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Facebook's only Dutch factchecker quits over political ad exemption

122 points by CaptainZapp 7y ago

skocznymroczny 7y ago
Fact-checking is misleading, because it makes some people believe that facts are completely objective and you can verify or disprove them without any bias. In the end, most fact-checking outlets just repeat propaganda of the political parties they align with.
- rimliu 7y ago
  Can you provide some facts that would be subjective?
  - djohnston 7y ago
    i think the issue is that even mainstream fact checking websites like snopes have ratings such as "mostly true", "somewhat true", etc. Lots of political accusations aren't binary, hence the existence of a gradient of "truthiness", to borrow from Colbert.
  - benmmurphy 7y ago
    As a fact checker you have a lot of leeway of what is the subject of your fact checking. For example if there is a controversy over the height of a building that seemed to split opinion into two groups the highists and the lowists. If you wanted to write an article 'debunking' the highists claims you could find the most extreme claim about the height of the building then refute that claim and then claim the highists claim had been debunked. If you pay attention to snopes you will see on some of their fact checks of politically controversial topics they will take this line where they will either weak man a position or strong man a position depending on what result they want to produce.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Let’s ignore all the complexity surrounding facts and just assume facts are obtainable and 100% objective. With 100% objective facts, media outlets still wield a huge amount of power through cherry-picking and spinning. Example: You live in a group A (party, country, etc.) echo chamber where every day you’re bombarded with news on evil thing X group B just did, which is a fact. What they don’t tell you is that group A is also doing X, or doing some more egregious thing Y. They didn’t lie to you, they just omitted the full picture. After a while, you’ll inevitably believe group B is the root of all evil, and even if you’re then presented 100% facts about how group A did all the evil things from a group B publication, you’ll probably dismiss those. In short, not necessarily agreeing with gp, but it’s certainly very complicated.
    - benmmurphy 7y ago
      slatestarcodex has a good article discussing this problem which they have labeled the 'chinese robber fallacy'. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
    - stronglikedan 7y ago
      That's why I feel that whataboutism is a valid response, since it points out the hypocrisy, which can sway the debate.
  - jerf 7y ago
    In the realm of media, there's a lot of equivocation with the word "fact". I believe in the existence of objective facts in the general sense. But when we're using the term in the context of our current media environment, a lot of "facts" are actually conclusions that contain heaping helpings of opinion, if you really dig into them. There's a lot of telling you what to think and not a lot of bare facts, because who wants to read boring bare facts? Assuming the bare facts are even reported accurately between the place where they were collected and the final reporting (see almost all popular science articles, where even when "facts" are being reported they still get screwed up). Here's a common set of "subjective facts": "Policy X will help group Y in manner Z." along with "Politician A voted against X and therefore hates Y." As I've commented before, even the apparent objective fact that "Politician A voted against X" isn't necessarily as factual as it may seem since it's a common tactic to have X bundled in with a whole bunch of other things, and you don't know whether A voted against X, or voted against boondoggle B buried in the bill, or if X was in fact the only thing the politician agreed with in the entire bill and was forced to vote against it because everything else was worse, or if they agreed with X and voted against it as part of some other political deal, or what. Even the "bare fact" "Politician A voted against X" can be treated in a way that turns it into an effective lie, even if it is nominally 100% true. That is the sort of "fact" we deal with in the media environment all the time, and it isn't as objective as we'd like it to be.
    - mtberatwork 7y ago
      > Here's a common set of "subjective facts": "Policy X will help group Y in manner Z." along with "Politician A voted against X and therefore hates Y." That's just a logical fallacy. By definition a fact can only be objective, otherwise it's simply an opinion.
      - mistermann 7y ago
        > That's just a logical fallacy. Which is presented as a fact by the media.....which is consumed by readers and mentally filed under "fact", and subsequently used by subconscious heuristics in future evaluations of reality, producing more "facts" which are transmitted throughout their network of acquaintances, infecting more subconscious heuristics, and round and round we go. It's interesting that many here at HN expect the general public to up their epistemological game, when all of us here have the same infected heuristics as them (if to a lesser degree), and routinely behave in similar ways. The question on my mind lately is: how might this situation be improved, first here at HN, and then maybe later throughout the rest of society? We've got a bunch of bright minds here, it might be interesting if we acknowledged this problem and set our collective minds to finding a solution.
  - polski-g 7y ago
    "trans men are men" "Poverty causes crime" "Women are neurotic" "IPv6 is required to be implemented ASAP" All of these are absolute facts To some people. And absolute falsities to others.
  - pingyong 7y ago
    "Thousands of babies are killed every year through late-term abortions." The meaning of "babies", "killed" and "late-term abortion" (or even if that term has any meaning) is completely subjective.
romaaeterna 7y ago
>>> The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook’s only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network’s tools that suppress distribution of misinformation. Imagine the years of training and sheer innate genius that the people at nu.nl must have had to make them appropriate arbiters of truth and fairness in the news. And while these giants of verity at nu.nl could have been expending their talents of truth and reason in physics, or medicine, or even making money in business, instead they choose to run an online news website. What a blessed country the Netherlands is.
- wokkel 7y ago
  Before you voice an opinion it helps if you have the facts. What they did was write background stories on facebook news items to see if they could find corroborating news articles. Basically what every sane human should do when reading anything online. As for the statement that we are blessed: thanks.
  - romaaeterna 7y ago
    I was there a few weeks ago, and there is a lot for you to feel blessed about. (Though I might also agree with Houellebecq's recent quip that "Holland isn't a country, it's a business venture.") Factchecking is a gatekeeper method. The adversarial method for challenging incorrect facts is far better than the gatekeeper method, unless you have gatekeepers of the very highest quality. And Facebook has no mechanism for getting gatekeepers for more than middling quality. The abuses in their factchecking mechanism in the English media have been notorious.
the-dude 7y ago
Nu.nl is the news-outlet with least journalistic activity of all publications in NL. It is basically a one-on-one copy of AP.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  It makes sense that they lasted longer than Leiden University before quitting, then. Facebook couldn't even make the token concessions needed to keep at least one low-effort rag on board?
bilekas 7y ago
I just can't get my head around why political speech is permitted to be false.. Have Facebook ever actually given any solid reasons for this decision?
- pnako 7y ago
  Voters decide what is good or bad political speech (at least in democracies). It's already bad enough with concentrated corporate media and giant web corporations, we don't need to have another unelected group of "fact checkers" mess with this any further. Let anyone, politician or not, make any political speech and, again, voters will ultimately decide.
  - MereInterest 7y ago
    Voters decide what is effective and ineffective speech. This is entirely distinct from good/bad, or true/false. It is easy to produce effective political ads that are entirely false, such as was done in the Brexit campaign.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      > This is entirely distinct from good/bad, or true/false. Very good point. It should also be noted that some things are a matter of fact (1+1=2), and some things (like whether Brexit is worth doing) are a matter of opinion, based on a complex array of facts, factoids, memes, rule-of-thumbs, gut-feels, lived experience, etc.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- polski-g 7y ago
  Because truth is subjective. "Trump is racist" a statement of fact. But it's entirely subjective.
forgingahead 7y ago
For everyone doing all the hand-wringing about Facebook, doesn't existing media (newspapers, TV, cable, etc) already NOT "fact check" ads run on their networks?
- bilekas 7y ago
  More 'Whataboutism' ? Also can you back up your statement about not fact-checking before anyone claims otherwise ? Unfortunately more people consume Facebook than others, so its a prime target. Also I would point you towards another article : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-advertising-factbox/factbox-how-social-media-sites-handle-political-ads-idUSKBN1XP22G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-advertising-...
- mattigames 7y ago
  Is the existing media reaching one third of the world population and part of a single company? You have to keep in mind when talking about facebook that is a machinery of proportions never seen before.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  Traditional media reviews the ads they run. Most probably don't fact check, but no reputable newspaper would run anything that doesn't at least pass a sniff test.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  Usually you have organizations like advertising standard authorities, who will absolutely crack down on untruthful ads. The ones in Australia and in the UK come to mind and have serious bite in confronting offenders. Add to that that ads in newspapers are clearly identifiable as ads, while this is much more intermingled in social media.
  - lurker458 7y ago
    the UK one has no teeth.
- paulus_magnus2 7y ago

122 points by CaptainZapp 7y ago

Fact-checking is misleading, because it makes some people believe that facts are completely objective and you can verify or disprove them without any bias. In the end, most fact-checking outlets just repeat propaganda of the political parties they align with.

rimliu 7y ago
Can you provide some facts that would be subjective?
- djohnston 7y ago
  i think the issue is that even mainstream fact checking websites like snopes have ratings such as "mostly true", "somewhat true", etc. Lots of political accusations aren't binary, hence the existence of a gradient of "truthiness", to borrow from Colbert.
- benmmurphy 7y ago
  As a fact checker you have a lot of leeway of what is the subject of your fact checking. For example if there is a controversy over the height of a building that seemed to split opinion into two groups the highists and the lowists. If you wanted to write an article 'debunking' the highists claims you could find the most extreme claim about the height of the building then refute that claim and then claim the highists claim had been debunked. If you pay attention to snopes you will see on some of their fact checks of politically controversial topics they will take this line where they will either weak man a position or strong man a position depending on what result they want to produce.
- oefrha 7y ago
  Let’s ignore all the complexity surrounding facts and just assume facts are obtainable and 100% objective. With 100% objective facts, media outlets still wield a huge amount of power through cherry-picking and spinning. Example: You live in a group A (party, country, etc.) echo chamber where every day you’re bombarded with news on evil thing X group B just did, which is a fact. What they don’t tell you is that group A is also doing X, or doing some more egregious thing Y. They didn’t lie to you, they just omitted the full picture. After a while, you’ll inevitably believe group B is the root of all evil, and even if you’re then presented 100% facts about how group A did all the evil things from a group B publication, you’ll probably dismiss those. In short, not necessarily agreeing with gp, but it’s certainly very complicated.
  - benmmurphy 7y ago
    slatestarcodex has a good article discussing this problem which they have labeled the 'chinese robber fallacy'. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...
  - stronglikedan 7y ago
    That's why I feel that whataboutism is a valid response, since it points out the hypocrisy, which can sway the debate.
- jerf 7y ago
  In the realm of media, there's a lot of equivocation with the word "fact". I believe in the existence of objective facts in the general sense. But when we're using the term in the context of our current media environment, a lot of "facts" are actually conclusions that contain heaping helpings of opinion, if you really dig into them. There's a lot of telling you what to think and not a lot of bare facts, because who wants to read boring bare facts? Assuming the bare facts are even reported accurately between the place where they were collected and the final reporting (see almost all popular science articles, where even when "facts" are being reported they still get screwed up). Here's a common set of "subjective facts": "Policy X will help group Y in manner Z." along with "Politician A voted against X and therefore hates Y." As I've commented before, even the apparent objective fact that "Politician A voted against X" isn't necessarily as factual as it may seem since it's a common tactic to have X bundled in with a whole bunch of other things, and you don't know whether A voted against X, or voted against boondoggle B buried in the bill, or if X was in fact the only thing the politician agreed with in the entire bill and was forced to vote against it because everything else was worse, or if they agreed with X and voted against it as part of some other political deal, or what. Even the "bare fact" "Politician A voted against X" can be treated in a way that turns it into an effective lie, even if it is nominally 100% true. That is the sort of "fact" we deal with in the media environment all the time, and it isn't as objective as we'd like it to be.
  - mtberatwork 7y ago
    > Here's a common set of "subjective facts": "Policy X will help group Y in manner Z." along with "Politician A voted against X and therefore hates Y." That's just a logical fallacy. By definition a fact can only be objective, otherwise it's simply an opinion.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      > That's just a logical fallacy. Which is presented as a fact by the media.....which is consumed by readers and mentally filed under "fact", and subsequently used by subconscious heuristics in future evaluations of reality, producing more "facts" which are transmitted throughout their network of acquaintances, infecting more subconscious heuristics, and round and round we go. It's interesting that many here at HN expect the general public to up their epistemological game, when all of us here have the same infected heuristics as them (if to a lesser degree), and routinely behave in similar ways. The question on my mind lately is: how might this situation be improved, first here at HN, and then maybe later throughout the rest of society? We've got a bunch of bright minds here, it might be interesting if we acknowledged this problem and set our collective minds to finding a solution.
- polski-g 7y ago
  "trans men are men" "Poverty causes crime" "Women are neurotic" "IPv6 is required to be implemented ASAP" All of these are absolute facts To some people. And absolute falsities to others.
- pingyong 7y ago
  "Thousands of babies are killed every year through late-term abortions." The meaning of "babies", "killed" and "late-term abortion" (or even if that term has any meaning) is completely subjective.

romaaeterna 7y ago

>>> The online newspaper Nu.nl had been Facebook’s only factchecking partner in the Netherlands since Leiden University dropped out of the programme last year. The website had sole responsibility for marking Facebook and Instagram news content for Dutch users as being false or misleading, in order to help power the social network’s tools that suppress distribution of misinformation. Imagine the years of training and sheer innate genius that the people at nu.nl must have had to make them appropriate arbiters of truth and fairness in the news. And while these giants of verity at nu.nl could have been expending their talents of truth and reason in physics, or medicine, or even making money in business, instead they choose to run an online news website. What a blessed country the Netherlands is.

wokkel 7y ago
Before you voice an opinion it helps if you have the facts. What they did was write background stories on facebook news items to see if they could find corroborating news articles. Basically what every sane human should do when reading anything online. As for the statement that we are blessed: thanks.
- romaaeterna 7y ago
  I was there a few weeks ago, and there is a lot for you to feel blessed about. (Though I might also agree with Houellebecq's recent quip that "Holland isn't a country, it's a business venture.") Factchecking is a gatekeeper method. The adversarial method for challenging incorrect facts is far better than the gatekeeper method, unless you have gatekeepers of the very highest quality. And Facebook has no mechanism for getting gatekeepers for more than middling quality. The abuses in their factchecking mechanism in the English media have been notorious.

the-dude 7y ago

Nu.nl is the news-outlet with least journalistic activity of all publications in NL. It is basically a one-on-one copy of AP.

leggomylibro 7y ago
It makes sense that they lasted longer than Leiden University before quitting, then. Facebook couldn't even make the token concessions needed to keep at least one low-effort rag on board?

bilekas 7y ago

I just can't get my head around why political speech is permitted to be false.. Have Facebook ever actually given any solid reasons for this decision?

pnako 7y ago
Voters decide what is good or bad political speech (at least in democracies). It's already bad enough with concentrated corporate media and giant web corporations, we don't need to have another unelected group of "fact checkers" mess with this any further. Let anyone, politician or not, make any political speech and, again, voters will ultimately decide.
- MereInterest 7y ago
  Voters decide what is effective and ineffective speech. This is entirely distinct from good/bad, or true/false. It is easy to produce effective political ads that are entirely false, such as was done in the Brexit campaign.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    > This is entirely distinct from good/bad, or true/false. Very good point. It should also be noted that some things are a matter of fact (1+1=2), and some things (like whether Brexit is worth doing) are a matter of opinion, based on a complex array of facts, factoids, memes, rule-of-thumbs, gut-feels, lived experience, etc.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
polski-g 7y ago
Because truth is subjective. "Trump is racist" a statement of fact. But it's entirely subjective.

forgingahead 7y ago

For everyone doing all the hand-wringing about Facebook, doesn't existing media (newspapers, TV, cable, etc) already NOT "fact check" ads run on their networks?

bilekas 7y ago
More 'Whataboutism' ? Also can you back up your statement about not fact-checking before anyone claims otherwise ? Unfortunately more people consume Facebook than others, so its a prime target. Also I would point you towards another article : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-advertising-factbox/factbox-how-social-media-sites-handle-political-ads-idUSKBN1XP22G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-advertising-...
mattigames 7y ago
Is the existing media reaching one third of the world population and part of a single company? You have to keep in mind when talking about facebook that is a machinery of proportions never seen before.
wongarsu 7y ago
Traditional media reviews the ads they run. Most probably don't fact check, but no reputable newspaper would run anything that doesn't at least pass a sniff test.
CaptainZapp 7y ago
Usually you have organizations like advertising standard authorities, who will absolutely crack down on untruthful ads. The ones in Australia and in the UK come to mind and have serious bite in confronting offenders. Add to that that ads in newspapers are clearly identifiable as ads, while this is much more intermingled in social media.
- lurker458 7y ago
  the UK one has no teeth.
paulus_magnus2 7y ago