I'm amazed at how much cynicism I'm seeing here about this. People just keep repeating what can be boiled down to the same premise: complete objective truth bas

I'm amazed at how much cynicism I'm seeing here about this. People just keep repeating what can be boiled down to the same premise: complete objective truth basically doesn't exist. Truth is messy, tricky, subjective business. This is not new, this is just how the world is. Truth and understanding is best-effort and always has been, so why is a tool to attempt to combat some of the most egregious falsehoods even remotely a bad thing? Nobody should claim that its bulletproof, but I'm not seeing anyone really do this? The problem is some of us never deal in absolutes, we see nuance in everything (climate science, economics, political science) but there are others who do deal in absolutes and make a killing doing so. Sitting around having the same debate over and over about facts and truth doesn't do anything to tackle the problem. My rule of thumb is that generally there is safety in numbers. Don't trust any single source and don't trust something that doesn't have a chain of reasoning behind it. I trust all kinds of scientific statements that I don't have the qualifications or time to vet myself - but we have to do our best and that often means doing a meta-analysis of how a conclusion was reached and how many other people/groups (who themselves have qualifications and links to other entities with similar qualifications) that the statements are linked to. Fake news isn't 100 levels deep, its usually 1 level with no real supporting information. When people (like Trump) categorically denounce someone elses statement they often provide no real information of their own. Similarly, when refuting a fact-check, most people don't dig into it and refute something in their chain of reasoning, they just say "well that is just not true!" and leave it at that. We don't need to fundamentally fix the nature of truth but we need to be able to combat the worst cases of misinformation and any tool that helps do that is great. Continuing the have the same philosophical debate about truth is fine from an academic standpoint but from a practical standpoint it is sometimes not helpful. I feel similarly about climate change - its great to acknowledge nuance but what good is that if we're trending towards pogroms and a totalitarian dictatorship (to be hyperbolic, maybe)?