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I've never looked at academic papers before, but they mostly seem concerned with automated fact-checking, under an assumption that this is desirable. Papers lo

I've never looked at academic papers before, but they mostly seem concerned with automated fact-checking, under an assumption that this is desirable. Papers looking at whether or not this is desirable tend not to come to that conclusion, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.843872 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.84... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2019.1668894 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2019.16... (2020 meta-analysis) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2020.1733613 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2020.17... I personally hold a belief that a fact-checking publisher has the same biases and profit-motives as any news publisher (or, as motive, political influence of the wealthy). I don't find it useful to distinguish fact-checking as special and call for specific research on this, as if existing academic research can always be invalidated by a simple re-branding.

epgui 5y ago
My personal view on automated fact-checking is actually quite different than on what I consider to be real fact-checking (ie.: the product of professional human labour), for much the same reason that I wouldn't buy a newspaper written by a bot, but that I see a lot of value in articles written by humans. I don't know how well this will age, but for now, I think any company claiming to be able to automate fact-checking should be met with a high degree of skepticism. Just for context, what I imagine in my head when I think of a "fact check" is something like this, basically a specialized or somewhat standardized / formulaic form of journalism: - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/england-banned-fox-news/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/england-banned-fox-news/ - https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/18/joe-biden/joe-bidens-town-hall-mistake-about-inflation-index/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/18/joe-biden/... - https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/05/donald-trump/does-mike-pence-have-power-reject-electoral-colleg/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/05/donald-tru... I deliberately picked a couple of less obvious fact-checks than "is the earth round", because I wanted to highlight how even in politics, on questions where there is high potential for bias, there are cut and dry things which can be fact-checked, or at the very least 'contextualized'. I'm sure none of this is perfect, but I am not super optimistic that automated content would be of this level of quality.

epgui 5y ago

My personal view on automated fact-checking is actually quite different than on what I consider to be real fact-checking (ie.: the product of professional human labour), for much the same reason that I wouldn't buy a newspaper written by a bot, but that I see a lot of value in articles written by humans. I don't know how well this will age, but for now, I think any company claiming to be able to automate fact-checking should be met with a high degree of skepticism. Just for context, what I imagine in my head when I think of a "fact check" is something like this, basically a specialized or somewhat standardized / formulaic form of journalism: - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/england-banned-fox-news/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/england-banned-fox-news/ - https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/18/joe-biden/joe-bidens-town-hall-mistake-about-inflation-index/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/18/joe-biden/... - https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/05/donald-trump/does-mike-pence-have-power-reject-electoral-colleg/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/05/donald-tru... I deliberately picked a couple of less obvious fact-checks than "is the earth round", because I wanted to highlight how even in politics, on questions where there is high potential for bias, there are cut and dry things which can be fact-checked, or at the very least 'contextualized'. I'm sure none of this is perfect, but I am not super optimistic that automated content would be of this level of quality.