Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 71 posts

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#61

Post by netcan »

smt88 wrote: post #5
colordrops wrote: post #4

The main problem with many of these "fact checking" organizations and processes is that they often overstep their bounds. They work fine when they can source exact data and facts, e.g. a date, a number, the conclusion of a scientific study, the name of a person, and exact phrase that was said. But more often than not, they delve into opinion or judgement of vague or complex situations. This intermingling is not much…

The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system. Most people would agree an imperfect attempt with lots of transparency is better than no attempt at all. The first thing you learn in journalism is that you can't be 100% objective, even if you're 100% truthful. Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you…

>>The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system.

The limitations of objective fact-checking means we need to understand where we can/should apply it, and its efficacy are limited.

Judges or a legal system are a good example. These are also truth finding institutions. They are very expensive institutions, and produce a very limited stream of narrow truths. That's because truth finding is, as you say, difficult.

Law is an extremely limited system. We (in theory) apply it as little as possible, when other solutions have failed. The system is set up to verify or falsify claims as narrowly as possible to find this solution. Law has specifically defined truth categories like "reasonable doubt," and other rules about how to lean in cases of ambiguity.

The evidence for "person X killed person Y" may be sufficient to acquit person Z of a murder, but not to convict person X.

Fact checking can be used as a tool that newspaper editors use to maintain quality. It doesn't do the same thing in a different context. Fact checking at a newspaper, in wikipedia or for social media is a totally different thing with different limitations and applicability.

> Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you write 20 pages of a deep dive into where he was born and all the evidence for it. You are complete and thorough, and you end up concluding that he couldn't have been born in Kenya.

Works perfectly fine for personal fact checking. You can do it like this. If it's being done in court, an editors's office, a wikipedia discussion page or FB's version of mechanical turk for moderators.... you will need a different method.

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#62

Post by atoav »

concordDance wrote: post #56

This is approaching from the wrong angle. Trying to stop the tide of bullshit is futile without hundreds of thousands of "fact checkers", what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. How to read an article, how to respect quantification, what sort of things to be suspicious of, how to find out accurate information and when to withhold judgement.

While I agree these are important skills that everybody should learn, especially in todays world, I don't think this is the whole problem.

Quite often it is not the issue that people don't know they might be wrong, but that they don't care whether they are. In their worldview small (or sometimes even big) lies are justified in a "war" that conveys "a bigger truth". In their eyes, people who stick with the truth no matter what are naive, stupid or both.

As with the deprogramming of Nazis like my grandfather after WWII, the hardest ones to get back to the truth are ot the ones that couldn't tell, but the ones that could tell, knew it was wrong, knew what was going on and went for it anyways.

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#63

Post by redis_mlc »

raziel2p wrote: post #34
roenxi wrote: post #7

> We’d be asked to check if a story about a woman who was arrested for leaving her children in the car for hours while she ate at a buffet was true; meanwhile a flood of anti-semitic false George Soros stories never showed up on the list. This is an interesting take. Doubly interesting to me because this is evidence for something that was always likely - Facebook fact checkers aren't particularly qualified in the are…

You do not always have to be a subject matter expert to do fact-checking. Furthermore, doctors and nurses can (and have) also spread COVID misinformation, it's not a bad thing to have journalists check them.

> doctors and nurses can (and have) also spread COVID misinformation

Especially Fauci.

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#64

Post by germandiago »

raziel2p wrote: post #34
roenxi wrote: post #7

> We’d be asked to check if a story about a woman who was arrested for leaving her children in the car for hours while she ate at a buffet was true; meanwhile a flood of anti-semitic false George Soros stories never showed up on the list. This is an interesting take. Doubly interesting to me because this is evidence for something that was always likely - Facebook fact checkers aren't particularly qualified in the are…

You do not always have to be a subject matter expert to do fact-checking. Furthermore, doctors and nurses can (and have) also spread COVID misinformation, it's not a bad thing to have journalists check them.

fact checking is just a political fight for making things look true or false. It is an official ministry of the truth, reminds me of past times, and certainly not better than today or 15 years back, where absolutely any aspect of life tried to be politiziced.

Many things cannot be easily audited, are about points of view, and fact checking enables censorship and bias towards one side or another. And last but not least, I am not a kid. When I go out at night I know there are good and bad places and people. I figure out what is good and bad and if I make a mistake, I learn.

I am an adult. I do not need babysitting. If there were far fewer people to control the rest of population, special mention to politicians here, who are kind of a mafia, then people would care way less about news. I know a bunch of people, just like me, that have taken the road to believe NOTHING from mainstream media because it is so obviously manipulated, even fact checking.

We have our own and different views and philosophies but we reached the conclusion that politics and trading to extract resources and create obedience from people are the main goals of people who want to control others.

I do not need fact checking.

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#65

Post by concordDance »

netcan wrote: post #60
concordDance wrote: post #56

This is approaching from the wrong angle. Trying to stop the tide of bullshit is futile without hundreds of thousands of "fact checkers", what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. How to read an article, how to respect quantification, what sort of things to be suspicious of, how to find out accurate information and when to withhold judgement.

>> what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. What's needed of who? I agree that epistemological hygiene is good, but how is FB supposed to tackle this. Even the education system may have trouble, and even if they don't it will take a generation. Problems need to be framed in ways that don't avoid dealing with them.

My view is that asking Facebook to tackle it is asking way too much. Indeed, I wouldn't want the government to try and control what people can communicate either.

Yes, it will take a generation for people to figure out how to navigate a world like this, but ultimately its the only option that doesn't end up with a centralised arbiter of truth restricting communication (where a dystopia will inevitably follow in a few decades).

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#66

Post by was8309 »

lenkite wrote: post #41
smt88 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system. Most people would agree an imperfect attempt with lots of transparency is better than no attempt at all. The first thing you learn in journalism is that you can't be 100% objective, even if you're 100% truthful. Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you…

As long as fact-checkers can be sued for incorrect and malicious fact checking and fact-checking isn't grounds for censorship and information suppression, I would be on-board with you. The most that fact-checkers do when they are egregiously and utterly incorrect is a correction to an eye-rolling "needs context" label. The standards of objectivity of fact-checkers (who are all left-leaning partisans) are ridiculously…

Please provide an example of where Brooke Binkowski is egregiously and utterly incorrect. She's a hero to me and I'm leery of having hero's.

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#67

Post by colordrops »

smt88 wrote: post #5
colordrops wrote: post #4

The main problem with many of these "fact checking" organizations and processes is that they often overstep their bounds. They work fine when they can source exact data and facts, e.g. a date, a number, the conclusion of a scientific study, the name of a person, and exact phrase that was said. But more often than not, they delve into opinion or judgement of vague or complex situations. This intermingling is not much…

The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system. Most people would agree an imperfect attempt with lots of transparency is better than no attempt at all. The first thing you learn in journalism is that you can't be 100% objective, even if you're 100% truthful. Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you…

> To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system.

I don't see how that conclusion is drawn at all. The legal system is run by highly trained individuals in as public a way as possible, bounded by its own set of standard laws and procedures, to very specific sets of issues, often times throwing out cases because they are not "resolvable" by the narrow capabilities of the system.

To compare a random anonymous person behind closed doors spitting out a "fact check" on their laptop to judges is an insult to judges and the legal system.

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#68

Post by was8309 »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #21
adrianN wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem fact checkers are trying to solve is that most people don't have the resources to do the fact checking themselves, so that malicious actors can sway public opinion with wrong or misleading information. That is extremely dangerous in democracies.

You don't solve the problem, you just defer it to the fact-checkers. Who fact-checks the fact-checkers and ensures they are not themselves used to sway public opinion?

what's stopping anyone from fact-checking the fact-checkers? Also, it would be great if fact checking was presented in an argdown form, or someway to distill the bases of disagreement

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#69

Post by was8309 »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #36

There was a video on YouTube titled "Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?". Of course that one has by now been "fact-checked" off YouTube. So even if I wanted to, I couldn't refer you to what was a very neat presentation of some of the issues with fact-checkers with clear evidence showing where these in fact present misinformation and demonstrate clear political bias. And that is the problem with fact-checkers. (In thi…

Please provide clear evidence showing where Brook Binkowski presents misinformation.

Re: I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

#70

Post by colordrops »

was8309 wrote: post #66
lenkite wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as fact-checkers can be sued for incorrect and malicious fact checking and fact-checking isn't grounds for censorship and information suppression, I would be on-board with you. The most that fact-checkers do when they are egregiously and utterly incorrect is a correction to an eye-rolling "needs context" label. The standards of objectivity of fact-checkers (who are all left-leaning partisans) are ridiculously…

Please provide an example of where Brooke Binkowski is egregiously and utterly incorrect. She's a hero to me and I'm leery of having hero's.

The comment you are responding to has nothing to do with whomever this person is. It's about fact checking as a general endeavor.
Post reply on HN