Earlier quoted context omitted.
By my definition it is generally not possible for an entity to be an effective authority on what is or is not false or misleading. You could think of contrived examples which you could get nearly everybody to agree to as false, like claiming the sun revolved around the earth. But that’s not what’s being discussed. What’s being discussed is establishing Facebook (or other entities) as the ministry of truth. > There is…
What do you think of the Media Bias Chart? https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ This project assesses the factual accuracy and political bias of a large number of articles (and by extension, the publishers of those articles). It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual, and that's a big part of what good journalism is. A verifiable fact is a…
If you report a story, using only the facts that support your narrative, and omitting only the facts that don’t support it, have you lied? Have you reported propaganda?
What if you report a story, without reporting anything as a fact? What if you report “anonymous sources claim ___”, or “___ is being criticised for ___”, or “a verified document describes ___”. None of those reports involve any facts at all, nor any verifiable fictions.
What if you simply disagree on what the facts are?
What if you intentionally misinterpret something, in an effort to debunk it. If I make a mostly true statement, but use an obvious hyperbole, or get a minor detail wrong, am I “just using the English language as intended”, or “just spreading false information”.
> What do you think of the Media Bias Chart?
I think if you tasked 50 different research teams with producing their own chart with the methods they deemed best, that you’d get 50 different charts.
> It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual
We have always had the ability to enforce authority on others. That doesn’t mean we have had any success in creating authorities to be the arbiter of truth. In fact, we have a long history as a species of failing miserably at doing that.
Easily verifiable outright lies in the media do happen, but the cases where this is so black and white are incredibly uncommon, and that’s not what these systems are trying to deal with. I mean, recently “conspiracy theories” have become a target for moderation. Do you know what a conspiracy theory actually is? It’s any theory that two or more people conspired to do something. How much recent news reporting would fit that definition?
Any system that attempts to strip people of their right to critical though (which is what this is) is doomed to fail in the exact same way that every such system implemented throughout history has.