32 ms·

Only distributed fact-checking can keep up with democratized distribution

132 points by awinter-py 6y ago

DiggyJohnson 6y ago
That’s a very compelling thesis statement. I’m looking forward to the discussion here. What criticisms of your argument are you anticipating, if any?
- awinter-py 6y ago
  "Obviously nobody should be allowed to write online and moderation just postpones that desirable end state" would be a valid counterargument I think
feralimal 6y ago
Who arbitrates? Is it whoever owns big corporations? Is it the mainstream media? Are they trustworthy? Is it the government? Scientists? Which one of us holds the truth? One man's facts are another man's lies. And this is fine. We should be able to tolerate multiple opinions. Labelling things as 'hate speech' and denying people the right to speech doesn't help! I think C S Lewis said it best: "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
- vdnkh 6y ago
  > One man's facts are another man's lies This is pretty absurd. We should be fighting disinformation instead of legitimizing it. Not all “facts” are based in a healthy reality. See: 2020 election “fraud”
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    See also: 2016 Russian collusion.
    - pavlov 6y ago
      The Mueller investigation indicted 34 people.
      - nextaccountic 6y ago
        So, it's prosecutors that decide what is true? What if they are wrong? (I'm not talking about this particular case)
        wwweston 6y ago
        I have an idea, we can convene special committees where both prosecutors and defendants are given a structured format in which they can present all the evidence for guilt/innocence and counterevidence and arguments. We'll have separate professionals in charge of making sure the structure/rules of the committee are followed so that it's fair, and of course we'll have advocates well-versed in these rules on both sides, but maybe we'll also have a panel of everyday people representing, well, everyone, so that decisions like this remain a public matter as well as professional opinion. Think of it as something like the royal courts for important decisions of old. In fact, that might be a good name for it: court.
        smsm42 6y ago
        Except courts do not determine truth. They determine legal guilt or innocence. They are actually designed this way - everybody can know somebody murdered somebody else, but if the court procedure is not followed and proof is not presented in a certain manner to achieve certain legal outcome - no prosecution. Moreover, there are special rules when known true evidence can be dismissed for not following the rules. OTOH, there are plenty of factually untrue court decisions - people have been incarcerated and even executed for crimes they factually did not commit. Check out Project Innocence, for example. If you want to find truth, courts are not the best place to look for it.
        wwweston 6y ago
  - umvi 6y ago
    This comment has been hidden because it was fact checked and determined to be partially false. Reason: facts don't have to be based in a "healthy reality" to be true since perception of reality is subjective. Click [here] to see original comment.
  - mythrwy 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA This looks pretty factual to me. It's fraud of some kind.
- electrondood 6y ago
  Facts aren't lies, and facts are definitely not opinions. Hate speech absolutely exists. Rights end when they infringe on the rights of others.
  - perched_robin 6y ago
    Islam is right about women.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    Hate speech definitely exists. A lot of people, regrettably, hate other people for a variety of reasons, and speak about it. But there's no "right" to be loved, so neither speaking nor hating violates any rights.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    You can easily do hate speech without telling any lies, just presenting [a specific subset of] verifiably true facts.
- pavlov 6y ago
  Why not jump off a bridge? After all, Newton's theory of gravitation is just a theory, and besides Einstein proved it's incomplete. The elite still pretends their disproven theory is truth because they want to control your life. Show the power of positive thinking and faith, make the leap! But seriously, equating fact-checking with torment is probably not what C. S. Lewis had in mind. It has historically been the case that when opinions and ideology replace facts, it opens the door to tormentors who won't hesitate to hurt you to impose their version of reality.
  - feralimal 6y ago
    Here is the full quote. I think its even better: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
    - pavlov 6y ago
      Is fact-checking tyranny? No.
      - sneak 6y ago
        People who wish it to be difficult for millions or billions to read anything they deem "false" is accurately described as "a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims".
      - smsm42 6y ago
        If the only information allowed is the one approved by designated "fact checkers" (the ideal most major social networks strive for, and most fact-checking enthusiasts would wholeheartedly approve) - it is the most complete example of tyranny (at least in the information space) possible. Of course, if fact checking merely exists as a set of opinions - it doesn't become tyrannical by itself. It's just an opinion of somebody on the question of what the facts are. But we all know it's not how it works. At least not how it works on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
- geofft 6y ago
  And this is why we are tormented with free-speech absolutists - their conscience says they're doing a good thing for the world.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    If others' freedoms are a torment to you, it is a really sorry existence.
    - geofft 6y ago
      Defining things as "other's freedoms" is begging the question. We generally recognize, for instance, that no one has the "freedom" to drive cars as fast as they like or fire bullets in public. Not many people think they have the "freedom" to knowingly tell lies about me or to reprint my copyrighted works. My existence is quite sorry, sure, but it would be improved if my ideological opponents could make arguments with substance.
      - smsm42 6y ago
        > fire bullets in public You can fire bullets, provided you can guarantee you wouldn't hit anyone or destroy any property. Usually this is achieved by either doing it on a range or in an open space far from other people and their property. Same for driving - if you're driving in a desert where you can't hit anyone, you can drive as fast as you'd like. If you're on a road surrounded by other people who you could maim or kill, and/or destroy their property - that's another business. It's not because I feel "offended" by you driving too fast - it's because you literally could kill me if you drive too fast. I haven't heard of anybody killed by a facebook post that expressed opinion they didn't agree with. That's why this is not your right to not see such opinions. > but it would be improved if my ideological opponents could make arguments with substance. Maybe it would, but nobody owes you to improve your existence. The system where certain people were forced to improve other people's existence, whether they liked it or not, existed once in the US. It was called "slavery". After a while, people wised up and realized this system sucks. At least most of the people did. Since then, you owe everybody not to make their existence worse by violating their rights, but they do not owe you to make your existence better - not until you convince them to do it by offering them something in exchange, like money or hugs or whatever you agree upon. It sucks, I know, but better than the alternative.
an_opabinia 6y ago
If Donald Trump had just spent 30 minutes more a day reading books or briefings, we wouldn’t be litigating misinformation, disinformation, flat earthers, fact checking, conspiracies, boomers, etc. Thousands of rants never written, tens of thousands of podcast episodes would have never been recorded, millions of tweets never tweeted. You actually only needed to improve the literacy of one man to make irrelevant 99.99% of the problems described here. Under the Biden presidency all this shit will still exist, it won’t disappear on noon Jan 20 2021, but it will stop mattering. Treating Trump as a constant while blaming everyone else (like this does) is the trap.
- freewilly1040 6y ago
  This (extremely dubiously) assumes a sincere effort to tell the truth on Trump’s part
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  You assume that Trump is not just deliberately lying. While Trump might or might not be smart, he is surrounded by people like Pompeo and Cotton who certainly are. They lie and mislead too.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  > Under the Biden presidency all this shit will still exist ... but it will stop mattering. Why is that? Because Biden is truthful? Because he won't be tweeting 10 times a day? Because the media will (effectively) do the tweeting for him? Because the media will simply not challenge him, and ignore his critics? All politicians lie, or perhaps to put it more charitably, they promote a very one-sided point of view. It's almost the definition of politics. The only reason anything will change under Biden is that many of the people with the biggest megaphones support him.
  - therouwboat 6y ago
    News has been trump trump trump for the past 4 years and you say he doesnt get his voice heard?
centimeter 6y ago
Ceding "fact-checking" (i.e. narrative construction) to social media companies (directly, or indirectly by letting them choose contractors to do it for them) is a terrible idea. Not only is it unlikely the narrative you receive will track reality in a useful way, but it gives a huge amount of political power to these companies. A much more sane approach, IMO, is to come up with software frameworks where you choose which research firms or individuals (friends, professors, etc.) you want to follow and how much trust you want to assign to each of them. There is plenty of research on ways to do this well in the context of "web-of-trust" cryptosystems.
gtsop 6y ago
I like the idea, but the author doesn't seem to care enough for the root cause of dissinformation. That is, at it's core, the existence of conflicting interests. Because if literally everyone was on the same page, there wouldn't be a reason to lie about anything (of importance), right? Although distributed fact checking sounds like a good idea (however problematic it could be, even in a world without interest conflicts) how does the author prepare for the inevitable moment when a lie will get the seal of a Fact™ because big players push towards that direction? How would you protect your ecosystem against that? You are back to square 1.
- will4274 6y ago
  There's an angle here of [conflict theory vs mistake theory](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/). Your post seems to take a conflict-theory only perspective - that disinformation is caused only by conflicting interests, and never by incorrect analysis. Is that your opinion or is it enough to say there are some conflict theorists, therefore fact checking can't solve all the problems?
  - gtsop 6y ago
    Interesting article. I think black and white is never a good rule, so although I would side on the conflict-theory perspective it would be very naive of me to claim that incorrect analysis doesn't ever contribute to dissinformation. Same goes with many of the points in the article that the author assigns to "mistake-theorists" but I can see myself subscribing to these. With those in mind, I'd say that although not the sole cause of dissinformation, conflict of interests is the most important and impactful factor.
  - Siira 6y ago
    Everyone knows different beliefs happen because of mistakes, conflicted interests, and that differing models can still embody one truth (E.g., Newtonian physics vs relativistic), with different tradeoffs. Also, mistakes happen in even recognizing your own interests. A lot of mistakes are also practically unsolvable. Any moderation algorithm that assumes conflict away is hopelessly naive.
aphextron 6y ago
You assume the average person cares about facts more than validation of their preexisting worldview. Fake news peddlers know this isn't true, and it's why they're winning.
woliveirajr 6y ago
I think the biggest problem is that much is said to be fact-check but is, indeed, opinion verification. People have many degrees in how they express themselves and many times an opinion use words that resemble factual statements. Then others read it as facts and want that someone give a validation or rebuttal of it. Add some partial fact-check, some political inclined, some strong words, and then everybody has opinion of the credibility of it. Be it centralized or distributed.
amelius 6y ago
Children need to be taught about fake news, bias, etc.
- hrafn 6y ago
  May not necessarily have much of an effect, as in this classic example where children who had recently received education on the use of fake sources were unable to spot that an article on the "tree octopus" was made up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_octopus
sergiotapia 6y ago
Nah, we're moving towards individual controls and decentralized platforms. Having a tool distribute fact check is just delaying the inevitable. Just look at tiktok for the HARD repudiation of the ultra-left themes. The young people will always be counter-culture, and let's face it the ultra-left is mainstream today. Facebook, twitter? Those are your wine-aunts/grandpas platforms.
- awinter-py 6y ago
  'wine aunt platform' is a phrase that will stay with me
- electrondood 6y ago
  What are you thinking of as "ultra-left"? The only actual radicalization I've seen in the last decade has been "ultra-right," militias, normalization of anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiment, hyper-nationalism, normalization of hate speech, hate crimes and hate speech against minorities, etc. DHS and FBI both call out rising right wing domestic terrorism as one of the top threats to the US. They don't mention "ultra-left" anything.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I think the key to achieving this is building Web of Trust on top of the fact checker relationships and connect them to the users, so that you can see exactly how you are connected, and whether you can trust the individuals. Today, the sources of whatever information you read, even from the most credible sources, are obscured. Whether it is CNN or a peer-reviewed journal article, the most information you will get about the author is a name, a picture, and maybe a bit of their publicly available data. With Web of Trust, the level of trust you should assign to an author, and by extension the information, can be instantaneously computed by adding up your own trust references. If I assign my trust responsibly, and you assign your trust to me, then everyone I trust is by extension trustworthy, and the information metadata can reflect this. If you don't think I assign my trust responsibly, then you can remove me from your trust circle, and my assigned trust will become irrelevant. It's not a perfect system, it's vulnerable to attacks, it requires eternal vigilance, but it's the best we've got going for us today, IMO.
- awinter-py 6y ago
  have you used a web of trust system you liked, that works well w/ an existing social platform? I'd try one if you have a rec. fwiw I wrote one of these and mine sucked
  - jancsika 6y ago
    I'm curious-- did you build it as a decentralized/federated/distributed piece of software?
    - awinter-py 6y ago
      nope -- it was a forum, the web-of-trust feature only operated over the users and content inside the forum
      - forgotmypw17 6y ago
        Could you please write a little more about your forum? I'm also working on a forum system that includes basic WoT features, and would be grateful for anything you share. (Prototype link is in my profile if you want to play with the current prototype.)
ve55 6y ago
I agree with the author that optimizing for virality as the bottom line is a disaster than can only go on for so long. Its consequences are obvious at this point, and it's not leading to good places anywhere it is applied en masse. (For those unconvinced, I encourage to read about how the most viral and captivating content is often content that purposefully instills anger, fear, outgroup-hatred, schadenfreude, etc) But deciding that we 'just need to fact-check' things more seems to be a very incomplete solution. Much is said about "who gets to fact-check?" but I think even if we assume the people fact-checking are good (morally) and mostly very correct (veridically), this solution will still fall extremely short. Even if you perform good fact-checking, there is little evidence that this will achieve your goal, which is not actually correcting text on the Internet, but correcting peoples’ beliefs in their own minds, which turns out to be pretty difficult (telling people they are wrong while removing content they want to read is likely not the best way, even so). Remember that many rights that you take for granted were only gained thanks to the failures of past powers to control the narrative as strictly as they wanted to. While I don't think that anyone can control 'the narrative' so to speak, especially not a single company or government (that currently exists), we will still see ceaseless attempts at such; the temptation to correct everyone is just too great (https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/, anyone?), especially if you believe you're on the side of Virtue (which it turns out, almost everyone believes).
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  This. These outright falsehoods that people take for truths are not taken for truth in a vacuum. As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them. I was reading somewhere that people tend to readily assimilate information conforming to their own world view, and have a tendency to block out information that does not conform to their world view. It's claimed that these tendencies pre-date the internet. If that's true, the negative effects of virality were inevitable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jl6 6y ago
whack 6y ago
Very long article that buries the lede: > We need a market ecosystem of moderation vendors who provide different kinds of value to different kinds of users. A moderation marketplace is good for platforms because they don’t want to be the arbiter of truth, they just want users to have a good experience > It’s good for users because they’re not forced into anything; they can pick which web they want to dwell on. This may sound like a filter bubble, where ‘everyone has their own truth’, but moderation vendors will still need to maintain their reputation for being right The author is overly optimistic in thinking that people who fall for blatant misinformation, will not fall for grossly biased or incompetent moderators. Anyone who believes Trump's election-was-stolen conspiracy theory, will also have blind faith in any moderator that Trump and his movement endorses, regardless of the moderator's reputation among mainstream sources. You may say that doesn't matter because the vast majority of people will never tweak their settings and will simply use the platform's default moderator. Which is a good point, but once again, that brings us back to the status quo where people get upset about the "bias" shown by the platform and its anointed default moderator. I do like the idea of decoupling the platform corporation and the moderator, but it still raises questions about who gets to control the moderator organization. Call me crazy but these misinformation campaigns have made one thing abundantly clear. Popular voting is inherently susceptible to actively-misinformed voters and there are no palatable solutions to this problem. https://outlookzen.com/2020/10/26/reasons-to-replace-the-popular-vote/ https://outlookzen.com/2020/10/26/reasons-to-replace-the-pop...
- XorNot 6y ago
  The real basic failure is the same one which is currently running: how do you limit it to 1 "author" per actual physical human being in the world? Like set aside other problems like establishing credentials or reputability, disinformation campaigns are based on the reality that it's very easy to create just plausible enough looking accounts, and getting easier (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/).
endymi0n 6y ago
I'm completely convinced by now that fact-checking is utterly useless, because it is based on a specific worldview that truth is something important. While I happen to share that worldview, recent populist politicians didn't just ignore that, but managed to turn this idea on its head — and the left still seems to not get it. There was really no shortage of scandals, proven disinformation or exposing books. But I saw liberals and progressives stumped over the fact that exposing those lies did absolutely zero to change opinion over the populist administrations. No matter the previous results, all those years they still worked with the mindset that just exposing one more lie would suddenly change everyone's mind. As Einstein said: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The thing they don't get is that the average Bolsonaro or Trump supporter simply does not _care_ whether their politician lies, if they simply come out of the argument as stronger. It's not logical at all, it's psycho-logical. Any facts are pretty simple to get off the table if you're brazen, narcisstic and sociopathic enough: Just accuse the other side of doing it before they do, and if they do, double down on it yourself in order to keep the narrative lead. It doesn't even have to make the slightest sense, it just needs to make small egos feel good and in the know. "ABC: I'm lying? Look at XYZ, he lied two times and I can prove it! So nasty!" Suddenly the distinction between ABC lying every day and XYZ a dozen times in their career does not matter anymore to the casual onlooker. All politicians lie, why would fact-checking matter? In fact, probably even the fact-checkers lie! And if you don't believe me, just remember that "Fake News" was an invention of the left that was rhetorically completely spun around (extremely successfully so) from meaning creating fake news to meaning that all (mainstream) news are fake. It took nothing more than repetition and massive confidence. As long as you keep people more scared about China, socialism, gun-robbers and making the next paycheck, it's rather easy to control the narrative, no matter the facts. Fact-checking is a liberal pipe-dream.
- shrimpx 6y ago
  Fact checking works in a civilized society where the adversaries are “good sports” who acknowledge the rules of the game — e.g., conceding a lost election. The problem today is that we don’t live in such a society. Our political reality has edged closer to pure wrestling for power, where the other guy is seen as bad and any lever is ok to pull to prevent them from expressing.
tacitusarc 6y ago
This problem is far deeper and more complex than the author makes it out to be. I have yet to see a single detailed explanation that actually touches on all the intricacies involved: from blog posts to documentaries, they all are incomplete at best or wrong at worst. So of course, the proposed solutions are necessarily incomplete, as they're not working from a comprehensive understanding of the problem. I don't know how to solve this. The problem isn't recent, it's at least decades old, if not centuries. As far as I can tell, it boils down to a lack of effort to reconcile the experiences of disparate groups, and the need to contextualize their ideologies within those experiences. This fundamentally means that one person's facts can be another person's fiction, and the line between the two should be tread carefully. For a long time, this problem was sidestepped entirely, as groups simply avoided one another or had minimal contact.The problem was exacerbated in the modern world, and has been brought to its most extreme conclusion through the internet. Institutional authority today speaks with too much unearned certainty. Those who share that certainty will be appeased, and those who do not will be incensed. I do not know how to solve this problem. Neither does anyone else, though. That includes the author of this article, who doesn't even understand the problem in the first place. If there is one takeaway, however, that I would like people to have, it is this: just because someone disagrees with you, or refuses to acknowledge facts of which you are certain, does not mean they are stupid. It is entirely possible it is you who are missing something. Be uncertain.
- loopz 6y ago
  The solution is simple, yet unoptimized entirely but for the smallest union of people: Empathy The incentive everywhere need to be to empathize and understand our differences, to bridge the gaps. When one looks at the overall business world, which is institutionalized war and injustice, against people and environment, there is much to work with. All the logic in the world won't right these wrongs.
  - Siira 6y ago
    Most people don’t have that much empathy. Most of them don’t even want it. (I certainly don’t want it.) Your solution is basically adding terms for other people to everyone’s utility function. It would require a super-Orwellian effort to pull that off. The truth is that there is no panacea at all, and we need to design sound game theoretic mechanisms for every single thing we care about.
Anka33 6y ago
"fact-checking" is dog whistle for "only leftist allowed"
- loopz 6y ago
  Because people on the right only lie?
- klyrs 6y ago
  What about lefty antivaxers?
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  The role of fact checking is not to strive for partisan balance but rather to identify public comments that are untrue. American conservatives would fall afoul of fact checking far less frequently if the conservative worldview wasn't wedded to talking points that are not factually accurate. For example: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence of ongoing large-scale voter fraud in US elections. There is no evidence that the incoming Biden administration intends to end capitalism. There were no 'convoys' of migrants preparing to violently storm the US-Mexico border prior to the 2018 midterms. Barrack Obama was not ineligible to serve as President. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals. Etc. A fact checker who does not point out the fact-free basis of these, and other, deeply-held conservative talking points is simply not doing his/her job. If the weight of fact checking falls primarily against conservatives, then conservatives can fix that problem by lying less frequently.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    Judging by the vote totals of the above post, it seems there is a cadre of users here who believe the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor[0]. No wonder HN folks have such a hard time with the idea of fact checking. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
geofft 6y ago
I think "fact checking" is the wrong framing for the problem at hand - assuming we're talking about the problem of people shooting up pizza shops. (The article also talks about how businesses or hobbyists who are genuinely interested in truth can find the truth more accurately, but I think that's pretty orthogonal to the problem of social-media-fueled conspiracy theories.) Take the US election, for instance. At this point the "facts," strictly speaking, aren't really in doubt: we have certain reports from the various states following various procedures for verification, and those reports give a certain winner. The argument against that position is not against the checkable fact of the reports - the argument is that, for various reasons, multiple of these states are either deliberately lying or had their procedures tricked. What's left is whether you believe that to be plausible and in fact more plausible than the null hypothesis that the election went roughly as predicted. And that's not checkable, or at least not democratically-checkable. If you believe that voting machines were hacked in a way that left no evidence, or ballots were modified in transit, or the distance of observers left them unable to notice intentional mis-tallying, or whatever, what sort of fact would convince you otherwise? If you are so inclined to believe that the election was stolen, you can find facts to back you up. It is factually true that there were illegal votes, for instance: in an election with 160 million votes, the chance that not a single person would misunderstand the rules for where they can vote are basically nil. It is factually true that the Georgia secretary of state made this argument, not particularly eloquently, and is on video saying that they expect to find voter fraud. It is factually true that many electronic voting machines lack proper safeguards. It is factually true that there are more avenues of attack on mail-in ballots. And so forth. What we have is not a lying problem: what we have is a propaganda problem. And we do. in a sense, have "distributed fact-checking" / a marketplace of fact-checkers: we have different members of the news media with different viewpoints. And it turns out people aren't particularly loyal to any one vendor. When Fox News called the election for Biden, people flipped the channel to Newsmax, which has "an editorial policy of being supportive of the President," according to their CEO. So I don't think that encouraging people to buy into fact-checking builds any bridges for the communities that incubate future pizza-shop shooters to come back to reality. What they will learn is that they can always find facts to fit their beliefs. Sure, there are facts out there that don't fit their beliefs, too, but they lack an interest in changing their beliefs, so it's easy to wave those away. (The flat-earthers mentioned in this article are another good example of this phenomenon.)
User23 6y ago
"Fact-checking" has very little to do with facts. It's just a clever rhetorical ploy to promote some viewpoints and disqualify others. Specifically, it's a species of bullshit[1]. If the actual facts support the bullshitter all the better, but if they don't you can rest assured the "fact check" will be "contextualized" to whatever extent is needed to serve the bullshitters' rhetorical ends. [1] Bullshit defined here as speech intended to persuade without regard for veracity. The liar knows the truth and conceals it, but the bullshitter doesn't care if his statements are true so long as his bullshit is persuasive. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit
- rabuse 6y ago
  This is how I feel about people claiming every dissenting view as "fact checked" or "debunked" in recent times; it just throws out any possibility of debate.
- smt88 6y ago
  So you believe nothing is a fact? You're obviously not the target audience of fact-checkers. Most people agree on some basic principles of reality that can't be skewed. For example, when a politician says something in public that millions of people hear and is recorded on video, and then he says he didn't say it, that is a lie. A fact-checker would provide the evidence and context. Or if a politician says that nothing could be done to reduce Covid deaths in the US, that is less straightforward but also an easy lie to disprove because there are people who died due to lack of available tests for their coworkers, or people who died because of a huge nightclub being allowed to stay open.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    I hope you agree that context matters. Anyone can have a sound bite cut out of a larger statement and have that spun to be something that isn't representative, or that he didn't intend, or even the complete opposite. And then for many people, repitition becomes fact. Whatever they've heard most often, from the most sources, becomes their belief.
heimatau 6y ago
Democratized fact-checking won't work. The costs are too high. IF you can find a way to reduce the costs of the general public to fact-check, you might be onto something. But until then, we'll see a few places that sometimes provide signal to the general public but mostly provide noise. This problem isn't simple. If you have ideas, pitch them and build.
zby 6y ago
Recycling my comment from a recent discussion: The problem is that we don't want facts - we want confirmations. "The reality is that the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/ https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/ Fact checking is not the right angle to look at it - what we need is curiosity.
crazygringo 6y ago
Unfortunately, in the US, fact-checking addresses only the symptom, not the cause, and is unlikely to change anyone's minds [1]. We can see that disinformation isn't a necessary feature of democratic debate today, as it is a tactic used overwhelming by Republicans/conservatives, and very little by Democrats/liberals. In a two-party system like the US, the structural reasons Republicans adopt this tactic is fundamentally because the structure of the Electoral College makes it rational for Republicans to target polarized extremists (to boost turnout), while Democrats need to target the center (to win swing voters) [2]. The solution isn't fact-checking. The solution is abolishing the electoral college, so that both parties have to appeal equally to centrist swing voters, who are more convinced by reasonable factual appeals than by polarized disinformation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias [2] https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-election-joe-biden-donald-trump-electoral-college-vote-senate-democracy https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-election-joe-biden-donald-...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > We can see that disinformation isn't a necessary feature of democratic debate today, as it is a tactic used overwhelming by Republicans/conservatives, and very little by Democrats/liberals. I think you have your parties mixed up: - The Democrats spent 4 years on the fruitless Mueller probe, which had no basis in fact. This was an attempt to deny the authority of an elected President. - The Biden family is involved in a billion-dollar bribery scandal with the CCP. The only thing the Bidens have that's worth a billion dollars is influence.
oh_sigh 6y ago
I'd like to know how distributed fact checking could deal with this example: trump's infamous comments about mexican border crossers including rapists and criminals. From the quote, it is clear that the context is people crossing the border are frequently criminal elements, rapists being some of them. But every time I hear reference to this quote(except from overt trump supporters, who have their own issues interpreting events ), it is characterized as trump saying that all Mexicans are rapists. Literally every time I've ever heard it referenced, even from mainstream news articles. How does one do distributed fact checking if there is a mass public delusion? At best, distributed fact checking can give you th concensus of fact checkers, which is not always the truth.
- weswpg 6y ago
  what percentage of immigrants - of any origin - are criminals and rapists? the quote: > “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said in the same speech. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” you can assume he meant something other than what he said, but his words were in reference to "When Mexico send its people", so it is not "delusion" to say he referred to "people from Mexico". he so generously acknowledges that only "some" of them might be good people. what do you think he meant when he said "they're not sending you"? what do you think he meant by saying Mexico "sends" people to the US? the media was right to treat that comment as indefensible.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    It being indefensible is a different point than characterizing the statement as "trump called mexicans rapists". You're doing the exact thing I was saying that everyone does with regards to this comment.
chaganated 6y ago
Just wait until they start "fact checking" your personal conversations. Yet another unfortunate combination of elitist and philosophical dunce. It is so tiresome.
bleepblorp 6y ago
There is very little evidence that fact checking actually works to reduce the impacts of disinformation. See e.g. this study of the impact of Twitter warnings on belief in disonformation: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/c/8659/files/2020/10/ckk_PSQ_SSRN.pdf https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/c/8659/... The only known-effective way to deal with disinformation is to remove it.
somehnrdr14726 6y ago
I wonder if pulling the brakes on what's being called the post-fact era, is futile. Maybe the internet is perfectly capable of maintaining N disjointed realities and there's nothing we can do to resolve them. It may not be high-resolution virtual reality, but if the only way I interact with other people is through devices, it's virtual reality. We call them bubbles but they're so much more. I think if we accept this as an invariant we might be able to find solutions by trudging forward. As a thought prompt it certainly gets my thinking cap going.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  The problem is that these coexisting fantasy worlds run into issues when you actually do touch reality, which does not go away simply because one choses not to believe in it. covid of course being the most recent example. We can all run into whatever bubbles we want, but it won't stop a biological virus. Everyone can spin it into their own virtual narrative, but people will die nonetheless, and underlying the cloud and the internet is good old hardware and infrastructure, which is very real and very decaying. Fleeing into digital worlds is only a temporary solution.
Cyberthal 6y ago
The only ones who need agonize over the moral quandaries are the ones setting censorship policy. For the rest of us, it's helpful to stop worrying about ought and focus on what is. In the long run, an audience will leave a platform that discriminates against them. This means the big platforms will fragment. The more they discriminate, the faster this will occur. This is a financial and social benefit for their opponents, who should therefore expose but not oppose it. Monolithic institutions such as Big Platform are vulnerable to the same ideological convergence that captured the big universities, but this problem is self-solving. Social cycle theory predicts hegemonic collapse due to impractical religion, but now both universities and Big Platform are being replaced piecemeal by the invasive barbarian hordes of the decentralized Internet, who ignore national boundaries. See Parler and Gab for Twitter; DDG, Bing and Dogpile for Google. Facebook's challengers are VK, Minds and Diaspora, although Facebook is more loathe to offend its conservative lucrative userbase. Google's manipulations are subtle enough that anti-trust, section 230 and the like are probably greater threats; personalized search results still usually deliver a superior product despite biased results manipulation. A divided society that increasingly refuses to do business with each other cannot have united platforms. For every leftist who discriminates against the right, there is a rightist who is legally barred from openly practicing his discrimination against a protected category on the left. Which isn't the same as saying this discrimination doesn't occur. Already hordes of Republican Boomers have rejected Twitter's heavy-handed censorship, driving record competitor growth. Regardless of whether one believes Trump will overturn the MSM-declared electoral outcome, it's obvious that IF he does, Twitter's losses will accelerate. This will increase popular skepticism towards the other big platforms, to say nothing of increased governmental scrutiny. Hillary's loss proved certainty an illusion. It's a bold bet; we'll see what happens.

132 points by awinter-py 6y ago

That’s a very compelling thesis statement. I’m looking forward to the discussion here. What criticisms of your argument are you anticipating, if any?

awinter-py 6y ago
"Obviously nobody should be allowed to write online and moderation just postpones that desirable end state" would be a valid counterargument I think

feralimal 6y ago

Who arbitrates? Is it whoever owns big corporations? Is it the mainstream media? Are they trustworthy? Is it the government? Scientists? Which one of us holds the truth? One man's facts are another man's lies. And this is fine. We should be able to tolerate multiple opinions. Labelling things as 'hate speech' and denying people the right to speech doesn't help! I think C S Lewis said it best: "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"

vdnkh 6y ago
> One man's facts are another man's lies This is pretty absurd. We should be fighting disinformation instead of legitimizing it. Not all “facts” are based in a healthy reality. See: 2020 election “fraud”
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  See also: 2016 Russian collusion.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    The Mueller investigation indicted 34 people.
    - nextaccountic 6y ago
      So, it's prosecutors that decide what is true? What if they are wrong? (I'm not talking about this particular case)
      - wwweston 6y ago
        I have an idea, we can convene special committees where both prosecutors and defendants are given a structured format in which they can present all the evidence for guilt/innocence and counterevidence and arguments. We'll have separate professionals in charge of making sure the structure/rules of the committee are followed so that it's fair, and of course we'll have advocates well-versed in these rules on both sides, but maybe we'll also have a panel of everyday people representing, well, everyone, so that decisions like this remain a public matter as well as professional opinion. Think of it as something like the royal courts for important decisions of old. In fact, that might be a good name for it: court.
        smsm42 6y ago
        Except courts do not determine truth. They determine legal guilt or innocence. They are actually designed this way - everybody can know somebody murdered somebody else, but if the court procedure is not followed and proof is not presented in a certain manner to achieve certain legal outcome - no prosecution. Moreover, there are special rules when known true evidence can be dismissed for not following the rules. OTOH, there are plenty of factually untrue court decisions - people have been incarcerated and even executed for crimes they factually did not commit. Check out Project Innocence, for example. If you want to find truth, courts are not the best place to look for it.
        wwweston 6y ago
- umvi 6y ago
  This comment has been hidden because it was fact checked and determined to be partially false. Reason: facts don't have to be based in a "healthy reality" to be true since perception of reality is subjective. Click [here] to see original comment.
- mythrwy 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA This looks pretty factual to me. It's fraud of some kind.
electrondood 6y ago
Facts aren't lies, and facts are definitely not opinions. Hate speech absolutely exists. Rights end when they infringe on the rights of others.
- perched_robin 6y ago
  Islam is right about women.
- smsm42 6y ago
  Hate speech definitely exists. A lot of people, regrettably, hate other people for a variety of reasons, and speak about it. But there's no "right" to be loved, so neither speaking nor hating violates any rights.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  You can easily do hate speech without telling any lies, just presenting [a specific subset of] verifiably true facts.
pavlov 6y ago
Why not jump off a bridge? After all, Newton's theory of gravitation is just a theory, and besides Einstein proved it's incomplete. The elite still pretends their disproven theory is truth because they want to control your life. Show the power of positive thinking and faith, make the leap! But seriously, equating fact-checking with torment is probably not what C. S. Lewis had in mind. It has historically been the case that when opinions and ideology replace facts, it opens the door to tormentors who won't hesitate to hurt you to impose their version of reality.
- feralimal 6y ago
  Here is the full quote. I think its even better: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."
  - pavlov 6y ago
    Is fact-checking tyranny? No.
    - sneak 6y ago
      People who wish it to be difficult for millions or billions to read anything they deem "false" is accurately described as "a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims".
    - smsm42 6y ago
      If the only information allowed is the one approved by designated "fact checkers" (the ideal most major social networks strive for, and most fact-checking enthusiasts would wholeheartedly approve) - it is the most complete example of tyranny (at least in the information space) possible. Of course, if fact checking merely exists as a set of opinions - it doesn't become tyrannical by itself. It's just an opinion of somebody on the question of what the facts are. But we all know it's not how it works. At least not how it works on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
geofft 6y ago
And this is why we are tormented with free-speech absolutists - their conscience says they're doing a good thing for the world.
- smsm42 6y ago
  If others' freedoms are a torment to you, it is a really sorry existence.
  - geofft 6y ago
    Defining things as "other's freedoms" is begging the question. We generally recognize, for instance, that no one has the "freedom" to drive cars as fast as they like or fire bullets in public. Not many people think they have the "freedom" to knowingly tell lies about me or to reprint my copyrighted works. My existence is quite sorry, sure, but it would be improved if my ideological opponents could make arguments with substance.
    - smsm42 6y ago
      > fire bullets in public You can fire bullets, provided you can guarantee you wouldn't hit anyone or destroy any property. Usually this is achieved by either doing it on a range or in an open space far from other people and their property. Same for driving - if you're driving in a desert where you can't hit anyone, you can drive as fast as you'd like. If you're on a road surrounded by other people who you could maim or kill, and/or destroy their property - that's another business. It's not because I feel "offended" by you driving too fast - it's because you literally could kill me if you drive too fast. I haven't heard of anybody killed by a facebook post that expressed opinion they didn't agree with. That's why this is not your right to not see such opinions. > but it would be improved if my ideological opponents could make arguments with substance. Maybe it would, but nobody owes you to improve your existence. The system where certain people were forced to improve other people's existence, whether they liked it or not, existed once in the US. It was called "slavery". After a while, people wised up and realized this system sucks. At least most of the people did. Since then, you owe everybody not to make their existence worse by violating their rights, but they do not owe you to make your existence better - not until you convince them to do it by offering them something in exchange, like money or hugs or whatever you agree upon. It sucks, I know, but better than the alternative.

an_opabinia 6y ago

If Donald Trump had just spent 30 minutes more a day reading books or briefings, we wouldn’t be litigating misinformation, disinformation, flat earthers, fact checking, conspiracies, boomers, etc. Thousands of rants never written, tens of thousands of podcast episodes would have never been recorded, millions of tweets never tweeted. You actually only needed to improve the literacy of one man to make irrelevant 99.99% of the problems described here. Under the Biden presidency all this shit will still exist, it won’t disappear on noon Jan 20 2021, but it will stop mattering. Treating Trump as a constant while blaming everyone else (like this does) is the trap.

freewilly1040 6y ago
This (extremely dubiously) assumes a sincere effort to tell the truth on Trump’s part
MattGaiser 6y ago
You assume that Trump is not just deliberately lying. While Trump might or might not be smart, he is surrounded by people like Pompeo and Cotton who certainly are. They lie and mislead too.
throwaway201103 6y ago
> Under the Biden presidency all this shit will still exist ... but it will stop mattering. Why is that? Because Biden is truthful? Because he won't be tweeting 10 times a day? Because the media will (effectively) do the tweeting for him? Because the media will simply not challenge him, and ignore his critics? All politicians lie, or perhaps to put it more charitably, they promote a very one-sided point of view. It's almost the definition of politics. The only reason anything will change under Biden is that many of the people with the biggest megaphones support him.
- therouwboat 6y ago
  News has been trump trump trump for the past 4 years and you say he doesnt get his voice heard?

centimeter 6y ago

Ceding "fact-checking" (i.e. narrative construction) to social media companies (directly, or indirectly by letting them choose contractors to do it for them) is a terrible idea. Not only is it unlikely the narrative you receive will track reality in a useful way, but it gives a huge amount of political power to these companies. A much more sane approach, IMO, is to come up with software frameworks where you choose which research firms or individuals (friends, professors, etc.) you want to follow and how much trust you want to assign to each of them. There is plenty of research on ways to do this well in the context of "web-of-trust" cryptosystems.

gtsop 6y ago

I like the idea, but the author doesn't seem to care enough for the root cause of dissinformation. That is, at it's core, the existence of conflicting interests. Because if literally everyone was on the same page, there wouldn't be a reason to lie about anything (of importance), right? Although distributed fact checking sounds like a good idea (however problematic it could be, even in a world without interest conflicts) how does the author prepare for the inevitable moment when a lie will get the seal of a Fact™ because big players push towards that direction? How would you protect your ecosystem against that? You are back to square 1.

will4274 6y ago
There's an angle here of [conflict theory vs mistake theory](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/). Your post seems to take a conflict-theory only perspective - that disinformation is caused only by conflicting interests, and never by incorrect analysis. Is that your opinion or is it enough to say there are some conflict theorists, therefore fact checking can't solve all the problems?
- gtsop 6y ago
  Interesting article. I think black and white is never a good rule, so although I would side on the conflict-theory perspective it would be very naive of me to claim that incorrect analysis doesn't ever contribute to dissinformation. Same goes with many of the points in the article that the author assigns to "mistake-theorists" but I can see myself subscribing to these. With those in mind, I'd say that although not the sole cause of dissinformation, conflict of interests is the most important and impactful factor.
- Siira 6y ago
  Everyone knows different beliefs happen because of mistakes, conflicted interests, and that differing models can still embody one truth (E.g., Newtonian physics vs relativistic), with different tradeoffs. Also, mistakes happen in even recognizing your own interests. A lot of mistakes are also practically unsolvable. Any moderation algorithm that assumes conflict away is hopelessly naive.

aphextron 6y ago

You assume the average person cares about facts more than validation of their preexisting worldview. Fake news peddlers know this isn't true, and it's why they're winning.

woliveirajr 6y ago

I think the biggest problem is that much is said to be fact-check but is, indeed, opinion verification. People have many degrees in how they express themselves and many times an opinion use words that resemble factual statements. Then others read it as facts and want that someone give a validation or rebuttal of it. Add some partial fact-check, some political inclined, some strong words, and then everybody has opinion of the credibility of it. Be it centralized or distributed.

amelius 6y ago

Children need to be taught about fake news, bias, etc.

hrafn 6y ago
May not necessarily have much of an effect, as in this classic example where children who had recently received education on the use of fake sources were unable to spot that an article on the "tree octopus" was made up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_octopus

sergiotapia 6y ago

Nah, we're moving towards individual controls and decentralized platforms. Having a tool distribute fact check is just delaying the inevitable. Just look at tiktok for the HARD repudiation of the ultra-left themes. The young people will always be counter-culture, and let's face it the ultra-left is mainstream today. Facebook, twitter? Those are your wine-aunts/grandpas platforms.

awinter-py 6y ago
'wine aunt platform' is a phrase that will stay with me
electrondood 6y ago
What are you thinking of as "ultra-left"? The only actual radicalization I've seen in the last decade has been "ultra-right," militias, normalization of anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiment, hyper-nationalism, normalization of hate speech, hate crimes and hate speech against minorities, etc. DHS and FBI both call out rising right wing domestic terrorism as one of the top threats to the US. They don't mention "ultra-left" anything.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I think the key to achieving this is building Web of Trust on top of the fact checker relationships and connect them to the users, so that you can see exactly how you are connected, and whether you can trust the individuals. Today, the sources of whatever information you read, even from the most credible sources, are obscured. Whether it is CNN or a peer-reviewed journal article, the most information you will get about the author is a name, a picture, and maybe a bit of their publicly available data. With Web of Trust, the level of trust you should assign to an author, and by extension the information, can be instantaneously computed by adding up your own trust references. If I assign my trust responsibly, and you assign your trust to me, then everyone I trust is by extension trustworthy, and the information metadata can reflect this. If you don't think I assign my trust responsibly, then you can remove me from your trust circle, and my assigned trust will become irrelevant. It's not a perfect system, it's vulnerable to attacks, it requires eternal vigilance, but it's the best we've got going for us today, IMO.

awinter-py 6y ago
have you used a web of trust system you liked, that works well w/ an existing social platform? I'd try one if you have a rec. fwiw I wrote one of these and mine sucked
- jancsika 6y ago
  I'm curious-- did you build it as a decentralized/federated/distributed piece of software?
  - awinter-py 6y ago
    nope -- it was a forum, the web-of-trust feature only operated over the users and content inside the forum
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      Could you please write a little more about your forum? I'm also working on a forum system that includes basic WoT features, and would be grateful for anything you share. (Prototype link is in my profile if you want to play with the current prototype.)

ve55 6y ago

I agree with the author that optimizing for virality as the bottom line is a disaster than can only go on for so long. Its consequences are obvious at this point, and it's not leading to good places anywhere it is applied en masse. (For those unconvinced, I encourage to read about how the most viral and captivating content is often content that purposefully instills anger, fear, outgroup-hatred, schadenfreude, etc) But deciding that we 'just need to fact-check' things more seems to be a very incomplete solution. Much is said about "who gets to fact-check?" but I think even if we assume the people fact-checking are good (morally) and mostly very correct (veridically), this solution will still fall extremely short. Even if you perform good fact-checking, there is little evidence that this will achieve your goal, which is not actually correcting text on the Internet, but correcting peoples’ beliefs in their own minds, which turns out to be pretty difficult (telling people they are wrong while removing content they want to read is likely not the best way, even so). Remember that many rights that you take for granted were only gained thanks to the failures of past powers to control the narrative as strictly as they wanted to. While I don't think that anyone can control 'the narrative' so to speak, especially not a single company or government (that currently exists), we will still see ceaseless attempts at such; the temptation to correct everyone is just too great (https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/, anyone?), especially if you believe you're on the side of Virtue (which it turns out, almost everyone believes).

bilbo0s 6y ago
This. These outright falsehoods that people take for truths are not taken for truth in a vacuum. As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them. I was reading somewhere that people tend to readily assimilate information conforming to their own world view, and have a tendency to block out information that does not conform to their world view. It's claimed that these tendencies pre-date the internet. If that's true, the negative effects of virality were inevitable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jl6 6y ago

whack 6y ago

Very long article that buries the lede: > We need a market ecosystem of moderation vendors who provide different kinds of value to different kinds of users. A moderation marketplace is good for platforms because they don’t want to be the arbiter of truth, they just want users to have a good experience > It’s good for users because they’re not forced into anything; they can pick which web they want to dwell on. This may sound like a filter bubble, where ‘everyone has their own truth’, but moderation vendors will still need to maintain their reputation for being right The author is overly optimistic in thinking that people who fall for blatant misinformation, will not fall for grossly biased or incompetent moderators. Anyone who believes Trump's election-was-stolen conspiracy theory, will also have blind faith in any moderator that Trump and his movement endorses, regardless of the moderator's reputation among mainstream sources. You may say that doesn't matter because the vast majority of people will never tweak their settings and will simply use the platform's default moderator. Which is a good point, but once again, that brings us back to the status quo where people get upset about the "bias" shown by the platform and its anointed default moderator. I do like the idea of decoupling the platform corporation and the moderator, but it still raises questions about who gets to control the moderator organization. Call me crazy but these misinformation campaigns have made one thing abundantly clear. Popular voting is inherently susceptible to actively-misinformed voters and there are no palatable solutions to this problem. https://outlookzen.com/2020/10/26/reasons-to-replace-the-popular-vote/ https://outlookzen.com/2020/10/26/reasons-to-replace-the-pop...

XorNot 6y ago
The real basic failure is the same one which is currently running: how do you limit it to 1 "author" per actual physical human being in the world? Like set aside other problems like establishing credentials or reputability, disinformation campaigns are based on the reality that it's very easy to create just plausible enough looking accounts, and getting easier (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/).

endymi0n 6y ago

I'm completely convinced by now that fact-checking is utterly useless, because it is based on a specific worldview that truth is something important. While I happen to share that worldview, recent populist politicians didn't just ignore that, but managed to turn this idea on its head — and the left still seems to not get it. There was really no shortage of scandals, proven disinformation or exposing books. But I saw liberals and progressives stumped over the fact that exposing those lies did absolutely zero to change opinion over the populist administrations. No matter the previous results, all those years they still worked with the mindset that just exposing one more lie would suddenly change everyone's mind. As Einstein said: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The thing they don't get is that the average Bolsonaro or Trump supporter simply does not _care_ whether their politician lies, if they simply come out of the argument as stronger. It's not logical at all, it's psycho-logical. Any facts are pretty simple to get off the table if you're brazen, narcisstic and sociopathic enough: Just accuse the other side of doing it before they do, and if they do, double down on it yourself in order to keep the narrative lead. It doesn't even have to make the slightest sense, it just needs to make small egos feel good and in the know. "ABC: I'm lying? Look at XYZ, he lied two times and I can prove it! So nasty!" Suddenly the distinction between ABC lying every day and XYZ a dozen times in their career does not matter anymore to the casual onlooker. All politicians lie, why would fact-checking matter? In fact, probably even the fact-checkers lie! And if you don't believe me, just remember that "Fake News" was an invention of the left that was rhetorically completely spun around (extremely successfully so) from meaning creating fake news to meaning that all (mainstream) news are fake. It took nothing more than repetition and massive confidence. As long as you keep people more scared about China, socialism, gun-robbers and making the next paycheck, it's rather easy to control the narrative, no matter the facts. Fact-checking is a liberal pipe-dream.

shrimpx 6y ago
Fact checking works in a civilized society where the adversaries are “good sports” who acknowledge the rules of the game — e.g., conceding a lost election. The problem today is that we don’t live in such a society. Our political reality has edged closer to pure wrestling for power, where the other guy is seen as bad and any lever is ok to pull to prevent them from expressing.

tacitusarc 6y ago

This problem is far deeper and more complex than the author makes it out to be. I have yet to see a single detailed explanation that actually touches on all the intricacies involved: from blog posts to documentaries, they all are incomplete at best or wrong at worst. So of course, the proposed solutions are necessarily incomplete, as they're not working from a comprehensive understanding of the problem. I don't know how to solve this. The problem isn't recent, it's at least decades old, if not centuries. As far as I can tell, it boils down to a lack of effort to reconcile the experiences of disparate groups, and the need to contextualize their ideologies within those experiences. This fundamentally means that one person's facts can be another person's fiction, and the line between the two should be tread carefully. For a long time, this problem was sidestepped entirely, as groups simply avoided one another or had minimal contact.The problem was exacerbated in the modern world, and has been brought to its most extreme conclusion through the internet. Institutional authority today speaks with too much unearned certainty. Those who share that certainty will be appeased, and those who do not will be incensed. I do not know how to solve this problem. Neither does anyone else, though. That includes the author of this article, who doesn't even understand the problem in the first place. If there is one takeaway, however, that I would like people to have, it is this: just because someone disagrees with you, or refuses to acknowledge facts of which you are certain, does not mean they are stupid. It is entirely possible it is you who are missing something. Be uncertain.

loopz 6y ago
The solution is simple, yet unoptimized entirely but for the smallest union of people: Empathy The incentive everywhere need to be to empathize and understand our differences, to bridge the gaps. When one looks at the overall business world, which is institutionalized war and injustice, against people and environment, there is much to work with. All the logic in the world won't right these wrongs.
- Siira 6y ago
  Most people don’t have that much empathy. Most of them don’t even want it. (I certainly don’t want it.) Your solution is basically adding terms for other people to everyone’s utility function. It would require a super-Orwellian effort to pull that off. The truth is that there is no panacea at all, and we need to design sound game theoretic mechanisms for every single thing we care about.

Anka33 6y ago

"fact-checking" is dog whistle for "only leftist allowed"

loopz 6y ago
Because people on the right only lie?
klyrs 6y ago
What about lefty antivaxers?
bleepblorp 6y ago
The role of fact checking is not to strive for partisan balance but rather to identify public comments that are untrue. American conservatives would fall afoul of fact checking far less frequently if the conservative worldview wasn't wedded to talking points that are not factually accurate. For example: There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence of ongoing large-scale voter fraud in US elections. There is no evidence that the incoming Biden administration intends to end capitalism. There were no 'convoys' of migrants preparing to violently storm the US-Mexico border prior to the 2018 midterms. Barrack Obama was not ineligible to serve as President. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals. Etc. A fact checker who does not point out the fact-free basis of these, and other, deeply-held conservative talking points is simply not doing his/her job. If the weight of fact checking falls primarily against conservatives, then conservatives can fix that problem by lying less frequently.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Judging by the vote totals of the above post, it seems there is a cadre of users here who believe the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor[0]. No wonder HN folks have such a hard time with the idea of fact checking. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

geofft 6y ago

I think "fact checking" is the wrong framing for the problem at hand - assuming we're talking about the problem of people shooting up pizza shops. (The article also talks about how businesses or hobbyists who are genuinely interested in truth can find the truth more accurately, but I think that's pretty orthogonal to the problem of social-media-fueled conspiracy theories.) Take the US election, for instance. At this point the "facts," strictly speaking, aren't really in doubt: we have certain reports from the various states following various procedures for verification, and those reports give a certain winner. The argument against that position is not against the checkable fact of the reports - the argument is that, for various reasons, multiple of these states are either deliberately lying or had their procedures tricked. What's left is whether you believe that to be plausible and in fact more plausible than the null hypothesis that the election went roughly as predicted. And that's not checkable, or at least not democratically-checkable. If you believe that voting machines were hacked in a way that left no evidence, or ballots were modified in transit, or the distance of observers left them unable to notice intentional mis-tallying, or whatever, what sort of fact would convince you otherwise? If you are so inclined to believe that the election was stolen, you can find facts to back you up. It is factually true that there were illegal votes, for instance: in an election with 160 million votes, the chance that not a single person would misunderstand the rules for where they can vote are basically nil. It is factually true that the Georgia secretary of state made this argument, not particularly eloquently, and is on video saying that they expect to find voter fraud. It is factually true that many electronic voting machines lack proper safeguards. It is factually true that there are more avenues of attack on mail-in ballots. And so forth. What we have is not a lying problem: what we have is a propaganda problem. And we do. in a sense, have "distributed fact-checking" / a marketplace of fact-checkers: we have different members of the news media with different viewpoints. And it turns out people aren't particularly loyal to any one vendor. When Fox News called the election for Biden, people flipped the channel to Newsmax, which has "an editorial policy of being supportive of the President," according to their CEO. So I don't think that encouraging people to buy into fact-checking builds any bridges for the communities that incubate future pizza-shop shooters to come back to reality. What they will learn is that they can always find facts to fit their beliefs. Sure, there are facts out there that don't fit their beliefs, too, but they lack an interest in changing their beliefs, so it's easy to wave those away. (The flat-earthers mentioned in this article are another good example of this phenomenon.)

User23 6y ago

"Fact-checking" has very little to do with facts. It's just a clever rhetorical ploy to promote some viewpoints and disqualify others. Specifically, it's a species of bullshit[1]. If the actual facts support the bullshitter all the better, but if they don't you can rest assured the "fact check" will be "contextualized" to whatever extent is needed to serve the bullshitters' rhetorical ends. [1] Bullshit defined here as speech intended to persuade without regard for veracity. The liar knows the truth and conceals it, but the bullshitter doesn't care if his statements are true so long as his bullshit is persuasive. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit

rabuse 6y ago
This is how I feel about people claiming every dissenting view as "fact checked" or "debunked" in recent times; it just throws out any possibility of debate.
smt88 6y ago
So you believe nothing is a fact? You're obviously not the target audience of fact-checkers. Most people agree on some basic principles of reality that can't be skewed. For example, when a politician says something in public that millions of people hear and is recorded on video, and then he says he didn't say it, that is a lie. A fact-checker would provide the evidence and context. Or if a politician says that nothing could be done to reduce Covid deaths in the US, that is less straightforward but also an easy lie to disprove because there are people who died due to lack of available tests for their coworkers, or people who died because of a huge nightclub being allowed to stay open.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  I hope you agree that context matters. Anyone can have a sound bite cut out of a larger statement and have that spun to be something that isn't representative, or that he didn't intend, or even the complete opposite. And then for many people, repitition becomes fact. Whatever they've heard most often, from the most sources, becomes their belief.

heimatau 6y ago

Democratized fact-checking won't work. The costs are too high. IF you can find a way to reduce the costs of the general public to fact-check, you might be onto something. But until then, we'll see a few places that sometimes provide signal to the general public but mostly provide noise. This problem isn't simple. If you have ideas, pitch them and build.

zby 6y ago

Recycling my comment from a recent discussion: The problem is that we don't want facts - we want confirmations. "The reality is that the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/ https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/ Fact checking is not the right angle to look at it - what we need is curiosity.

crazygringo 6y ago

Unfortunately, in the US, fact-checking addresses only the symptom, not the cause, and is unlikely to change anyone's minds [1]. We can see that disinformation isn't a necessary feature of democratic debate today, as it is a tactic used overwhelming by Republicans/conservatives, and very little by Democrats/liberals. In a two-party system like the US, the structural reasons Republicans adopt this tactic is fundamentally because the structure of the Electoral College makes it rational for Republicans to target polarized extremists (to boost turnout), while Democrats need to target the center (to win swing voters) [2]. The solution isn't fact-checking. The solution is abolishing the electoral college, so that both parties have to appeal equally to centrist swing voters, who are more convinced by reasonable factual appeals than by polarized disinformation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias [2] https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-election-joe-biden-donald-trump-electoral-college-vote-senate-democracy https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-election-joe-biden-donald-...

redis_mlc 6y ago
> We can see that disinformation isn't a necessary feature of democratic debate today, as it is a tactic used overwhelming by Republicans/conservatives, and very little by Democrats/liberals. I think you have your parties mixed up: - The Democrats spent 4 years on the fruitless Mueller probe, which had no basis in fact. This was an attempt to deny the authority of an elected President. - The Biden family is involved in a billion-dollar bribery scandal with the CCP. The only thing the Bidens have that's worth a billion dollars is influence.

oh_sigh 6y ago

I'd like to know how distributed fact checking could deal with this example: trump's infamous comments about mexican border crossers including rapists and criminals. From the quote, it is clear that the context is people crossing the border are frequently criminal elements, rapists being some of them. But every time I hear reference to this quote(except from overt trump supporters, who have their own issues interpreting events ), it is characterized as trump saying that all Mexicans are rapists. Literally every time I've ever heard it referenced, even from mainstream news articles. How does one do distributed fact checking if there is a mass public delusion? At best, distributed fact checking can give you th concensus of fact checkers, which is not always the truth.

weswpg 6y ago
what percentage of immigrants - of any origin - are criminals and rapists? the quote: > “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said in the same speech. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” you can assume he meant something other than what he said, but his words were in reference to "When Mexico send its people", so it is not "delusion" to say he referred to "people from Mexico". he so generously acknowledges that only "some" of them might be good people. what do you think he meant when he said "they're not sending you"? what do you think he meant by saying Mexico "sends" people to the US? the media was right to treat that comment as indefensible.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  It being indefensible is a different point than characterizing the statement as "trump called mexicans rapists". You're doing the exact thing I was saying that everyone does with regards to this comment.

chaganated 6y ago

Just wait until they start "fact checking" your personal conversations. Yet another unfortunate combination of elitist and philosophical dunce. It is so tiresome.

bleepblorp 6y ago

There is very little evidence that fact checking actually works to reduce the impacts of disinformation. See e.g. this study of the impact of Twitter warnings on belief in disonformation: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/c/8659/files/2020/10/ckk_PSQ_SSRN.pdf https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/c/8659/... The only known-effective way to deal with disinformation is to remove it.

somehnrdr14726 6y ago

I wonder if pulling the brakes on what's being called the post-fact era, is futile. Maybe the internet is perfectly capable of maintaining N disjointed realities and there's nothing we can do to resolve them. It may not be high-resolution virtual reality, but if the only way I interact with other people is through devices, it's virtual reality. We call them bubbles but they're so much more. I think if we accept this as an invariant we might be able to find solutions by trudging forward. As a thought prompt it certainly gets my thinking cap going.

Barrin92 6y ago
The problem is that these coexisting fantasy worlds run into issues when you actually do touch reality, which does not go away simply because one choses not to believe in it. covid of course being the most recent example. We can all run into whatever bubbles we want, but it won't stop a biological virus. Everyone can spin it into their own virtual narrative, but people will die nonetheless, and underlying the cloud and the internet is good old hardware and infrastructure, which is very real and very decaying. Fleeing into digital worlds is only a temporary solution.

Cyberthal 6y ago

The only ones who need agonize over the moral quandaries are the ones setting censorship policy. For the rest of us, it's helpful to stop worrying about ought and focus on what is. In the long run, an audience will leave a platform that discriminates against them. This means the big platforms will fragment. The more they discriminate, the faster this will occur. This is a financial and social benefit for their opponents, who should therefore expose but not oppose it. Monolithic institutions such as Big Platform are vulnerable to the same ideological convergence that captured the big universities, but this problem is self-solving. Social cycle theory predicts hegemonic collapse due to impractical religion, but now both universities and Big Platform are being replaced piecemeal by the invasive barbarian hordes of the decentralized Internet, who ignore national boundaries. See Parler and Gab for Twitter; DDG, Bing and Dogpile for Google. Facebook's challengers are VK, Minds and Diaspora, although Facebook is more loathe to offend its conservative lucrative userbase. Google's manipulations are subtle enough that anti-trust, section 230 and the like are probably greater threats; personalized search results still usually deliver a superior product despite biased results manipulation. A divided society that increasingly refuses to do business with each other cannot have united platforms. For every leftist who discriminates against the right, there is a rightist who is legally barred from openly practicing his discrimination against a protected category on the left. Which isn't the same as saying this discrimination doesn't occur. Already hordes of Republican Boomers have rejected Twitter's heavy-handed censorship, driving record competitor growth. Regardless of whether one believes Trump will overturn the MSM-declared electoral outcome, it's obvious that IF he does, Twitter's losses will accelerate. This will increase popular skepticism towards the other big platforms, to say nothing of increased governmental scrutiny. Hillary's loss proved certainty an illusion. It's a bold bet; we'll see what happens.