Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by Miner49er » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #111

b112 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really bugs me here is, everyone yells at facebook, saying it is spreading propaganda, lies, societal harm, etc. Then, fact checking is attempted, and people claim censorship, an imperfect job, and the idea that "How dare they!" I literally loath, hate, and despise facebook. But come on, they're only doing this because everyone piled on them, claiming they must fact check and validate things. If I was facebook,…

The people who want Facebook to not half-ass being a publisher and the people who want Facebook to stay neutral are different crowds.

I think one could conceivably both criticize FB for enabling the spread of false info and for their censorship via fact-checking.

The argument would be that FB optimizes sharing false info, and the proper fix is to either get rid of it completely, or fundamentally change it. Not tack on some "fact checking".

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

#152

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

nickelpro wrote: post #112

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That piece you linked is equally (if not more) biased as the original Thracker piece. Honestly, I've lost a lot of respect for SBM based on that post, as it's a political argument. In general, it's incredibly sad that Covid has lead to such politicisation around vaccines and trials. It seems (to me, at least) that most of what people (SBM, the FB fact-checkers) are concerned about is other people using the informatio…

If you can view the full body of evidence and believe that there are "data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial" or support more specific accusations such as "the company... unblinded patients", then that's totally fair. I cannot find those conclusions in what's been released, and based on what's been released I think classifying such a headline as "missing context" is accurate. If the headline was "Questions a…

> on the whole there are no concerns about about the Pfizer vaccine trial, only the three sites administered by Ventavia

Like, the numbers for hospitalisation were very very small indeed, and while I (personally) don't believe that the entire trial was flawed (the extensive real world evidence would suggest otherwise), clinical trials are super important, and fixing flaws in them and reporting on them is exactly what I want the BMJ to do.

Additionally, the Lead Stories people are engaging in politics over this report, which kinda sickens me, to be honest. Both them and SBM are using ad-hominems to avoid engaging with the detail of this report, and that's concerning (particularly the fact checkers).

More generally, fact checking being done like this is very worrying (like the Cochrane collaboration got banned from IG for a while, which is nuts).

I guess my meta-point here is that standards of discourse are dropping everywhere, it's all explosions of rage in defence of a pre-determined outcome (which I mostly agree with, tbh) and this is very, very sad and bodes badly for humanity's ability to solve the problems in front of us over the next few decades.

Sad.

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

#153

Post by d35007 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #64

> Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.” Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing th…

> No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.

If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.

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

#154

Post by aceon48 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

It was never about fact checking. It was always about narrative control.

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

#155

Post by civilized » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

tremon wrote: post #149

civilized wrote: post #126

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 CO…

a bizarre case of cherry-picking One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless. I have no opinion on the merits of the chosen comparison, but if your position is that it is fair to compare the baseli…

I didn't say what is fair, so please don't bother making such insinuations. Let qualified researchers decide that. I simply pointed out the flaws in the comparison made by Lead Stories and how they used it to justify a misleading claim.

The article made an extremely specific comparison - all-time Spanish Flu toll versus COVID toll in a very specific time and place where it was especially bad - did not justify it, and used it to imply a broader claim about the relative deadliness of the pandemics. And the broader claim was explicit before they changed the headline.

I reject the idea that the appropriate comparison is subjective in this context of fact-checking. Lead Stories cannot freely make whatever comparison it feels justified and present the result as a fact about the relative deadliness of the 1918 and COVID pandemics. The most relevant facts prima facie are those presented in my initial post. If someone wishes to argue that COVID is more deadly after controlling for XYZ, the proper forum for that is a peer-reviewed scholarly research article.

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

#156

Post by jtbayly » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

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…

I’d personally like to see FB sued for this, as it is clear that your proposed solution has been tried and is not working. FB is not stopping this, but getting worse, as we see here.

I don’t know which way the lawsuit would go, but I’d like to see it happen.

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

#157

Post by treis » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

Having read the original article and BMJ's follow up I think Facebook is right here. The original article does lack context and is not a measured response to the problems found. Especially so considering it was published in November 2021 after hundreds of millions of doses were given and the vaccine was obviously safe and effective. They should have known better than to give fodder to the anti-vax movement.

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

#158

Post by logifail » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

ErrolMusk wrote: post #124

logifail wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Facebook HIRED Peter Daszak as a 'factchecker' [..]

Worse, Daszak was also part of WHO-led international mission[0] to investigate the origins of the pandemic(!!) in early 2021, though he eventually recused himself in June 2021[1]

[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

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

#159

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

d35007 wrote: post #153

rdtsc wrote: post #64

> Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.” Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing th…

> No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same. If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by peteradio » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

nickelpro wrote: post #129

peteradio wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

Here is the label applied:

"The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying and Ignored Reports of Flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials"

Did the original article claim trial disqualification? It's like pointing out a rotting foundation and someone says "Hey that's not fair! The house is still standing!" Who is doing the editorializing?