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

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.)