I think my only strong opinions on fact checking are that the situation has exposed the problems inherent in techne without episteme, and that it is no longer tenable to punt on philosophical questions.
Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
211–220 of 307 posts
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#212Without trying to express any opinion on the correctness of Facebook's behavior in this specific instance... this quote in the BMJ writeup concerned me
> The Lead Stories article, though it failed to identify any errors in The BMJ’s investigation, nevertheless carried the title, “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying and Ignored Reports of Flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.”
> The first paragraph wrongly described The BMJ as a “news blog” and was accompanied by a screenshot of the investigation article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or inaccurate.
It is _entirely_ possible for a story to be factually correct and still be completely misleading. Just because it doesn't outright lie doesn't mean it's not misleading.
For example, I can point out that "Senator voted, multiple times, against adding funds for the support of military veterans", and that would leave a lot of people with the idea that Senator is specifically trying to prevent funding for veterans. However, it's just as likely that the bills in question were primarily about something that the senator was against, and the veterans part was a tiny "pet addon"; and the senator was voting against the more substantial goal of the bill.
That type of misleading information is used ALL the time, and nothing about it is factually incorrect... but it's still intentionally misleading. It's goal is to make people believe something that isn't true.
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#213The 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…
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…
I’m really uncomfortable with Fact Checking on the Internet, particularly because we don’t know who we are anointing as the checkers. But I have yet to see a better alternative. The status quo of just giving everyone in the world a megaphone is clearly worse and not working.
It would be better if, instead of trying to claim that they were some kind of authority on what is a fact and what isn’t, they just said “this content is not the kind of content we want to host” and got rid of it that way. There’s no need to justify it as some search for the True Truth.
At the end of the day, Company X hosts the servers and decides what they host and if Company X don’t want to host some kind of content they won’t. If I started posting the n word all over HN, they have the right to get rid of it/me. They don’t want that content here and they have the justification to ban it.
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#214the 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.
An example of a fact that can be checked would be the height of a tree or the size of an island.
Whether person X helped group Y do Z is vastly more complex and can be answered on several levels. It’s best left to the public to apply literal common sense. Also, most political debates are on this level of abstraction, making fact-checking a non-starter
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#215The 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…
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,…
> everyone yells at facebook, saying it is spreading propaganda, lies, societal harm, etc.
Well, no, not everyone - the half of the people that wanted to silence the other half accused facebook of spreading propaganda to justify censorship. Now that they've won, the half that's being censored are pointing out that it's as bad as they said it was going to be.
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my favorites, they have since been called out on it and had to fix it: This statement "We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913." was rated "mostly true"[0] While this one "the U.S. federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913." was rated "half true"[1] What more evidence do you need that this whole thing is sort of arbitrary? [0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/2…
I mean, the little cartoon meter is pretty arbitrary. What’s the difference between half true and mostly true? Those two phrases seem mostly equivalent to me. But the more important thing is the analyses I think, they are quite similar in content. And raise the same caveat about the civil war taxes. These fact checks were 3 years apart, so it may be completely different groups of people writing these fact checks. Yet…
To me the main issue would be that an income tax prior to 1913 were temporary taxes. Technically, yes they were based on income. But when we talk about income taxes today, we don’t talk about them as necessary tools to generate revenue in support of a war that would have an end date.
It wasn’t a permanent fixture. Today it’s a permanent fixture and short of one of the Paul clan winning the office, it will continue into the foreseeable future.
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#217Earlier 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,…
They should indeed just ignore them, free speech wasn't arrived at as an optimal path by accident. Nothing changed to make it not-optimal. People need to adapt to not believing every stupid thing they read on the internet and actually thinking critically about things. The information streams of the world should not be tailored to the critical thinking ability of complete morons. It blows my mind we went from "trying…
> What the fuck happened?
I think a few broad trends reinforced each other in the U.S. But kind of prerequisite, people came to get too much of their notion of free speech as a scholastic doctrine in state schools. Mills's On Liberty argues that a doctrine elevated above criticism comes to be held in an empty way, and gets lost over time even if it's true. It seems like that happened here to the idea of free speech itself.
(I'd quibble at your "completely destroyed". We don't want to see what completely destroyed will look like.)
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#218The 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…
This what gets me. Zuck is a well educated fella. He must know this is wrong. Why is this happening? Has he lost control of Facebook? Is he not interested?
> He must know this is wrong.
From his perspective, it's not wrong, as long as the "fact-checking" goes his way.
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#219Earlier 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…
"The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false," Prove it, and prove that the underpaid non-specialist moderator who labelled it as such was justified even if they were right. Facebook is not and can not be an arbiter of truth in the abstract, and in the concrete the specific people doing the work certainly are not. Where are Facebook getting these experts who know so much abou…
>> "The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false,"
> Prove it,
I mean, isn't it obvious from recent history that social media fact checking emerged as a band aid, because of demonstrably false blatant lies like Pizzagate, Q Anon, Stop the Steal, and all kinds of Anti-vax crankery were spreading like wildfire on social media?
And at every step of the way the social media companies dragged their feet before they tried to do anything to address that problems
IMHO, social media fact checking is a bad solution to a real and serious problem. However, the proper solution is probably to nuke social media from orbit; but technology doesn't serve us, we serve technology, so that's not going to happen.
> That's all it is, a corporation's enforced opinion, not "facts" or "truth". Why should you trust a corporation's official enforced opinion any more just because the corporation found out they can call it a "fact check" and it slips past people's fully-justified cynicism about official corporation enforced opinion?
"Corporation" is a loaded word with negative connotations. Let me put it this way: institutions are far, far better at reliably determining facts than individuals. That's true because the world is complicated, busy place and it requires far more effort and knowledge than one person can possess. Corporations are a class of institution, and some of them actually do a fairly good job of fact checking (e.g. publishing and media corporations). That said, Facebook is a shitty institution, but it's the only one in a position to do anything about the crap on its platform.
Re: Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of my favourites: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ Snopes acknowledges that a convicted terrorist (ie, someone that targeted civilians to enact political change) sat on the board of a BLM funding body then concludes 'mixture' because there is no universally agreed definition of 'terrorism'. > In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter…
I understand what you are saying, but at the same time the claim was that she was a “convicted terrorist”, when in fact she was not convicted of terrorism. That’s just a fact. You can look at her convictions, and there is no conviction for terrorism. There’s plenty to say about her actions, which are certainly terroristic, but her being “convicted” of terrorism is straight up not true, no matter how you feel about it…
You’re playing the same fuck-fuck games that Snopes plays.
The claim is “convicted terrorist”. Those are two claims: 1) she is a terrorist and 2) she was convicted. Even Snope admits she was convicted of crimes linked to terrorism, but the link is subjective.
”it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
What was this left-wing revolutionary doing with hundreds of pounds of illegal explosives? Starting a mining company?
It’s just splitting hairs to such a degree you try and weasel out of a perfectly rationale take.
It’s like saying someone is a “convicted robber” then saying the claim is “mixed” because they weren’t convicted of robbery but rather assault and theft. Well, ok, but clearly that’s a distinction unworthy of calling out?