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The biggest problem with Snopes is their unwillingness to rate something as opinion rather than fact. As a result they assign truth ratings to things that are m
by TimPC 5y ago
The biggest problem with Snopes is their unwillingness to rate something as opinion rather than fact. As a result they assign truth ratings to things that are mostly opinion pieces and those truth ratings are often accusing the opinion piece of making something up. The opinions in said pieces may or may not be well supported by facts but they are still opinions and calling one false is misleading at best and dangerous at worse. Especially when you have become a source for social media censorship.
- eagsalazar2 5y agoCan you provide a link to an article you feel is especially illustrative of this problem?
- TimPC 5y agoI’d rather focus on the broader claim that the right set of answers for fact checking is {True, False, Opinion} the get bogged down in the specifics of the exactly correct boundaries between these categories, which has some subjectivity and is likely to become the main topic of discussion if any example is provided.
- TimPC 5y agoI also think the right thing to do is pull out individual claims in articles and rate the claims rather than trying to rate the article as a whole. There are a few edge cases where entirely true facts are put together in misleading ways that might get assigned higher than ideal truth ratings in this construction but I think it does far better than trying to rate articles as a whole which confuses the matter entirely and introduces a lot more subjectivity.
- busymom0 5y agoI gave couple examples here. It's a long comment so I don't want to repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173312