I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
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I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
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Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#2[deleted]
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#3FB, while being the prime medium by which fake news spread, is at the same time terrible for anyone who attempts to control public opinion.
You can never hire enough "fact-checkers" thank God, it's democracy in action.
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#4The main problem with many of these "fact checking" organizations and processes is that they often overstep their bounds. They work fine when they can source exact data and facts, e.g. a date, a number, the conclusion of a scientific study, the name of a person, and exact phrase that was said. But more often than not, they delve into opinion or judgement of vague or complex situations. This intermingling is not much different from how newspapers and channels intermingle reporting with opinion, often with very little indication of the difference between the two.
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#5The main problem with many of these "fact checking" organizations and processes is that they often overstep their bounds. They work fine when they can source exact data and facts, e.g. a date, a number, the conclusion of a scientific study, the name of a person, and exact phrase that was said. But more often than not, they delve into opinion or judgement of vague or complex situations. This intermingling is not much…
The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system.
Most people would agree an imperfect attempt with lots of transparency is better than no attempt at all.
The first thing you learn in journalism is that you can't be 100% objective, even if you're 100% truthful.
Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you write 20 pages of a deep dive into where he was born and all the evidence for it. You are complete and thorough, and you end up concluding that he couldn't have been born in Kenya.
Just the fact that you wrote that much to debunk a nonsensical, evidence-free lie is actually going to make it seem like they had evidence!
You can also neglect to report on things. You can report on 150 burglaries a day and give people the impression that burglaries are skyrocketing when they aren't.
So of course there will be subjectivity that leaks out, but that's not something we should fear to the point of giving up.
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#6The main problem with many of these "fact checking" organizations and processes is that they often overstep their bounds. They work fine when they can source exact data and facts, e.g. a date, a number, the conclusion of a scientific study, the name of a person, and exact phrase that was said. But more often than not, they delve into opinion or judgement of vague or complex situations. This intermingling is not much…
You often see this thing where they debunk a claim that no one makes, and then in the body of the text admit that people's real concern is in fact true.
I can't help but feel that people who have their bias confirmed by the title rarely bother to read past it + the big red "False!"
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#7> We’d be asked to check if a story about a woman who was arrested for leaving her children in the car for hours while she ate at a buffet was true; meanwhile a flood of anti-semitic false George Soros stories never showed up on the list.
This is an interesting take. Doubly interesting to me because this is evidence for something that was always likely - Facebook fact checkers aren't particularly qualified in the areas they are fact checking.
This woman with a background in journalism would have been taking down posts by doctors and nurses for being COVID misionformation.
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#8The main problem with many of these "fact checking" organizations and processes is that they often overstep their bounds. They work fine when they can source exact data and facts, e.g. a date, a number, the conclusion of a scientific study, the name of a person, and exact phrase that was said. But more often than not, they delve into opinion or judgement of vague or complex situations. This intermingling is not much…
The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system. Most people would agree an imperfect attempt with lots of transparency is better than no attempt at all. The first thing you learn in journalism is that you can't be 100% objective, even if you're 100% truthful. Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you…
> To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system
Nobody wants or needs the media - even less social media - as proxy-judges of the information. Everbody just wants the information and judge it for themselves.
That is because most of the time, fact-control becomes opinion-control and we see exactly this happening just before our eyes.
Thus people on either side of the political spectrum will support the suppressing of the opinion of their political opposition.
At the moment this is happening with the evidently unholy coalition between the left and big tech as well as big media. Another unholy coalition is big pharma + governance and big media where anything slightly critical of certain vaccines will get insta-banned on Youtube for example.
May I suggest that you only support this behaviour as it currently happens to align with your views?
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#9[deleted]
Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)
#10The main problem with many of these "fact checking" organizations and processes is that they often overstep their bounds. They work fine when they can source exact data and facts, e.g. a date, a number, the conclusion of a scientific study, the name of a person, and exact phrase that was said. But more often than not, they delve into opinion or judgement of vague or complex situations. This intermingling is not much…
The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system. Most people would agree an imperfect attempt with lots of transparency is better than no attempt at all. The first thing you learn in journalism is that you can't be 100% objective, even if you're 100% truthful. Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you…
The whole point of judges is that they are humans who exercise their judgement. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's intended to counter a cold, dry, robotic application of the letter of the law.