4 ms·

Fact Checking is a new word for censorship.

maxerickson 10y ago
How dare they make a business decision to have standards for accuracy on their platform. The nerve of giant corporations in our corporatist world! The nerve!
- skylan_q 10y ago
  He's right, though. Google itself cannot be trusted. The size of the organization itself along with how many state actors it's colluding with should set off alarms.
- leereeves 10y ago
  Censorship is often hidden behind innocuous phrases like "standards for accuracy". It was fairly obvious when the media started talking about "fake news online" that the endgame was censoring the Internet.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Yeah, totally obvious. Robust freedom of speech doesn't mean that idiots get to have an equal voice. In fact, I think it depends on idiots quickly getting ignored, even in vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways.
    - leereeves 10y ago
      So you're arguing in favor of censorship? Who decides who gets ignored in "vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways"?
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        Let me know when it becomes illegal to start up a news aggregator. Until then, it's whoever makes better news aggregators.
        leereeves 10y ago
        'Better' meaning? Popular? Then you're deciding truth by popularity.
        maxerickson 10y ago
        And? The alternative is to ban sorting news articles at all.
        leereeves 10y ago
        And you'll end up with a liberal echo chamber and a conservative echo chamber, and never the two sides shall read the same story.
        maxerickson 10y ago
        Maybe. In the US I think the more partisan media operations are pandering at least as much as they are influencing (I guess probably quite a bit more). The opinion bubble exists whether they sell ad space on it or not, they have some effect of making it bigger. There's also the fun problem where the sorting and other display choices of a news aggregator are speech. Why should that speech be suppressed?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - espadrine 10y ago
    Moving the debate to evaluating accuracy is better than what we were headed towards. The conclusion stops being a race-to-the-bottom "can we even know anything?" and becomes "how can we perfect our knowledge?"
- soft_dev_person 10y ago
  How will a system like this handle unpredictable developments reported by new or few sources? And how will a system like this handle news or reports about events that challenge our world view? Not everything takes the form of Trump saying random outrageous stuff that is easily verified/rejected. Also, you may say that "Fact checked" is just an additional data point to judge whether to trust an information source, but you know as well as I do that lazy people (most people) will start thinking that "Fact checked" means truth and "Not fact checked" means lies. Even more so on Facebook. I think, in the long run, these systems will be detrimental to peoples' ability to judge any information themselves. This is a problem for democracy.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    It's not like we are starting in a place where people do a reasonable job of judging information. I remember sitting in a library years ago as two goofballs met each other for the first time and immediately extended each other more credibility than they gave to the institutions they proceeded to ramble about. It was fascinating to watch.
    - soft_dev_person 10y ago
      Then they are not fixing the right problem.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    The articles aren't being marked as Fact Checked, they are being only tagged as being Fact Checking articles.
    - soft_dev_person 10y ago
      That's interesting. Not sure it will be interpreted that way by most people, considering how many are interpreting the announcement itself. Even after reading it again and the one announcing the "fact-check" tag, it was still not obvious what they meant until I read your comments in here. Anyway, the part regarding Facebook still stands, and we are moving in that general direction I believe.
- ksk 10y ago
  I found the word accuracy applied to an advertising company quite ironic.
ollysb 10y ago
Censorship is about hiding information, this is adding additional information regarding accuracy, which you're free to ignore should you wish.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
  > Censorship is about hiding information Google says in the blog they push Fact Checked articles up the results list (and by implication push unchecked ones down).
  - icebraining 10y ago
    No, Fact Checking articles will be pushed up. People here are reading this wrongly. The articles aren't marked as checked, but as themselves being fact checks (of the overall story).
    - 0x445442 10y ago
      If that's true its terribly poor labeling. I guarantee the majority of folks glancing at an article and seeing that tag will interpret it as the article being vetted not an article doing the vetting. If that's what they're doing their must be a reference article the "fact checking" article is pointing to. So I'd much rather have tags on the reference article pointing to the "fact checking" articles and tags on the "fact checking" articles pointing back to the reference article.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        If that's what they're doing their must be a reference article the "fact checking" article is pointing to. Why? Facts about a particular story are often reproduced by many sites. It's reasonable to run a check on those facts without specifically targeting a site. Snopes (which they use as an example) does this regularly.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  accuracy based on what? this blog post avoids going into any detail or example of how fact checking works in practice.
taytus 10y ago
I'm sorry, what?? Not sure what fortune cookie you read this from, but fact checking is the action of investigating a claim to see if it is true or not.
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
Not directly. Fact checking just seems like it's an API layer in news. By proxy, you're now trusting the fact checking organizations instead of the publisher/journalist themselves. Readers will read your news if they've got that tag on there. So it helps both sides out on the surface. It's very difficult to collude with 120 organizations dedicated to fact checking. The actual problem is when 120 organizations disagree 50/50 about the truth, you're basically left with a consensus problem and you have to decide who's side is more trustworthy, which is a problem we had before with deciding which news organizations were trustworthy. All this is doing is moving the ball from the old guard to the new and rebranding it, because the population loves shiny new things. Or maybe the old guard is just fronting. There also probably won't be published data about when fact checking organizations are wrong, so nothing is stopping a decently financed group from becoming an authority in this new system and then staying around for a good while. There's also no metric for success and thresholds of when badly managed fact checking organizations should be culled from the herd. Will fact checking organizations have the balls to publish facts that put themselves in a terrible light and then self-terminate? What about the reputations of the people in that organization who move on to new organizations? Are they sufficiently punished for abusing the system? That is what is disturbing about this: that anyone can stand up and throw the fact checking badge around. It's not state-level censorship yet (IMO).
Angostura 10y ago
Do you feel the same way about peer review? Fact Checking isn't censorship. It is a process whereby someone with good reputation for factual accuracy, gauges the extent to which an article is based on accurate facts.
ww520 10y ago
Ahh, how soon we will have the Ministry of Truth.

How dare they make a business decision to have standards for accuracy on their platform. The nerve of giant corporations in our corporatist world! The nerve!

skylan_q 10y ago
He's right, though. Google itself cannot be trusted. The size of the organization itself along with how many state actors it's colluding with should set off alarms.
leereeves 10y ago
Censorship is often hidden behind innocuous phrases like "standards for accuracy". It was fairly obvious when the media started talking about "fake news online" that the endgame was censoring the Internet.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yeah, totally obvious. Robust freedom of speech doesn't mean that idiots get to have an equal voice. In fact, I think it depends on idiots quickly getting ignored, even in vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways.
  - leereeves 10y ago
    So you're arguing in favor of censorship? Who decides who gets ignored in "vile, pernicious, institutionalized ways"?
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Let me know when it becomes illegal to start up a news aggregator. Until then, it's whoever makes better news aggregators.
      - leereeves 10y ago
        'Better' meaning? Popular? Then you're deciding truth by popularity.
        maxerickson 10y ago
        And? The alternative is to ban sorting news articles at all.
        leereeves 10y ago
        And you'll end up with a liberal echo chamber and a conservative echo chamber, and never the two sides shall read the same story.
        maxerickson 10y ago
        Maybe. In the US I think the more partisan media operations are pandering at least as much as they are influencing (I guess probably quite a bit more). The opinion bubble exists whether they sell ad space on it or not, they have some effect of making it bigger. There's also the fun problem where the sorting and other display choices of a news aggregator are speech. Why should that speech be suppressed?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- espadrine 10y ago
  Moving the debate to evaluating accuracy is better than what we were headed towards. The conclusion stops being a race-to-the-bottom "can we even know anything?" and becomes "how can we perfect our knowledge?"
soft_dev_person 10y ago
How will a system like this handle unpredictable developments reported by new or few sources? And how will a system like this handle news or reports about events that challenge our world view? Not everything takes the form of Trump saying random outrageous stuff that is easily verified/rejected. Also, you may say that "Fact checked" is just an additional data point to judge whether to trust an information source, but you know as well as I do that lazy people (most people) will start thinking that "Fact checked" means truth and "Not fact checked" means lies. Even more so on Facebook. I think, in the long run, these systems will be detrimental to peoples' ability to judge any information themselves. This is a problem for democracy.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It's not like we are starting in a place where people do a reasonable job of judging information. I remember sitting in a library years ago as two goofballs met each other for the first time and immediately extended each other more credibility than they gave to the institutions they proceeded to ramble about. It was fascinating to watch.
  - soft_dev_person 10y ago
    Then they are not fixing the right problem.
- icebraining 10y ago
  The articles aren't being marked as Fact Checked, they are being only tagged as being Fact Checking articles.
  - soft_dev_person 10y ago
    That's interesting. Not sure it will be interpreted that way by most people, considering how many are interpreting the announcement itself. Even after reading it again and the one announcing the "fact-check" tag, it was still not obvious what they meant until I read your comments in here. Anyway, the part regarding Facebook still stands, and we are moving in that general direction I believe.
ksk 10y ago
I found the word accuracy applied to an advertising company quite ironic.

ollysb 10y ago

Censorship is about hiding information, this is adding additional information regarding accuracy, which you're free to ignore should you wish.

UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
> Censorship is about hiding information Google says in the blog they push Fact Checked articles up the results list (and by implication push unchecked ones down).
- icebraining 10y ago
  No, Fact Checking articles will be pushed up. People here are reading this wrongly. The articles aren't marked as checked, but as themselves being fact checks (of the overall story).
  - 0x445442 10y ago
    If that's true its terribly poor labeling. I guarantee the majority of folks glancing at an article and seeing that tag will interpret it as the article being vetted not an article doing the vetting. If that's what they're doing their must be a reference article the "fact checking" article is pointing to. So I'd much rather have tags on the reference article pointing to the "fact checking" articles and tags on the "fact checking" articles pointing back to the reference article.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      If that's what they're doing their must be a reference article the "fact checking" article is pointing to. Why? Facts about a particular story are often reproduced by many sites. It's reasonable to run a check on those facts without specifically targeting a site. Snopes (which they use as an example) does this regularly.
ekianjo 10y ago
accuracy based on what? this blog post avoids going into any detail or example of how fact checking works in practice.

taytus 10y ago

I'm sorry, what?? Not sure what fortune cookie you read this from, but fact checking is the action of investigating a claim to see if it is true or not.

FLUX-YOU 10y ago

Not directly. Fact checking just seems like it's an API layer in news. By proxy, you're now trusting the fact checking organizations instead of the publisher/journalist themselves. Readers will read your news if they've got that tag on there. So it helps both sides out on the surface. It's very difficult to collude with 120 organizations dedicated to fact checking. The actual problem is when 120 organizations disagree 50/50 about the truth, you're basically left with a consensus problem and you have to decide who's side is more trustworthy, which is a problem we had before with deciding which news organizations were trustworthy. All this is doing is moving the ball from the old guard to the new and rebranding it, because the population loves shiny new things. Or maybe the old guard is just fronting. There also probably won't be published data about when fact checking organizations are wrong, so nothing is stopping a decently financed group from becoming an authority in this new system and then staying around for a good while. There's also no metric for success and thresholds of when badly managed fact checking organizations should be culled from the herd. Will fact checking organizations have the balls to publish facts that put themselves in a terrible light and then self-terminate? What about the reputations of the people in that organization who move on to new organizations? Are they sufficiently punished for abusing the system? That is what is disturbing about this: that anyone can stand up and throw the fact checking badge around. It's not state-level censorship yet (IMO).

Angostura 10y ago

Do you feel the same way about peer review? Fact Checking isn't censorship. It is a process whereby someone with good reputation for factual accuracy, gauges the extent to which an article is based on accurate facts.

ww520 10y ago

Ahh, how soon we will have the Ministry of Truth.