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Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

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Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#121

Post by gadders »

tagoregrtst wrote: post #117
gadders wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication (and no idea if true or not) is that he is also helping his Dad enrich himself. Plus there are some weird sexual family dynamics hinted at as well.

“ and no idea if true or not” Well I think traditional media have acknowledged that the laptop is real. Of course that doesn't mean there was anything salacious on it and the excerpts arent in fact fake

The laptop is definitely real and his. I think there are salacious items on it (but I'm not sure if all the items I've seen claimed were on his laptop really were). I'm not sure if the stolen diary is really his sister's. FBI raiding Project Veritas might suggest it is?e

Unfortunately what is lacking is some large news organisation with lots of resources tracking down and corroborating all the information. But that won't happen because he's a Biden.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#122

Post by ceejayoz »

throwaway2474 wrote: post #110
ceejayoz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. You can think that as much as you like, but we have actual numbers on hospitalization/death in the two populations, and there's a clear, large difference even in the Omicron surge.

Delta and previous strains saw horrendous, mass casualties in many countries. I don’t think that’s really happening anywhere with omicron. It may be that enough of the world is vaccinated at this point (or had covid) that there’s no way to properly compare. Or maybe it’s just not being reported anymore? But it definitely doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as previous waves, even in the unvaccinated population.

> I don’t think that’s really happening anywhere with omicron.

It's almost like a bunch of people got vaccinated, but the US is still losing thousands a day. More than a 9/11's worth every day for the past week.

> It may be that enough of the world is vaccinated at this point (or had covid) that there’s no way to properly compare.

The 10-30% unvaccinated in most developed nations provides plenty of statistically significant population, and we've literally done the comparing. (See charts: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/briefing/omicron-deaths-v...)

> But it definitely doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as previous waves, even in the unvaccinated population.

We know it's less lethal, yes, but extrapolating that to "the vaccine isn't useful" is false.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#123

Post by mc32 »

SilasX wrote: post #95
wolframhempel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, there are fundamental problems with the concept of "fact-checking". Often the "fact" is just the majority consent, as e.g., demonstrated by the banning of the Wuhan lab leak theory prior to it becoming mainstream. But more broadly, there is a stark imbalance between the resources of the fact-checker (a few minutes or hours to decide) and the author who (e.g. in this case) conducted a month-long, in-depth i…

Be careful not to jump the gun here. The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false, and it's to their credit that social media platforms link a refutation. But when you have a huge number of stories, there are going to be edge cases, and BMJ got snared by one here. As I understand it: BMJ found legit problems with one vaccine's clinical trial. But this kind of thing gets seized…

I’m not sure about the prevalence but one major peeve of mine is when someone states, X is ten meters high. Fact check: Wrong, X is 9.6 meters high. It takes away credibility.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#124

Post by ErrolMusk »

logifail wrote: post #78
jakobnissen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Facebook really censor the lab leak idea? Last I checked, Facebook only censored the idea that the virus was manufactured, not that it merely leaked - and that theory is still fringe.

When Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet letter which was published in February 2020 it pretty much shut down any open discussion of origins. "It's of natural origin, or you're a conspiracy theorist". It took the Lancet 16 months(!) to publish a conflict of interest statement revealing that Daszak was linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance.

Facebook HIRED Peter Daszak as a 'factchecker' and allowed him to REMOVE anything that suggested the virus came from a lab.

As somebody who probably incited/funded/created covid19, he was heavily incentivized to hide this crime.

Facebook ENABLED this coverup

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#125

Post by Tabular-Iceberg »

Avamander wrote: post #36
NoPie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It states that Thacker has been double vaccinated with Pfizer vaccine. Anti-vax conspiracy theorist? That is clearly nonsense.

Plenty of quacks follow the principle of "do as I say, not as I do." It's a very common behaviour amongst populist politicians to talk shit about vaccines and then being fully vaccinated.

I didn’t read the article, but isn’t it plausible that whatever they did allegedly did wrong wasn’t significant enough to warrant recommending against taking the vaccine?

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#126

Post by civilized »

I'm not familiar with the fact checker Lead Stories and was curious what else they publish. I went to their Twitter feed [1] and something caught my eye, a story about the mortality of COVID vs the Spanish Flu [2]. The headline posted on Twitter was "Fact Check: COVID-19 IS Deadlier Than The Spanish Flu And Seasonal Flu" [3].

That headline shocked me, because if you follow the mortality statistics, there is no way COVID's worldwide mortality rate could draw anywhere near the mortality rate of the 1918 flu epidemic, which has been estimated at 1-6% of the entire world population (17-100 million deaths, world pop in 1918 approximately 1.8 billion) [4, 5]. COVID has been estimated at about 7 million deaths so far out of a world population of 7.9 billion [6], for a global mortality rate of around 0.1%. Even looking at total excess deaths, which includes a lot of non-COVID causes, you have 20 million, still at the lower end of the 1918 epidemic's range with a much larger world population [7].

Lead Stories eventually defends their claim by comparing Spanish Flu mortality to peak COVID mortality in New York during the early epidemic - a bizarre case of cherry-picking.

To their credit, Lead Stories did update their headline soon after tweeting that to remove the claim about Spanish Flu, but the lead sentence still reads as follows:

> Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading...

This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading.

Considering this and their significant failures in the BMJ incident, I would hesitate in trusting this fact checker to consistently provide high-quality, unbiased checks.

[1] https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom

[2] https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-...

[3] https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/148358521874124800...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

[6] https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-...

[7] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#127

Post by annadane »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #105
mandmandam wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know for a fact that FB leadership regularly discussed ripping off smaller companies business ideas (ie, Snapchat [0]. Not a sign of moral people. https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/08/17/theftovation-facebook-...

Ripping off business ideas is an aspect of competition (BK versus McDonalds), not sure it is related to morals…

Oh come on. There's a limit to being pedantic

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#128

Post by aa-jv »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #22

The entire idea of "fact checking" on social media is premised on the notion that fact checkers have some kind of superior epistemic merit compared to the checkees. When you're fact checking random people or journalists that may or may not be true, but why does Zucc think facebook's checkers are superior to the BMJ? What are the fact checker's credentials, and most importantly what is their track record? The extreme…

Fact checking is better referred to as "authority enforcement" or "mainstream validation".

Here's how you know the fact checkers are actually propagandists: you can't find their name or their credentials, or who they work for/paid them.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#129

Post by nickelpro »

peteradio wrote: post #116
nickelpro wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read the article, Facebook's "fact checker" page, the BMJ's response, and the fact checker's response, as well as the posted response from Science Based Medicine. None of it "smacks of" anything, the series of events is clearly laid out. A former Ventavia regional director provided internal company documents to Thacker that laid out potential flaws in clinical trials run by the company for Pfizer's vaccine candi…

Inadvertent is no excuse and adding that "context" to the statement would tend to be misinformation as its not a valid excuse in the context of clinical trials governed by strict policy. Its "we followed policy" or "we failed to follow policy", FDA is not equipped to audit the entirety of all locations and there is a hell of a lot of trust involved. Pfizer getting their bell rung over these infractions should be expe…

The complete story of what happened is never misinformation. Greater and more complete sets of facts, un-editorialized, is the basis from which we draw out conclusions.

That you view something through a certain binary lens does not make that the only valid lens through which the scientific community and the public will perceive something. An article that purports to be "just the facts" must report just that, the complete facts and context as best they are known. An article that is correctly represented as an editorialized opinion may do whatever it pleases. The BMJ in this instance is purporting to be the former, while carrying out the latter.

I don't have a problem with the opinion Pfizer should be pursued or have "their bell rung" or whatever. I have a problem with willfully ignoring what the BMJ has done here, which is to use their reputation as a factual medical authority to push spin and then have the audacity to express outrage at being called out for that.

Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

#130

Post by [deleted] »

roenxi wrote: post #35
azalemeth wrote: post #4

Frankly, if I were the BMJ I would start contacting lawyers and issuing writs. I'm unsure of exactly what or where or how , but the principle that peer-reviewed scientific articles are being shadowbanned as "false" and unshareable by a for-profit, unqualified US organisation is...deeply offensive. A large lawsuit by an organisation such as the BMJ (an impact factor 40 journal first published in its current form in ab…

That seems excessively litigious. And very questionable on a fundamentals level - nobody except Facebook and idiots will believe that Facebook's fact checkers have a better grasp of reasonable medical opinion than the BMJ editorial team. The real story here is that we have one more item of evidence that Facebook doesn't have an algorithm to deduce truth from the cacophony of opinion. I'm not sure why we need evidence…

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