Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

>"about analyzing assertions that can be objectively verified."

Knowing what I know about BS-ing corporate power points and how data can be spun multiple different ways using statistics, the objectively verified information is not enough to prove/disprove an assertion. It always comes down to subjective interpretations and meta analysis of the context behind the facts themselves.

> this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors

the classic anecdote of the husband who does a really bad job washing the dishes so his wife won't ask him to do them anymore

>> Social media fact checking isn't some kind of hard block that can suppress any idea from being seen by anyone (in fact, this case it was little more than a caution sign), and IMHO it's probably better for the truth if it has to pass some hurdles and gets slowed down a bit, just as long as those hurdles increase the single-to-noise ratio

> Except it just did: discussion on the origins of Covid was almost completely shut down for well over a year

So? The idea made it out, though it's far from proven. In any case social media chatter and speculation about the idea like that has little value.

And this is something I'm totally fine with. I think it's totally in the service of truth to let an idea cook, before it's blasted to the public over social media at a loud volume.

I think individuals like FredPret have never tried to run any kind of forum or publicly editable resource on the internet.

Bad actors telling simple lies for lol's and/or profit do exist and they will ruin communities.

Inline fact checking is a feature of all successful forums, whether the fact checking is done by the institution or the community is immaterial to the true existence of the need.

If computers with all of their precision require checksums and error correction in data transfer protocols it seems arrogant and perhaps willfully ignorant to think humanity does not also require this for the continued propagation of accurate and useful data.

People often conflate "general existential uncertainty" with the "knowability of truth inside a shared frame of reference", in this case our shared frame of reference is physical reality and propositional statements can be "grounded".

Some people just stop trying because they are tired. Some because they lack the tools to evaluate data and create confidence intervals. Like most nerd skills, talented data analysts can be hard to find.

The very existence of this article and the ensuing discussion shows that the internet continues to surface facts and route around censorship. The efficacy and methodologies forums use will continue to evolve and require refinement, and have evolved from the early BBS days, some forums will also tend to be run in an overly authoritarian/restrictive/harmful way, just like in the old BBS days.

All online community that philosophically and practically reject error correction tend to end up shut down by the state for child pornography or overwhelmed with snake oil salesmen preying on the credulous.

I love how people think fact checking is censorship, but banning nipples and other "not advertiser friendly" content is A-O-K.

One thing which annoys me about this is that internet corps have gotten with avoiding the framing of "editorial control". Facebook (and others) would like to pick and choose out of the following

1. We have things like the internet, which are utilities and only exist to convey their users intent. They are regulated (at least in europe strongly, in the US to some degree), and your ISP is simply not liable for what you say using them. Facebook doesn't want this because they don't want the commoditization and regulatory control 2. We have media which has editorial control: you have control on what is published on your platform, you can pick and choose for monetization, but you are liable in the end. Of course none of the big corps want this 3. And then there is the sad attempt of a middle ground carved out by the DMCA and similar laws which try to do something in between, but fail to meaningfully specify the amount of legal liability for non-copyrighted material. Who is responsible for publishing this? The platform isn't AFAIK, they only have to worry about brand impact.

Let's clear this up, either put some of the legal responsibilities and liabilities that newspapers and publishers face on the platform and see the problem of fake news vanish as facebook shuts down hard on what they allow on their platform OR classify them as something like a utility and demand openness OR something else, but let's stop the doublethink of "spreading propaganda is okay, but anything that hurts us making money is ok to censor". People might even migrate to new platforms based on their editorial style then