in hell, not just because of fact-checkers, but because of how much cultural power has been taken from the people. The elites made sure of that: even music, which was at the very heart of these cultural movements, is now controlled by unchecked corporate power. (And the consequences are disastrous: pre-pandemic, 40% of young people felt chronically lonely; atomization is inevitable in a heavily "controlled" and restrictive culture.)
The 'elites' control the narrative through propaganda censors like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Anything that doesn't conform to their predetermined agenda gets discredited, the author smeared, then eventually banned from posting. These are legitimate 1st amendment issues that need to be defended or what little freedom we have left will be boiled away like baby frogs.
I realize this is begging for an "aha! the elites are proving the point!" response—but really no, we just don't want threads to clog up with low-information, high-indignation rhetoric. If you want to be all non-elitey within those params, have at it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.
In addition to the points raised by BMJ and in the comments below, there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish. For example, are their fact checkers conducting their own scientific experiments validating claims and outcomes of a scientific paper? Are fact checkers reaching out to sources from a news article and verifying quoted information? When “breaking news” or “scoops” are reported presentin…
Slightly on a tangent, but it is worth mentioning.
I used to be a regular part of both English and a regional language version of .
There were moderators on this site. And moderation was overseen by "Community Managers" who are humanities majors and MBAs. They not only let very wrong answers on scientific, mathematical, and technical matters stay on their platform until and unless reported by someone with good credentials, they also picked up "top writers" from people who wrote weirdly wrong things like Python being a database, or Quantum Mechanics determining the radii of solar systems.
It was embarassingly funny to watch. The arts major, MBA community managers did not know jack about programming or physics, yet, they are supposed to choose "top writers".
This also points the flaws in the thought that professional factcheckers should exist and they can be trusted with every topic.
They simply won't know enough. Ever.
A knowledgeable SWE won't work for a Q&A site's moderation or a renowned biologist for Facebook factchecking. They would rather work at a high-paying tech job and a tenure track professorship or big pharma, respectively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That made me laugh. I don’t know anyone who would think that is a serious article.
The people working in mainstream media - including the clowns at CNN - in the US are extraordinarily stupid on average. A lot of media outlets ran with the (non-)story that Elon Musk was planning to quit his roles at SpaceX and Tesla to become an influencer. Musk was joking and very obviously so; and yet so many of them ran stories with tags like "it's not certain yet if he's serious." (CNBC for example promptly ran…
The 'elites' control the narrative through propaganda censors like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Anything that doesn't conform to their predetermined agenda gets discredited, the author smeared, then eventually banned from posting. These are legitimate 1st amendment issues that need to be defended or what little freedom we have left will be boiled away like baby frogs.
The Internet is not, and has never been, a "public forum." At the end of the day the only piece of hardware you own is (probably) the one on your desk. You may put whatever data you want into it, but it's no one's responsibility to share that data. Beyond that the suggestion that all user's data should be shared equally is inherently flawed.
Internet is public utility just like roads.
There's probably no other way around it instead of treating stuff like Facebook as a partly private business and partly public utility.
It looks like this has been a trend with the BMJ, now that Peter Doshi has managed to become an associate editor. Just because the journal is historically important doesn't mean it should be looked at with an uncritical eye. Spreading misinformation, especially from a pulpit of legitimacy, needs to be challenged.
I'm sympathetic to arguments that FB has too much power in these things, but in this instance they got it right. The BMJ editorial staff need to be shamed into getting these cranks out of their midst.