God I'm so tired of fact checking.
First of all you cannot fact check an opinion. You can talk to the person and argue that, *IN YOUR HUMBLE OPINION* they're wrong. You can even present additional information that you think should help the person to change their mind, but you cannot expect it to happen, especially not at once.
Also, it doesn't matter as much WHAT you say but HOW you say it. Approaching someone for a discussion is one thing, attempting to be Einstein that knows everything better and presents everything he says as fact usually creates a defensive demeanor. Especially as journalists, that usually know jack shit about anything and happen to fail to reproduce even simple information correctly when depicting a story.
Then there’s another problem: A lot of people argue with science w/o even remotely understanding what science is. They present a lot of stuff as facts when suddenly a new player appears: progress. And that player can turn a lot of so called “facts” into questionable information. That’s the moment when it’s not about facts anymore but about the question how fast the information traveled and who it reached first.
So while a journalist is still stuck in the past, does fact checks that get a lot of posts/comments deleted on a website, others have already gotten to the new information and are trying to have a discussion on that, which is then successfully prevented by the fact checking journalist. When the new information has reached the journo 12h later, they don’t see themselves being responsible for anything…
But it’s not even that. A lot of science has been tainted by politics/ideology and is not in the least objective anymore, because the people in it are trying to further a political or ideological agenda. Which creates a whole new problem.
I could come up with many more examples here why fact checking is one of the worst ideas in human history, but it all boils down to one question: Who is in possession of the so called truth?
While the idea of fact checking is honorable, the simple information that there is no higher instance that holds the “ultimate truth” and that is not “politically or ideologically tainted” in one way or another should make it clear to anyone how bad the idea is once it’s put into action.
Not to mention how tinfoil hat connoisseurs behave once a fact check turns out to be wrong.