Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

Post by msandford » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:14 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…

Post by varispeed » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #123

SilasX wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by nradov » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:22 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

Post by bopbeepboop » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

pdpi wrote: post #100

kryogen1c wrote: post #76

the idea of "fact checking" has a false premise - its begging the question[0]. we need to disabuse ourselves of this notion that we can know the Truth or the "facts" if we just checked enough. there is no such thing as contextless infromation. is the sky blue? depends. maybe it emits a certain spectrum based on gas content on our planet, but color is a perceptual experience. did trump\biden say X? maybe; is that the…

You don’t need to have a nuanced perspective on the truth to be able to spot outright lies and nonsense. E.g. Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population. I’m perfectly OK with fact checkers getting rid of that level of nonsense while letting most of everything else true.

Post by tomp » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

jakobnissen wrote: post #75

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…

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.