Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

bmj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 702 posts

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#271

Post by native_samples »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #231
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting for the apology from all the people who said that this was all very necessary to combat misinformation and save democracy, and that any suggestions that this could possibly have bad outcomes was relying on a slippery slope fallacy, and not to be regarded.

This story is literally about a single instance. By that logic, a single instance where fact checkers proved something was false is enough to justify their existence.

As the BMJ article points out, Cochrane has had the same problem, and it's not like these are the only two cases. There have been huge numbers of statements by high profile experts and professors being labelled as fake news by journalism interns at "fact checkers". You may not be aware of them but this is a very frequent problem.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#272

Post by dang »

pfortuny wrote: post #17

They seem to have forgotten the Inquisition. Really, in their view they were just trying to help people not be infected by false claims.

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We're trying for something different here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#273

Post by zepto »

jf22 wrote: post #103
pfortuny wrote: post #17

They seem to have forgotten the Inquisition. Really, in their view they were just trying to help people not be infected by false claims.

Can I ask if you think Facebook fact checking is as serious as the Spanish Inquisition?

It has the potential to be. Of course they aren’t going to torture individuals, but they could easily amplify large scale suffering stochastically.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#274

Post by dang »

temp8964 wrote: post #35

Quoted post unavailable.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.

p.s. Not defending fact-checkers, just trying to defend HN against tedious deterioration.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#275

Post by scythe »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45

This one is much trickier than it looks. Reposting user nojito's post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596111 ), but here in a top level comment: > The fact check was correct in this instance though? > https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis... > The conclusions in the original BMJ article make zero sense when actually scrutinized. > https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 Please read b…

It appears that the source of the confusion is the lack of articles. The 'true' headline is "revealed flaws in A Pfizer vaccine trial", the misleading interpretation is "revealed flaws in THE Pfizer vaccine trial". Lead Stories emphasizes the significance of the other trials, The BMJ emphasizes the significance of the findings, and neither is really lying.

Where Lead Stories goes overboard is in the way they present their title. It would be far more appropriate to title the story like this:

>Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Revealed Flaws In Only One Of Many Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

In fact the use of the plural "Trials" in the fact-check title from Lead Stories is a malapropism, since the BMJ article clearly focuses on a single trial. The BMJ article also does not use the word "disqualifying" at all, nor does it supply such an implication.

The problem is not with fact-checking or even with attaching a fact-check to this particular story; the problem is that the content of the fact-check is structured like clickbait, with a classic motte-and-bailey title.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#276

Post by dado3212 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45

This one is much trickier than it looks. Reposting user nojito's post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596111 ), but here in a top level comment: > The fact check was correct in this instance though? > https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis... > The conclusions in the original BMJ article make zero sense when actually scrutinized. > https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 Please read b…

This thread is inundated with people who did not read any of these articles and are going off the title alone.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#277

Post by periheli0n »

dqpb wrote: post #11
periheli0n wrote: post #6

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?

In this case I assume the BMJ article was peer reviewed, so it was already fact-checked by knowledgeable individuals. BMJ is a reputable journal that can be relied to fact-check their articles. The fact that it was labeled a newsblog means that the fact-checkers really had no domain knowledge about the facts they were supposed to check.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#278

Post by dado3212 »

thepasswordis wrote: post #208

How do we keep getting this so wrong? No central authority on truth. Not twitter, not Facebook, not the King, not the church. The fact is that many of the “facts” that twitter, Facebook, and google “checked”, they were wrong about, and they are doing j told damage to our society. Facebook is a company which, remember, performed psychological experiments on their users without their consent. Twitter has an opaque algo…

There were like 10k articles written about how FB is spreading COVID misinformation and causing people to not get vaccinated. You can't have both of these, which is the greater evil?

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#279

Post by dang »

periheli0n wrote: post #6

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.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. I'm not defending what you're criticizing—I'm saying that on HN, criticism needs to be more substantive than this.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#280

Post by romwell »

BMJ sounds like people who've never actually been on Facebook.

They complain of nonsensical title:

>"Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials"

The title is nonsensical because that's the nonsensical claim the fact-checkers are debunking! That's the title the BMJ article (or its screencap) is being shared with.

BMJ's article is being used as "proof" that vaccines are a hoax. That's why there's a hoax alert.

BMJ's article is "misleading info" in the context of how it's shared on Facebook, where the fact checkers are working.

I mean, there are a lot of thing that Facebook does wrong, but this is not one of them. Good job, Mark.

Post reply on HN