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I agree his answers about why political ads shouldn't be fact checked weren't good, but I found some of these "zinger" clips on Twitter really silly. > Mr. Zuc

I agree his answers about why political ads shouldn't be fact checked weren't good, but I found some of these "zinger" clips on Twitter really silly. > Mr. Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally first become aware of Cambridge Analytica?” Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand? You'd be better declining to answer this question than guess and get it wrong which seems like what he did. Asking if he became aware of them before or after a specific event would have been much more reasonable. There's tons of important events in my life where I don't know the month it happened because it's not important to remember. I think he's right to say "I don't know" when he can't be completely sure. That's not a zinger. Likewise, it's not a zinger when you ask a really long question that contains several factual claims that you require clarification on, or try to force a yes/no answer to a loaded question (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_question_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_question#Complex_quest...).

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
> Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand? Because it is one of the biggest scandals affecting Facebook in probably its entire history, and he's been grilled about it before? You'd think that once they found out his staff and advisors would make sure to tell him every single detail about it. Likewise, it should be the thing that occupies him for months on end. It's inexcusable for him to not seem to know some basic factoids about the whole thing.
- fungicide 7y ago
  Fun fact: The "oid" suffix in factoid means "like", or "resembling". So a factoid is not a true fact, but a statement resembling a fact. The word "factoid" was coined by Norman Mailer to mean "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." So it is a source of great irony that the meaning of the word has been inverted by the press to mean a trivial but true fact. Historians of the future may have a fun time trying to figure out if our factoids are a true fact that we consider trivial, or a fact that we know is false but is believed to be true.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

> Unless I missed that the hearing was highly related to this, why would he remember this exact date offhand? Because it is one of the biggest scandals affecting Facebook in probably its entire history, and he's been grilled about it before? You'd think that once they found out his staff and advisors would make sure to tell him every single detail about it. Likewise, it should be the thing that occupies him for months on end. It's inexcusable for him to not seem to know some basic factoids about the whole thing.

fungicide 7y ago
Fun fact: The "oid" suffix in factoid means "like", or "resembling". So a factoid is not a true fact, but a statement resembling a fact. The word "factoid" was coined by Norman Mailer to mean "an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." So it is a source of great irony that the meaning of the word has been inverted by the press to mean a trivial but true fact. Historians of the future may have a fun time trying to figure out if our factoids are a true fact that we consider trivial, or a fact that we know is false but is believed to be true.