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Hm, is fact checking solved problem? I remember someone here had their game flagged just because it referenced SARS-CoV-2. I hear almost daily horror stories of

Hm, is fact checking solved problem? I remember someone here had their game flagged just because it referenced SARS-CoV-2. I hear almost daily horror stories of youtube algo's screwing up content creator. As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read. On top of that, things like the GPT2 from OpenAI might generate very human like comment. Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? All this tech is relatively new but maybe we should think in longer time scale. Wikipedia is still not used as a source in school work because that's the direction educational institution moved. If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously, maybe it's a better approach. Let me end this on a muddier concept. I thought masks was a good idea from the get go but there was an opposing view that existed at some point about this even from "authoritative" sources. In that case, do we just appeal to authority? Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?

Beltiras 6y ago
There's a big murky middle where you can't really tell but in the case of what Trump is complaining about an informed observer would come to a conclusion really quickly.
- zaroth 6y ago
  Voter registration rolls are pretty notorious for being out of date and unreliable. Personally I don’t have a problem with anyone who wants to vote by mail being able to request a ballot. Most states already allow no-excuse absentee ballets. I think the problem arises when the State automatically mails ballots to every registered voter at an address. If too many ballots show up at a house because someone requested it, there’s a paper trail. If too many ballots show up at a house automatically, there’s zero paper trail to be able to tell if they were all filled out and mailed back, besides the overall voter participation rate going up, which surely it will do.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - michaelt 6y ago
    Seems to me the solution there is to fix the voter registration rolls, rather than to make voting harder for people who are already on the rolls.
    - makomk 6y ago
      The trouble is that fixing the voter registration rolls means removing names from them, and the other American political faction - the Democrats and all the others opposed to Trump - push a different vote rigging narrative where every name removed from the list is a vote that's been suppressed by the Republicans. This happens even when the supposed voters both haven't voted in years and haven't actually been removed from the rolls or made ineligible to vote. In particular, I recall there being a very popular article/blog post that went hugely viral on Twitter comparing Trump's election margins in key states with the number of supposedly "suppressed" votes in that election, allegedly demonstrating that Trump won the election that way, where it was clear that the author knew the supposed voter suppression scheme wouldn't even work as described. Part-way through, after the breathless claims about hundreds of thousands of voters, was a careful ass-covering disclaimer about how what actually happened to voters on the purge lists which would supposedly stop them from voting would depend on the state. That disclaimer was because, in at least one of those key states Trump had to win and probably all, being put on the list didn't stop people from voting at all - they just had to confirm or update their address when they went to vote.
      - thephyber 6y ago
        > push a different vote rigging narrative where every name removed from the list is a vote that's been suppressed by the Republicans Politics gonna politik. Neither team red nor team blue is above slimy tactics. That's not an excuse not to push for a viable, non-partisan solution. I personally don't think periodically scrubbing rolls is either the right solution nor a good one. When they are scrubbed, the scrubbing is usually done by elected officials (who are almost certainly not above the corruption temptation) and who generally choose to over-scrub given too little confirmable data (causing false positive to be removed and increasing the burden on the average voter who doesn't know what happened or how to assure that their ballot isn't invalidated). Citizens should demand that the government actually use the data is already has on us and keep our address and eligibility current. One simple PubSub system with {Post Office, DMV, Credit Bureaus} as publishers of address changes and {Elections, IRS, etc} as consumers would fix this pretty quick.
gjulianm 6y ago
> Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? The issue is that this is not just a random social media post, it's coming from the President of the US, and most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the election process.
- jcroll 6y ago
  Democratic elections are supposed to be the failsafe for that no?
  - orian 6y ago
    Nope, they only provide a peaceful way to replace the man in charge instead bloodbath.
    - asdf21 6y ago
      Yes, that's the failsafe
  - noelwelsh 6y ago
    No, it's not.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Democratic elections rely on the demos being informed of the truth. Recent election winners have used social media to present, more effectively than using just the press, a preferred narrative that has - IMO - conned the electorate and won narrow wins for parties/people based primarily on falsehoods. You can't preserve democracy by relying solely on elections. Those who seriously, and serially, abuse the system also attack the ability of people to post/make their vote. Again happening the ability of the demos to choose their candidates. In some countries the system stands markedly against a fuller democracy - by use of things such as electoral colleges, or first-past-the-post voting systems. TL;DR see para.3
  - 6y ago
palsir 6y ago
Fact checking is far from a solved problem. The can of worms that Trump opened when he started the "fake news" conversation is still very much open.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Trump didn't start that "conversation". "Fake News" was a term originally intended to reflect the false "news-like" advertisements that were being purchased on social media (primarily Facebook, and primarily targetting conservative users). Trump appropriated it as a way to label unflattering news coverage from mainstream sources.
  - pyronik19 6y ago
    Hardly just unflattering, MSM pushed the "Russia" narrative for 3 years and there was literally nothing there. Hard to call that anything other than fake news. In fact its looking more and more like the actions from the Obama admin were likely highly corrupt and there will likely people going to jail. Just recently the media has been reporting that Trump called the virus a "hoax", which was a complete lie.
    - llcoolv 6y ago
      Yet another post, that is 100% factually correct and still gets downvoted into oblivion by the leftist bots. LOL.
    - mytherin 6y ago
      I'm curious what you mean by "literally nothing there", considering dozens of people have been charged and found guilty/jailed with crimes relating to the investigation, many of which were part of the Trump administration or working closely together with them [1]. Paul Manafort, the chairman of Donald Trumps' 2016 campaign is currently serving a 7.5 year prison sentence relating to this investigation. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/dec/05/robert-mueller-who-charged-list-trump-russia-inquiry-latest-indictments-flynn-manafort-cohen-what-happens-next https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/dec/...
newacct583 6y ago
> If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously The subject at hand are public statements from the president of the United States. How exactly does one not "take that seriously"? Given the gravity of the situation: if it's wrong, and you know it's wrong, surely you have a responsibility to tell people it's wrong. Right? > Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? How is Trump being "shunned" here? Twitter put a correction link at the bottom of his tweet.
KineticLensman 6y ago
> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view Because the 'correct answer' to many questions is 'it depends...'. You enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of various options and pick an option that satisfies some sort of evaluation function (which may depend on your point of view). Some of the advantages and disadvantages are facts while others are probabilities. This of course doesn't work well in short form media or for people who like things simple.
freen 6y ago
What is truth anyway? You say you are a person, I say you are a banana. Who are you to dispute my facts? So strange that the right has decided to cargo-cult the worst bits of post-modernism.
- nkurz 6y ago
  > You say you are a person, I say you are a banana. Who are you to dispute my facts? I'm not quite sure about your intent, but I think this is a more effective phrasing: "You say you are a person, but I say you are a banana. As a banana, who are you to dispute my facts?"
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    Or maybe "What are you to dispute my facts?"
llcoolv 6y ago
> I thought masks was a good idea from the get go but there was an opposing view that existed at some point about this even from "authoritative" sources. This is a very valid comment, especially when the chief source on truth in this case - WHO - changed their stance on this several times. Not to mention that their director general is a "former" high-ranking communist terrorist - something that doesn't make his organization appear too credible and something I am not really OK with.
- jfk13 6y ago
  > high-ranking communist terrorist That's quite an accusation; do you have a source for it?
  - llcoolv 6y ago
    Thank you for the question and starting a discussion instead of cowardly downvoting like those robots do - I would suggest to look up the wikipedia articles from three months ago on Tedros Adhanom and Tigray People's Liberation Front. Unfortunately today even the founder of Wikipedia admitted that the site neutrality is compromised by leftist activists[1]. There are also articles on The Guardian and NYT[2][3]. In the right wing and independent media it looks even more gross[4][5]. 1. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-founder-sites-neutrality-is-dead-thanks-to-leftist-bias/ https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-found... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/22/ethiopia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/22/ethiopia 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-director-general-ethiopia-cholera-outbreaks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-dire... 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu3lm0W6saU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu3lm0W6saU 5. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/was-who-director-tedros-top-member-violent-ethiopian-communist-party https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/was-who-director-tedr...
    - augustt 6y ago
      What a fucking joke that Breitbart article is. Wikipedia is biased because they state global warming as fact? Because Trump's page has more scandals (no shit) than Obama? Linking to that article says so much about you.
Loughla 6y ago
> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true. Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe in, personally, just because you don't believe in it? What is this world?
- crysin 6y ago
  It's the human world and this has always been the case. Humans as a whole have never been 100% rational.
- 2019-nCoV 6y ago
  How can a statement about the future be empirically wrong?
  - Loughla 6y ago
    I don't know what that even means. We're talking about facts established by research, indicating they have occurred in the past. I don't know what you're talking about.
    - 2019-nCoV 6y ago
      No, we're talking about an election in the future that hasn't happened yet.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    Tomorrow gravity is going to reverse and fling you into the sun.
    - GenerocUsername 6y ago
      If gravity were reversed you would actually be flung away from the sun. I ask you to please be correct and factual at all times. This is a discussion on the internet after all.
throawy1234 6y ago
I was in the social media support for one of the candidates during the Democratic primaries. Because of that we had direct access to twitter and the DNC social medial group. We noticed David Rothkop who had a decent size following and contributed to MSNBC and the DailyBeast was a registered foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates [1] David Rothkopf had made some wild accusations against two presidential candidates who were most critical of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. We asked Twitter multiple times that if anyone is a registered foreign agent and is constantly commenting on the US primaries and elections, that twitter should flag that account with some indicator or icon. All Twitter's government public relation person did was to give us some lip service and didn't do anything about it. [1] https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6596-Exhibit-AB-20180927-1.pdf https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6596-Exhibit-AB-20180927-1.pdf
dathinab 6y ago
There is a huge difference between a algorithm which detect potential fake news and adds a banner like "find information about <topik> here", "this is likely faktual wrong", etc. And a algorithm which removes the content outright. With other words: - fact check => removal == bad especially if automatised, basically censorship - fact check => warning + link to some source + maybe slightly less visibility in search (but still visible and potentially still even first result) == ok, people still can make their own opinion there is basically no censorship. (Side note, yes I'm aware that even "non" censoring methods can have a minimal censoring effect due to peoples laziness, but it's quite limited and IMHO acceptable especially if linked sources are objective.)
gadders 6y ago
It's certainly not a solved problem when the "Head of Site Integrity" has a history of anti-Trump tweets and called the President a Nazi. And that's just the head of the team. You can see the hard-left and pro-Antifa affiliations of the team outlined here: https://nickmonroe.blog/2019/11/28/dear-jack-twitter-is-politically-biased-heres-how/ https://nickmonroe.blog/2019/11/28/dear-jack-twitter-is-poli...
- dboreham 6y ago
  Any intelligent moral person is going to have "a history of anti-Trump tweets" if they're a Twitter user, which presumably someone who works for Twitter would be. Same logic goes for calling a person acting like Nazis a Nazi.
  - jki275 6y ago
    Quite the flame bait there, you're claiming that half the country is not intelligent or moral.
    - lovich 6y ago
      If those follow a standard bell curve, wouldn't it make sense for half the country to be below the average on those aspects?
      - jki275 6y ago
        Assumes a LOT of facts not in evidence.
  - gadders 6y ago
    I'm not sure that that is a reasonable point of view.
- mgoetzke 6y ago
  pro-Antifa means Pro Anti-Fascist which means to organise some movement against fascism. Would we really want people to be the inverse ? Meaning would we like them to be more fascist or accepting of fascism ? What exactly happened that AntiFa has become a group that people don't support ? Maybe I missed something there.
chlodwig 6y ago
It is not at all a solved problem. Fact-checking has the ancient "who watches the watchers" problem. Who facts checks the fact-checkers? And more broadly, censoring harassing tweets has the problem that a lot of activism looks a lot like harassment, and censoring "conspiracy theories" looks a lot like powerful people censoring those speaking truth to power. For anyone who believes that Twitter should be in the business of fact-checking, or censoring harassing or disinformation, tell me which of these should be fact-checked or censored: 1. "Don't wear masks. They don't work and take away masks from healthcare workers." 2. "The government is lying about whether masks work or not because we don't have enough masks for everyone." 3. "Masks help. Everyone should be wearing masks, wear a home-made mask if we don't have enough store bought ones." 4. "Fact: coronavirus is not airborne" 5. "Coronavirus is airborne." 6. "Scientists think Hydroxychloroquine might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: " 7. "Scientists think treating men with estrogen might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: " 8. "Look at this video of this Karen calling the police and lying because a black man who just told her to leash his dog. Do better white women." 9. "Look at this article about this Shylock who scammed thousands of seniors out of their retirement money. Do better Jews. 10. "Look at this Laquisha and her five kids taking over the bus and screaming and disturbing all the other riders. Do better black women." 11. Look, another tech-bro mansplaining and whitesplaining why racism isn't really a thing. I can only stomach so much of this ignorance. 12. "Under the Trump administration, there are actual Nazi's in the White House." 13. "Trump is a traitor against his country, he criminally colluded with Russia to rig the election." 14. "Representative Scarborough killed his intern." 15. "There is a paedophilia blackmail network that is pulling the strings behind the Democratic party." 16. "There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free" 17. "The United States is the highest taxed nation in the world -- that will change." 18. "Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri." 19. "If Democrats were truly serious about eradicating voter fraud, they would severely restrict absentee voting, permitting it only when voters have a good excuse, like illness." 20. "Absentee voting is to voting in person as as a take-home exam is to a proctored one. And just as teachers have reported a massive cheating as a result of moving to take-home tests during coronavirus, we can expect massive fraud as we move to mail-in ballots." Here are my answers if I was running Twitter: I would not fact-check any of these statements. I would censor the one's using derogatory racial language that is 8, 9, 10, and 11. Also 8, 9 and 11 should be banned for harassing a private citizen. For the potentially defamatory statements -- 12, 13, 14 and 15 -- if made by a real-name account they should be let stand and the offended person or organization can sue in court for defamation if they think it is false. If made by an anon account, the statement should be removed if reported.
staycoolboy 6y ago
> As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read Has this always been the case for you? or just in the past few years? I didn't care about news until the first gulf war. Then something flipped a switch in my brain and I could not get enough news. When news broadcasters started adopting websites in the 90's, I was like a junkie. I don't recall significant partisan division over Gulf War I, but I do recall a hard left/right split with the house takeover by Gingrich in 1994, and then the Clinton impeachment. Late 1990's is where things started to become bifurcated (remember, I wasn't paying attention in the 70's and 80's so it could have been as bad). Fast forward to mid 2010's and suddenly there are too many websites with "news" combined with SEO and recommendation algorithms spouting demonstrable nonsense that I can't help but hear Steve Bannon's "Flood the zone with shit" argument. Because it is working on me. I am over-educated (an engineering patent attorney for a top silicon company), I get paid to be a critical thinker. Facts and news just are clearly under assault from the zone-flooding angle to the point where being critical wears me to the bone. Was this intentional, or is this a consequence? Has the zone been successfully flooded as Bannon commanded?
- heurist 6y ago
  I think it's a natural effect of internet expansion. Stick 7B humans in a room together and you'll get a lot of noise because the world is a big place and events are literally happening everywhere all at once. Some find opportunity in that because the real world power is still trapped in spatially localized social networks and the internet can't reliably pierce that realm. Secrets are valuable. The noise we interact with is the intersection of waves created half a world away and the waves we create or come into contact with locally. The best perspective to maintain, in my opinion, is that local is the most important. If you were under immediate threat of death (eg a stranger with a knife in your home), you probably wouldn't care what's happening in DC, you'd be 100% focused on the danger in front of you. I measure that as "more important". The problem is in distant or murky danger, where you don't want to be caught off-guard. You have to be able to gauge your ability to adapt and achieve safety in comparison to the magnitude of danger, then limit your anxieties. Do what you can to be prepared and accept the rest. (This is what I have learned from a lifelong anxiety disorder). There is also no general mechanism for making sense of the massive amount of information being produced, so it's overwhelming. Google attacks the problem as an indexing tool (I'm sure they're attempting to become a generally intelligent agent). Wikipedia is a curated collection of humanity's abstract knowledge. Neither describes causality of arbitrary macroeconomic events though. If there was one broadly accepted source of truth then we'd all cling to it like a life raft.
tmaly 6y ago
On masks as a good idea, I am still a little concerned with touch transmission. I see people without gloves touching their mask. This is totally contaminating the mask. I would really like a settled question on whether mail and groceries are safe to touch. There was a study that came out saying the virus could exist on different surfaces for different periods of time. News reported last week that CDC update the website that indicated that the study was flawed. Soon after the CDC added clarification which still leaves the conclusion open. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0522-cdc-updates-covid-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0522-cdc-updates-co...
anewguy9000 6y ago
there is no such thing as truth as such; instead there are only theories and their predictive power (you could be in the matrix). so the best thing we have is the scientific method -- as individuals, we can all apply scientific thinking.
ChrisLomont 6y ago
>Hm, is fact checking solved problem? It doesn't need to be a solved problem to provide value by flagging highly questionable content. And many statements are known to be false or misleading, and providing info to people who don't know better is a step in a positive direction.
bananabreakfast 6y ago
Yes, fact checking a single vocal and influential individual on everything they say is indeed a solved problem! We've been doing it for years, on every president and congressman in America. There are such things as indisputable falsehoods. And when important people relay them as the truth there are dozens of fact checking organizations that exist only to call these individuals out and hold them accountable to their word. The fact that Twitter has started doing this with one specific individual is neither new nor innovative.
null0pointer 6y ago
One nuance about facts is that they change over time as we learn more about whatever the fact is about. Take SARS-CoV-2 for example, our best scientific knowledge about it has changed significantly since the start of the year. Some _facts_ from January would be considered _misinformation_ now. You might say that the actual facts are the underlying truth, but even that doesn't help. Our current view on the underlying truth are what is widely considered to be factual. The underlying truth can also change, for instance as the virus evolves and takes on different characteristics. Fact checking is most definitely not solved and I would posit that it's fundamentally intractable.
peterkos 6y ago
> youtube algo's screwing up content creator A slightly different problem, but Tom Scott did an excellent video on the automation of the copyright system on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU In summary, auto copyright checking solves Most copyright issues, to a degree that no other solution can really provide. And while there are a small (yet very unfair) number of false positives, the benefit that the system as a whole allows far outpaces that downtrend: for YouTube to exist! With regards to fact checking, I'd be more interested to hear how many people who read those kind of "fact flags" actually change their opinion in an easy case (flat earth, climate change, etc.). Honestly, the problem of "true truth" might never be solved, but so will the cause of incompetence never disappear.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Beltiras 6y ago

There's a big murky middle where you can't really tell but in the case of what Trump is complaining about an informed observer would come to a conclusion really quickly.

zaroth 6y ago
Voter registration rolls are pretty notorious for being out of date and unreliable. Personally I don’t have a problem with anyone who wants to vote by mail being able to request a ballot. Most states already allow no-excuse absentee ballets. I think the problem arises when the State automatically mails ballots to every registered voter at an address. If too many ballots show up at a house because someone requested it, there’s a paper trail. If too many ballots show up at a house automatically, there’s zero paper trail to be able to tell if they were all filled out and mailed back, besides the overall voter participation rate going up, which surely it will do.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelt 6y ago
  Seems to me the solution there is to fix the voter registration rolls, rather than to make voting harder for people who are already on the rolls.
  - makomk 6y ago
    The trouble is that fixing the voter registration rolls means removing names from them, and the other American political faction - the Democrats and all the others opposed to Trump - push a different vote rigging narrative where every name removed from the list is a vote that's been suppressed by the Republicans. This happens even when the supposed voters both haven't voted in years and haven't actually been removed from the rolls or made ineligible to vote. In particular, I recall there being a very popular article/blog post that went hugely viral on Twitter comparing Trump's election margins in key states with the number of supposedly "suppressed" votes in that election, allegedly demonstrating that Trump won the election that way, where it was clear that the author knew the supposed voter suppression scheme wouldn't even work as described. Part-way through, after the breathless claims about hundreds of thousands of voters, was a careful ass-covering disclaimer about how what actually happened to voters on the purge lists which would supposedly stop them from voting would depend on the state. That disclaimer was because, in at least one of those key states Trump had to win and probably all, being put on the list didn't stop people from voting at all - they just had to confirm or update their address when they went to vote.
    - thephyber 6y ago
      > push a different vote rigging narrative where every name removed from the list is a vote that's been suppressed by the Republicans Politics gonna politik. Neither team red nor team blue is above slimy tactics. That's not an excuse not to push for a viable, non-partisan solution. I personally don't think periodically scrubbing rolls is either the right solution nor a good one. When they are scrubbed, the scrubbing is usually done by elected officials (who are almost certainly not above the corruption temptation) and who generally choose to over-scrub given too little confirmable data (causing false positive to be removed and increasing the burden on the average voter who doesn't know what happened or how to assure that their ballot isn't invalidated). Citizens should demand that the government actually use the data is already has on us and keep our address and eligibility current. One simple PubSub system with {Post Office, DMV, Credit Bureaus} as publishers of address changes and {Elections, IRS, etc} as consumers would fix this pretty quick.

gjulianm 6y ago

> Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? The issue is that this is not just a random social media post, it's coming from the President of the US, and most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the election process.

jcroll 6y ago
Democratic elections are supposed to be the failsafe for that no?
- orian 6y ago
  Nope, they only provide a peaceful way to replace the man in charge instead bloodbath.
  - asdf21 6y ago
    Yes, that's the failsafe
- noelwelsh 6y ago
  No, it's not.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Democratic elections rely on the demos being informed of the truth. Recent election winners have used social media to present, more effectively than using just the press, a preferred narrative that has - IMO - conned the electorate and won narrow wins for parties/people based primarily on falsehoods. You can't preserve democracy by relying solely on elections. Those who seriously, and serially, abuse the system also attack the ability of people to post/make their vote. Again happening the ability of the demos to choose their candidates. In some countries the system stands markedly against a fuller democracy - by use of things such as electoral colleges, or first-past-the-post voting systems. TL;DR see para.3
- 6y ago

palsir 6y ago

Fact checking is far from a solved problem. The can of worms that Trump opened when he started the "fake news" conversation is still very much open.

newacct583 6y ago
Trump didn't start that "conversation". "Fake News" was a term originally intended to reflect the false "news-like" advertisements that were being purchased on social media (primarily Facebook, and primarily targetting conservative users). Trump appropriated it as a way to label unflattering news coverage from mainstream sources.
- pyronik19 6y ago
  Hardly just unflattering, MSM pushed the "Russia" narrative for 3 years and there was literally nothing there. Hard to call that anything other than fake news. In fact its looking more and more like the actions from the Obama admin were likely highly corrupt and there will likely people going to jail. Just recently the media has been reporting that Trump called the virus a "hoax", which was a complete lie.
  - llcoolv 6y ago
    Yet another post, that is 100% factually correct and still gets downvoted into oblivion by the leftist bots. LOL.
  - mytherin 6y ago
    I'm curious what you mean by "literally nothing there", considering dozens of people have been charged and found guilty/jailed with crimes relating to the investigation, many of which were part of the Trump administration or working closely together with them [1]. Paul Manafort, the chairman of Donald Trumps' 2016 campaign is currently serving a 7.5 year prison sentence relating to this investigation. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/dec/05/robert-mueller-who-charged-list-trump-russia-inquiry-latest-indictments-flynn-manafort-cohen-what-happens-next https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/dec/...

newacct583 6y ago

> If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously The subject at hand are public statements from the president of the United States. How exactly does one not "take that seriously"? Given the gravity of the situation: if it's wrong, and you know it's wrong, surely you have a responsibility to tell people it's wrong. Right? > Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? How is Trump being "shunned" here? Twitter put a correction link at the bottom of his tweet.

KineticLensman 6y ago

> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view Because the 'correct answer' to many questions is 'it depends...'. You enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of various options and pick an option that satisfies some sort of evaluation function (which may depend on your point of view). Some of the advantages and disadvantages are facts while others are probabilities. This of course doesn't work well in short form media or for people who like things simple.

freen 6y ago

What is truth anyway? You say you are a person, I say you are a banana. Who are you to dispute my facts? So strange that the right has decided to cargo-cult the worst bits of post-modernism.

nkurz 6y ago
> You say you are a person, I say you are a banana. Who are you to dispute my facts? I'm not quite sure about your intent, but I think this is a more effective phrasing: "You say you are a person, but I say you are a banana. As a banana, who are you to dispute my facts?"
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Or maybe "What are you to dispute my facts?"

llcoolv 6y ago

> I thought masks was a good idea from the get go but there was an opposing view that existed at some point about this even from "authoritative" sources. This is a very valid comment, especially when the chief source on truth in this case - WHO - changed their stance on this several times. Not to mention that their director general is a "former" high-ranking communist terrorist - something that doesn't make his organization appear too credible and something I am not really OK with.

jfk13 6y ago
> high-ranking communist terrorist That's quite an accusation; do you have a source for it?
- llcoolv 6y ago
  Thank you for the question and starting a discussion instead of cowardly downvoting like those robots do - I would suggest to look up the wikipedia articles from three months ago on Tedros Adhanom and Tigray People's Liberation Front. Unfortunately today even the founder of Wikipedia admitted that the site neutrality is compromised by leftist activists[1]. There are also articles on The Guardian and NYT[2][3]. In the right wing and independent media it looks even more gross[4][5]. 1. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-founder-sites-neutrality-is-dead-thanks-to-leftist-bias/ https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-found... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/22/ethiopia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/22/ethiopia 3. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-director-general-ethiopia-cholera-outbreaks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-dire... 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu3lm0W6saU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu3lm0W6saU 5. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/was-who-director-tedros-top-member-violent-ethiopian-communist-party https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/was-who-director-tedr...
  - augustt 6y ago
    What a fucking joke that Breitbart article is. Wikipedia is biased because they state global warming as fact? Because Trump's page has more scandals (no shit) than Obama? Linking to that article says so much about you.

Loughla 6y ago

> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true. Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe in, personally, just because you don't believe in it? What is this world?

crysin 6y ago
It's the human world and this has always been the case. Humans as a whole have never been 100% rational.
2019-nCoV 6y ago
How can a statement about the future be empirically wrong?
- Loughla 6y ago
  I don't know what that even means. We're talking about facts established by research, indicating they have occurred in the past. I don't know what you're talking about.
  - 2019-nCoV 6y ago
    No, we're talking about an election in the future that hasn't happened yet.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Tomorrow gravity is going to reverse and fling you into the sun.
  - GenerocUsername 6y ago
    If gravity were reversed you would actually be flung away from the sun. I ask you to please be correct and factual at all times. This is a discussion on the internet after all.

throawy1234 6y ago

I was in the social media support for one of the candidates during the Democratic primaries. Because of that we had direct access to twitter and the DNC social medial group. We noticed David Rothkop who had a decent size following and contributed to MSNBC and the DailyBeast was a registered foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates [1] David Rothkopf had made some wild accusations against two presidential candidates who were most critical of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. We asked Twitter multiple times that if anyone is a registered foreign agent and is constantly commenting on the US primaries and elections, that twitter should flag that account with some indicator or icon. All Twitter's government public relation person did was to give us some lip service and didn't do anything about it. [1] https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6596-Exhibit-AB-20180927-1.pdf https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6596-Exhibit-AB-20180927-1.pdf

dathinab 6y ago

There is a huge difference between a algorithm which detect potential fake news and adds a banner like "find information about <topik> here", "this is likely faktual wrong", etc. And a algorithm which removes the content outright. With other words: - fact check => removal == bad especially if automatised, basically censorship - fact check => warning + link to some source + maybe slightly less visibility in search (but still visible and potentially still even first result) == ok, people still can make their own opinion there is basically no censorship. (Side note, yes I'm aware that even "non" censoring methods can have a minimal censoring effect due to peoples laziness, but it's quite limited and IMHO acceptable especially if linked sources are objective.)

gadders 6y ago

It's certainly not a solved problem when the "Head of Site Integrity" has a history of anti-Trump tweets and called the President a Nazi. And that's just the head of the team. You can see the hard-left and pro-Antifa affiliations of the team outlined here: https://nickmonroe.blog/2019/11/28/dear-jack-twitter-is-politically-biased-heres-how/ https://nickmonroe.blog/2019/11/28/dear-jack-twitter-is-poli...

dboreham 6y ago
Any intelligent moral person is going to have "a history of anti-Trump tweets" if they're a Twitter user, which presumably someone who works for Twitter would be. Same logic goes for calling a person acting like Nazis a Nazi.
- jki275 6y ago
  Quite the flame bait there, you're claiming that half the country is not intelligent or moral.
  - lovich 6y ago
    If those follow a standard bell curve, wouldn't it make sense for half the country to be below the average on those aspects?
    - jki275 6y ago
      Assumes a LOT of facts not in evidence.
- gadders 6y ago
  I'm not sure that that is a reasonable point of view.
mgoetzke 6y ago
pro-Antifa means Pro Anti-Fascist which means to organise some movement against fascism. Would we really want people to be the inverse ? Meaning would we like them to be more fascist or accepting of fascism ? What exactly happened that AntiFa has become a group that people don't support ? Maybe I missed something there.

chlodwig 6y ago

It is not at all a solved problem. Fact-checking has the ancient "who watches the watchers" problem. Who facts checks the fact-checkers? And more broadly, censoring harassing tweets has the problem that a lot of activism looks a lot like harassment, and censoring "conspiracy theories" looks a lot like powerful people censoring those speaking truth to power. For anyone who believes that Twitter should be in the business of fact-checking, or censoring harassing or disinformation, tell me which of these should be fact-checked or censored: 1. "Don't wear masks. They don't work and take away masks from healthcare workers." 2. "The government is lying about whether masks work or not because we don't have enough masks for everyone." 3. "Masks help. Everyone should be wearing masks, wear a home-made mask if we don't have enough store bought ones." 4. "Fact: coronavirus is not airborne" 5. "Coronavirus is airborne." 6. "Scientists think Hydroxychloroquine might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: " 7. "Scientists think treating men with estrogen might be effective in treating coronavirus, link here: " 8. "Look at this video of this Karen calling the police and lying because a black man who just told her to leash his dog. Do better white women." 9. "Look at this article about this Shylock who scammed thousands of seniors out of their retirement money. Do better Jews. 10. "Look at this Laquisha and her five kids taking over the bus and screaming and disturbing all the other riders. Do better black women." 11. Look, another tech-bro mansplaining and whitesplaining why racism isn't really a thing. I can only stomach so much of this ignorance. 12. "Under the Trump administration, there are actual Nazi's in the White House." 13. "Trump is a traitor against his country, he criminally colluded with Russia to rig the election." 14. "Representative Scarborough killed his intern." 15. "There is a paedophilia blackmail network that is pulling the strings behind the Democratic party." 16. "There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free" 17. "The United States is the highest taxed nation in the world -- that will change." 18. "Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri." 19. "If Democrats were truly serious about eradicating voter fraud, they would severely restrict absentee voting, permitting it only when voters have a good excuse, like illness." 20. "Absentee voting is to voting in person as as a take-home exam is to a proctored one. And just as teachers have reported a massive cheating as a result of moving to take-home tests during coronavirus, we can expect massive fraud as we move to mail-in ballots." Here are my answers if I was running Twitter: I would not fact-check any of these statements. I would censor the one's using derogatory racial language that is 8, 9, 10, and 11. Also 8, 9 and 11 should be banned for harassing a private citizen. For the potentially defamatory statements -- 12, 13, 14 and 15 -- if made by a real-name account they should be let stand and the offended person or organization can sue in court for defamation if they think it is false. If made by an anon account, the statement should be removed if reported.

staycoolboy 6y ago

> As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read Has this always been the case for you? or just in the past few years? I didn't care about news until the first gulf war. Then something flipped a switch in my brain and I could not get enough news. When news broadcasters started adopting websites in the 90's, I was like a junkie. I don't recall significant partisan division over Gulf War I, but I do recall a hard left/right split with the house takeover by Gingrich in 1994, and then the Clinton impeachment. Late 1990's is where things started to become bifurcated (remember, I wasn't paying attention in the 70's and 80's so it could have been as bad). Fast forward to mid 2010's and suddenly there are too many websites with "news" combined with SEO and recommendation algorithms spouting demonstrable nonsense that I can't help but hear Steve Bannon's "Flood the zone with shit" argument. Because it is working on me. I am over-educated (an engineering patent attorney for a top silicon company), I get paid to be a critical thinker. Facts and news just are clearly under assault from the zone-flooding angle to the point where being critical wears me to the bone. Was this intentional, or is this a consequence? Has the zone been successfully flooded as Bannon commanded?

heurist 6y ago
I think it's a natural effect of internet expansion. Stick 7B humans in a room together and you'll get a lot of noise because the world is a big place and events are literally happening everywhere all at once. Some find opportunity in that because the real world power is still trapped in spatially localized social networks and the internet can't reliably pierce that realm. Secrets are valuable. The noise we interact with is the intersection of waves created half a world away and the waves we create or come into contact with locally. The best perspective to maintain, in my opinion, is that local is the most important. If you were under immediate threat of death (eg a stranger with a knife in your home), you probably wouldn't care what's happening in DC, you'd be 100% focused on the danger in front of you. I measure that as "more important". The problem is in distant or murky danger, where you don't want to be caught off-guard. You have to be able to gauge your ability to adapt and achieve safety in comparison to the magnitude of danger, then limit your anxieties. Do what you can to be prepared and accept the rest. (This is what I have learned from a lifelong anxiety disorder). There is also no general mechanism for making sense of the massive amount of information being produced, so it's overwhelming. Google attacks the problem as an indexing tool (I'm sure they're attempting to become a generally intelligent agent). Wikipedia is a curated collection of humanity's abstract knowledge. Neither describes causality of arbitrary macroeconomic events though. If there was one broadly accepted source of truth then we'd all cling to it like a life raft.

tmaly 6y ago

On masks as a good idea, I am still a little concerned with touch transmission. I see people without gloves touching their mask. This is totally contaminating the mask. I would really like a settled question on whether mail and groceries are safe to touch. There was a study that came out saying the virus could exist on different surfaces for different periods of time. News reported last week that CDC update the website that indicated that the study was flawed. Soon after the CDC added clarification which still leaves the conclusion open. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0522-cdc-updates-covid-transmission.html https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/s0522-cdc-updates-co...

anewguy9000 6y ago

there is no such thing as truth as such; instead there are only theories and their predictive power (you could be in the matrix). so the best thing we have is the scientific method -- as individuals, we can all apply scientific thinking.

ChrisLomont 6y ago

>Hm, is fact checking solved problem? It doesn't need to be a solved problem to provide value by flagging highly questionable content. And many statements are known to be false or misleading, and providing info to people who don't know better is a step in a positive direction.

bananabreakfast 6y ago

Yes, fact checking a single vocal and influential individual on everything they say is indeed a solved problem! We've been doing it for years, on every president and congressman in America. There are such things as indisputable falsehoods. And when important people relay them as the truth there are dozens of fact checking organizations that exist only to call these individuals out and hold them accountable to their word. The fact that Twitter has started doing this with one specific individual is neither new nor innovative.

null0pointer 6y ago

One nuance about facts is that they change over time as we learn more about whatever the fact is about. Take SARS-CoV-2 for example, our best scientific knowledge about it has changed significantly since the start of the year. Some _facts_ from January would be considered _misinformation_ now. You might say that the actual facts are the underlying truth, but even that doesn't help. Our current view on the underlying truth are what is widely considered to be factual. The underlying truth can also change, for instance as the virus evolves and takes on different characteristics. Fact checking is most definitely not solved and I would posit that it's fundamentally intractable.

peterkos 6y ago

> youtube algo's screwing up content creator A slightly different problem, but Tom Scott did an excellent video on the automation of the copyright system on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU In summary, auto copyright checking solves Most copyright issues, to a degree that no other solution can really provide. And while there are a small (yet very unfair) number of false positives, the benefit that the system as a whole allows far outpaces that downtrend: for YouTube to exist! With regards to fact checking, I'd be more interested to hear how many people who read those kind of "fact flags" actually change their opinion in an easy case (flat earth, climate change, etc.). Honestly, the problem of "true truth" might never be solved, but so will the cause of incompetence never disappear.

deleted 6y ago

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