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Ironically this Washington Post article about people not seeing fact checks is paywalled. Fact checkers have a big problem: people saying things that are outri
by native_samples 5y ago
Ironically this Washington Post article about people not seeing fact checks is paywalled.
Fact checkers have a big problem: people saying things that are outright and obviously untrue is relatively rare. Thus taken literally fact checking is not a very satisfying profession, as it would end up being dominated by trivial low impact, low status stuff like memes. As a consequence their staff leave their swimlane far too often and end up writing "fact checks" that wade into complex in-flight debates, usually by trying to claim missing context or that the wrong spin was put on something. These articles are no different to regular journalism and no more reliable.
Fact checkers also have a hard time understanding that they can make mistakes. People who fact check them back are invariably ignored. They're staffed by journalists, usually from left wing outlets, and their whole take on the process is basically just normal journalism in which the stories have a false/true/partly true label underneath the headline. There's no rigorous attempt to engineer trustworthy processes, even though the process of determining what's true or not is an extremely difficult and complicated one. Indeed that's basically the idealized version of the scientific process.
The canonization of these people via policies at tech firms makes all this 1000x worse. Because fact checkers are just lefty journalists in disguise, tech firms have effectively handed censorship control over to people with wildly ideological takes on things, and thus their so-called fact checking usually degrades into "whatever left wing authority figures say is true, is true". The result has been an orgasm of censorship in which 25 year old journalism interns have ended up blocking the views of highly credentialed experts, usually of the very same kind that are supplying them with their own counter "facts". They are so bad at this they can even end up making claims like "Health authorities disagree with this claim" about claims health authorities are themselves making!
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/kitten-corner-are-the-cdc-considered https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/kitten-corner-are-the-cdc...
As a profession fact checking is by now totally discredited. I don't know anyone who takes these claims of people being "fact checked" seriously. It's just an annoying and overt form of ideological censorship fraudulently posing as some kind of intellectualism.