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Independent fact checkers are never independent. There is a lot of money and power to be made in being arbiters of truth.
by newen 6y ago
Independent fact checkers are never independent. There is a lot of money and power to be made in being arbiters of truth.
- klyrs 6y agoNothing exists in a void, duh. My point is that one can strive for fact checkers who are independent of Facebook.
- 0xy 6y agoIndependent fact checkers are no better than Facebook, in fact in some cases are worse. Politifact, Buzzfeed and Washington Post are all included in the program and none of those are neutral. Politifact regularly spins political "fact checks", and will nuke evidence of their false claims from the internet (including from Archive.org) when they've been caught out. The number one problem with these fact checkers is that statements usually cannot be proven to the standard they advertise. When Trump speaks, it's usually saturated in hyperbole, exaggeration, imprecise language and metaphors. Politifact use this ambiguity to their advantage to achieve their political goals, usually by labeling a statement false because the figure was off by 2% or Politifact assumed context from a statement that was never given. If Trump says 37% of people do X, and Politifact posts "actshually, this is FALSE because it's only 35.78%", then that adds precisely nothing and is a clarification without meaning. In fact, Politifact regularly labels factual statements false if they think some factors behind the numbers invalidate the argument made (which is patently ridiculous, especially when you talk about statistics). "Fact checking" is so wishy-washy, subjective and rife with politically biased grifters that nobody should be trusted with the censorious power that Facebook bestows upon these biased entities.