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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

• SquibblesRedux 5y ago
  The only fact checker I would respect is a court of law, whose purpose, in fact, is to discern and examine facts. IMHO, Meta (Facebook) should not be immune from liability with respect to its editorializing and censorship other people's communications.
  • praash 5y ago
    Law is heavily driven by money. In many cases, certainty and facts are not reached at all. With enough resources, a large company can usually prolong lawsuits for years, if not reaching a favorable result outright. Even if an individual had proven facts and legislations on their side, the court can still screw them up.
• Bellamy 5y ago
  So this means Pfizer lied to FDA and all of us who got the vaccine. This has to be against the law somehow and criminal charges are on their way?
• barefeg 5y ago
  Why should Facebook be the platform where people post facts? Facebook has no responsibility of implementing any constitutional rights if they don’t want to. If people don’t agree with Facebook’s terms of service then they should use a different platform. This is what ultimately create better platforms for other types of discussions
  • deadalus 5y ago
    The problem is that BigTech funded 'news' organizations will bad-mouth and deplatform these new and different platforms as soon as they pose any threat. Their domains will be seized(Dreamhost removed Parler), infrastructure will be taken out(Cloudflare removed 8chan, Amazon banned Parler) or they will be removed from app stores(Gab was removed from both Playstore and Fdroid).
    • soundnote 5y ago
      Not just that, some actual Mastodon clients have specific blocklists that prevent people from using eg. Gab or Spinster (a gendercrit Mastodon server, as far as I know).
    • standyro 5y ago
      Parker and 8chan were pretty adamant about supporting literal hate speech from white power Nazis, (I say this as someone who had a Parler account and grew up with 4chan) on top of having terrible infrastructure for content moderation. I agree that free speech is important, but private businesses can decide to pull the plug if the want. It’s a consequence of speech. I’m not a fan of app stores though. Google and Apple are monopolistic.
      • asteroidbelt 5y ago
        > Parker and 8chan were pretty adamant about supporting literal hate speech Parler (?) did not support (!) it. They moderated hate speech. Maybe not 100% efficiently, but in response to some examples in media Parler AFAIR posted similar hate speech examples on Twitter, which Twitter failed to moderate out. Not fighting literal hate speech was not their policy. And no moderation is 100% efficient. What you are saying about Parler is false (and defamation).
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Fascinating that everyone is debating the efficacy of Meta’s fact checking and not even questioning that a single major corporation has supplanted the judiciary as arbiter of free speech and is being appealed to directly by the aggrieved. As RATM said: Wake Up.
  • BbzzbB 5y ago
    The last controversial era where they allowed free reign of misinformation, they were criticized for being a spreader of misinformation. Turns out if you have a platform where billions or hundreds of millions interact, you'll be damned either way. I'm unclear what the solution is but I'm quite sure no one will be please with either direction.
• ekianjo 5y ago
  Fact checking is basically a short name for "we pretend to be objective but we have a narrative to enforce"
• brodouevencode 5y ago
  We're only going to see more of these types if incidents, right? As platforms[sic] farm editing tasks out to third parties (presumably to wash their hands of any sort of liability) there will be a problem of lowest-bidder-wins which results in sub par work.
  • DrHilarius 5y ago
    It's not credible to assume that this is a one-off instance of incompetence on Facebook's part, it's of a piece with all their other fact checking and moderation policies around this issue.
    • brodouevencode 5y ago
      Fair enough, and if my original response made it seem that I was suggesting that this was a one-off I certainly didn't intend for it too - but I am willing to bet that the frequency of these will continue to increase and from more reputable sources.
  • hodgesrm 5y ago
    Well, as long as we tolerate it. To the extent Americans (and others) live in a democracy and can pass laws to address social harms this situation is entirely our own fault.
    • brodouevencode 5y ago
      I'm always wary of throwing more laws at a problem. I'd much rather market forces solve it.
      • Karunamon 5y ago
        Agree in principle, but that becomes hard/impossible at the scale Facebook and friends operate at. Monopoly isn't the right term, but it's close. I'd welcome laws that requires specific kinds of transparency and conduct at Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/YouTube user counts. Simply tie this conduct to S230 protections, and we evade all first amendment issues. The companies would do anything to avoid being responsible for the hateful, libelous, harassing, and terroristic content they convey every single day.
• dekhn 5y ago
  Both Facebook (now Meta) and Youtube bungled their fact checking by disabling posts and videos that were counter to some narrative, but not factually incorrect. That places them in a bad position, and they need to be called out publicly, as no other mechanism so far has pushed them towards more accurate fact checking.
  • borplk 5y ago
    They didn't "bungle" it. It's working as designed.
    • dang 5y ago
      Please don't post this sort of shallow, grandiose rhetoric. It leads to low-information, high-indignation discussion—i.e. flamewar—i.e. the crap that we're trying to avoid here. If you want to make this kind of critique, fine, but you need to do it with substance and not just turn up the volume knob. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • seniorivn 5y ago
        what is the reason to assume that the way their system works for years is not the intended way?
        • dang 5y ago
          Attribution of intention is extremely unreliable.
  • jsdevtom 5y ago
    While I agree with you for the most part, their responsibility should not be fact checking. That should be left to the individual.
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      They made themselves the fact checkers. If they're going to take the mantle of "fact checker", it is their responsibility to do it well.
• periheli0n 5y ago
  Turns out fact checking is hard and costs money. What's surprising is that Meta, which has capable staff and lots of money, can't seem to be bothered to do it properly.
  • nradov 5y ago
    How would you do fact checking "properly"?
    • andy_ppp 5y ago
      Create a bureaucracy that will still largely be corrupt (from one side or there other) and get things massively wrong? I'm actually more for community tools to do moderation correctly and for content to be moderated by "people I trust" within the community. So for example if someone who I've marked as trustworthy on science reporting marks a science story as fake news it's flagged for those of us who have marked the flagger as an authority. People will say you are just encouraging echo chambers like this but I actually think it's inevitable and we all live in echo chambers. Having your views challenged is extremely hard work that we don't always have time or the inclination to work through day to day. Everyone is watching a different movie.
    • periheli0n 5y ago
      I would start with having knowledgeable people doing the fact checking. Next, since it will not always be possible to get every fact check right the first time, allow for fact checking results to be revised. Exactly what BMJ asks for.
  • dqpb 5y ago
    How do you fact check someone who has more expertise than you? How do you fact check a brand new fact?
    • OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
      Expertise isn't a cure all. An example is the famous Minux/Linux fight. Tanenbaum was a distinguished professor, arguing with some guy on the internet who built a kernel. "Is a monokernel a viable way to build a first rate operating system?" Fact Check: operating system researchers widely believe that monolithic kernels are a fundamentally flawed way to build a system... The premise that there are some specially endowed people who, by virtue of their credentials, are the only ones able to mark things as true sounds like the core tenants of a religion, not a secular society!
• laluser 5y ago
  I get the amount of pressure Meta and probably youtube were going through when discussions around vaccines were rampant, but the narrative only started to change once pressure was built up into top news sites. For example, the lab leak theory. Yes, it's inconclusive and so complicated that even if Wuhan's lab would be fully transparent, I doubt you would be able to fully connect the dots. Anyways, even those discussions were getting banned until major news articles decided it was okay to talk about and only because independent journalists had built so much pressure that they finally caved. I don't know about the right trade-offs in this space, but all of this is so transparently anti free speech and obviously rigged that it just doesn't feel right.
• zanethomas 5y ago
  I prefer to do my own fact checking.
  • wesleywt 5y ago
    This is an impossible task. You are reliant on the opinion of experts who you should pay to take the time to evaluate the topic. We use to do this with proper journalism. But the internet has largely destroyed the industry.
    • zanethomas 5y ago
      If there is a topic I feel it is really crucial for me to evaluate then I will learn what's necessary to do so.
  • colinmhayes 5y ago
    Most people just believe what they read on Facebook without even clicking the link. Sucks, but we can't allow idiots to be propagandized by misleading titles. Unfortunately nuance is dead.
    • QuarterReptile 5y ago
      Who are "we", and why not?
      • colinmhayes 5y ago
        Zuck and I. Because we live in a democracy where being uninformed doesn't mean you have less say in the government.
        • NullPrefix 5y ago
          That is how voting works. Should dumb people have the right to vote?
          • 5y ago
• OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
  "Fact checking" serves only to ossify the current view on any emerging discussion. Vatican "fact checkers" kept Galileo under house arrest for spreading "fake news", in a sense. This is an unwinnable fight, the only reasonable response is to abandon the pretense that opinions are facts, and that most people can't distinguish truth from falsehood.
  • clarge1120 5y ago
    "Fact checking" as guard rails for protecting a narrative is (hopefully) a fad that will pass us by like bad fashion choices in the 1980's.
    • loldk 5y ago
      Just because someone can use something to destroy and hurt humanity or smaller or larger groups of people or living things... doesn't mean we should let those bad actors have their way by not using them for good, which is the whole point. Listen to yourself. You are allowing MSM to manipulate the meaning of things in your mind. You literally just suggested that fact checking in general is bad and should go away. I know you think that everyone is operating under the context of malicious/false fact checking, but that is my point: you all have undergone a paradigm shift in which you allow the meaning of words to change based on false flags and what mentally ill people are claiming is "fact checking". Stop. Everyone should be learning critical thinking and fact checking. Uneducated and vulnerable people need to understand this and see the difference between someone else doing it for them, and they themselves being able to see clearly what is happening to their lives.
      • deft 5y ago
        "fact checking" is bad. I'm not sure what the good version of it you imagine. By "fact checking in general" do you mean pointing out when someone is wrong? The parent comment sees fact checking as one thing: propaganda used to shut down heterodoxy. It has nothing to do with facts or truth.
        • 5y ago
• twirlock 5y ago
  [dead]
• pfortuny 5y ago
  They seem to have forgotten the Inquisition. Really, in their view they were just trying to help people not be infected by false claims.
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. We're trying for something different here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.
  • jf22 5y ago
    Can I ask if you think Facebook fact checking is as serious as the Spanish Inquisition?
    • zepto 5y ago
      It has the potential to be. Of course they aren’t going to torture individuals, but they could easily amplify large scale suffering stochastically.
    • QuarterReptile 5y ago
      Not in any meaningful way without first coming to terms on a shared ethical framework and a common understanding of 'serious', no.
      • SantalBlush 5y ago
        You're not wrong, but this whole discussion is about ethics, and I don't see any shared ethical framework being established.
    • xenocratus 5y ago
      Another question would be: which Spanish Inquisition - the real one, or the one that lives in popular culture?
      • 5y ago
• endisneigh 5y ago
  Is fact checking that difficult? Imagine a forum that works in the following way: 1. You post similar to here. 2. Any post that has a claim is flagged. The poster, or another commenter has 24 hours (or some time period) to link to both a page and specific text (similar to how Google highlights search text when visiting a link) that supports the claim. 3. Once a claim is attached, posters can vote and downvote how well the source(s) support the claims (claims themselves are not voted/downvoted). 4. Sites are whitelisted and blacklisted by looking at the total percentage in which claims are sited with sources that are downvoted vs. up + downvotes. 5. Posts that do not receive sources for claims are deleted. I feel like the only reason this isn't already done is because it was dramatically decrease the amount of posts and increase friction around posting. Posters would have to be careful to assert nothing in their post.
  • OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
    How do you present novel ideas in this framework?
    • simonklitj 5y ago
      I guess you present it off-site (your own blog or what have you), and use that presentation as source for the claim on-site.
    • netizen-936824 5y ago
      Gather evidence for it if the novel idea is a claim
    • endisneigh 5y ago
      Great question - I'd say there are two main ways: You have an assert that would comprise of many claims that are all supported independently by sources, and so you would then have a hypothesis and present it as so (as opposed to a fact, which would be a claim and require evidence, but inherently your idea is jus that). You present your idea on another forum that's eventually made into a fact by empirical evidence and then later link to that, citing your novel idea. This as you imagine is somewhat self-referential and probably wouldn't work at scale.
• j_m_b 5y ago
  > We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime. It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.
  • teachrdan 5y ago
    I'd normally agree with you. But in the case of Covid, some political actors are launching coordinated efforts to deliberately misinform millions of Americans in regards to a virus that has, so far, killed over 800,000 people here. How do we deal with this challenge without censoring some information that ought not be censored?
    • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      I don't agree with the premise that censorship helps in the first place. If Facebook established a new policy that nobody's allowed to say bad things about fast food, and you saw an article explaining how fast food is healthy and good for you, would you trust it?
      • shadowgovt 5y ago
        Ah, that's the tricky part. It's not about what you or I would do, it's about what the median user does when the topic is public health and safety. And half of everyone is below average.
        • throw10920 5y ago
          Erm, no, it's not. "It" is about taking principled actions, regardless of the outcome. "Outcomes over principles" is one of the most destructive and evil ideologies known to man, and the source for all kinds of tyranny disguised under the banner of "We know what's best for you". Censorship, in the sense of suppressing one's opinions and freedom of expression, is morally wrong, full stop - and even if it weren't, it's not even effective in the case of Facebook, because censorship just feeds (crazy) conspiracy theories and breeds distrust.
• deleted 5y ago
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• ninkendo 5y ago
  It seems to me that if you have a whistleblower account of some poor research practices for a vaccine trial, spreading it around Facebook to be commented on by random people who have no idea how to interpret it, probably isn't the best place for it. I know that means publications like these which may have something important to add to the vaccine conversation, won't be able to have millions of "likes and shares"... but, who cares? Is that really such an important thing? Why is it so important for billions of random uninformed people throughout the internet to directly vomit out the first thought that comes into their head on topics like these? I know I know, censorship, blah blah blah. I don't give a shit. To me, it's akin to somebody opting to turn off the comment section on a YouTube video that's bound to get a lot of heated debate. Just... publish your article, let actual news sites disseminate it, and do things the old fashioned way. That is, without the internet mob weighing in at every opportunity. I know that the endgame of my argument is that Facebook would just be a site with cat pictures and status updates on what people are having for dinner. I don't care. That would be a world that is 100000 times better than the one we live in.
  • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    My concern is that I don't think that is the endgame. I think the endgame is a world where Facebook still seems to have a variety of news information, but it's heavily censored under the hood, and your parents/grandparents think you're talking nonsense if you bring up one of the topics Facebook fact checks don't allow.
    • ninkendo 5y ago
      Maybe my preferred endgame is just a world without global social media, then.
      • Enginerrrd 5y ago
        I'd MUCH prefer that to the alternative mentioned above.
    • hairofadog 5y ago
• nradov 5y ago
  In 2018 Facebook "fact checked" a Babylon Bee article with this headline: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication”. (Babylon Bee is a humor site and clearly labeled as such.) https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008 https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008
  • Negitivefrags 5y ago
    “Something is wrong when the king needs to censor the jester”
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    Well... that seems to be working? The story isn't a fact. Got marked as not a fact. What's the problem?
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      When they are wasting time fact checking satire and also censoring facts from renowned medical journals, it points to some failure in the system occurring.
    • GSimon 5y ago
      "Repeat offenders will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertised removed." Is the problem, a satire post by a satirical publication has been notified their distribution and monetization could be penalized as a result of their satire, because a 'fact checker' decided to identify the content and treat it like a news piece.
      • chrisseaton 5y ago
        Maybe they should mark the content more clearly as satire to avoid causing confusion?
        • GSimon 5y ago
          Just to be clear what you're saying, you personally, or for the sake of others, need satire labels to identify that "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication" is satire? That is the statement you just made?
• temp8964 5y ago
  • webdoodle 5y ago
    > There’s no other explanation. The other explanation is that they are being paid to control the narrative that the 'elites' order them to, by censoring anything outside their agenda.
    • andrewclunn 5y ago
      So they wouldn't be bad people if they knowingly engaged in misleading the public for money?
  • switchbak 5y ago
    These fact checkers are typically folks from the world of journalism. Those are not the people I consider to be experts on all subjects, certainly not deeply technical subjects like medicine. I'm also not particularly confident that these social media companies have safeguards in place to ensure that their 3rd-party fact checkers are operating in good faith. I don't think you need to jump to the conclusion that they're always operating in bad faith though - I think much of this is explained by a lack of competence in a field, overworked employees, low standards, and groupthink.
    • temp8964 5y ago
      Of course they're operating in bad faith. Those words don't just jump to the screen when they think. It's not like they were just chatting with friends in messaging apps. They had to do some "research" and then type those opinions word by word, sentence by sentence, and revise it several times, and do the review and proofing before it get published. Is there any chance, during the whole process, it didn't come to their mind that it's their own opinion, not "facts"? There is not a single chance. NO.
    • PKop 5y ago
      >experts So called experts are not unbiased in terms of political interests. Also, all should believe that power is corrupting yes? But so are institutional power centers (social media monopoly platforms, prestige journalist outfits, elite media, academia, "expert" authorities, etc) targets for political factions to wield said power to their own ends. Just as centralized businesses are targets for hackers and such, so to are they targets for political factions because of all the power they sit on that can be wielded one way or another. There is no "unbiased", there is no disinterested, above-it-all players that mediate some universal truth for the masses. Even if one attempts to do this they will quickly be subverted by political actors pushing a message. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596948
• webdoodle 5y ago
  The 'elites' control the narrative through propaganda censors like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Anything that doesn't conform to their predetermined agenda gets discredited, the author smeared, then eventually banned from posting. These are legitimate 1st amendment issues that need to be defended or what little freedom we have left will be boiled away like baby frogs.
  • bastardoperator 5y ago
    Pot meet kettle. You're spreading propaganda about propaganda. I need concrete evidence of who these 'elites' are. Names, dates, actionable steps taken by individuals, and proof of the agenda. If you can't provide these basic data points, from this vantage point you're no different then the folks you're complaining about. This has nothing to do with 1A. Businesses have the right to refuse service if you're being too loud in their establishment. Sorry, not sorry.
    • Thetawaves 5y ago
      As if Facebook doesn't have an entire division doing this exact thing. We can't name specific names, because there are no specific names. These are institutions, and their orders flow down from the top. Your comment is 100% disingenuous.
    • mariavillosa 5y ago
      >This has nothing to do with 1A. Businesses have the right to refuse service if you're being too loud in their establishment. Sorry, not sorry. If the purpose of 1a is to foster a society where speech is democratic, then it does, because corporations have largely replaced governments as the primary arbiters of information. So philosophically, the idea behind it is very relevant. The kind of power that governments abused, leading to 1a, is in some ways analogous to corporate power today. Whether that analogy is valid is the debate, right? I'm not from the US, but I wonder - just like how liberalism radically reimagined governance and the role of the commons in their relationship to the state, I wonder how a revolution this century could radically reimagine the digital commons. What will seem like obvious, basic digital rights, 100 years from now, that are completely unimaginable to my digitally medieval brain, like a preliberal medieval peasant?
• throwaway_2009 5y ago
  "Fact checking" is newspeak for censorship. If the Telegraph controlled the "fact checker" the Guardian wouldn't exist. If the Guardian controlled the "fact checker", the Telegraph wouldn't exist. If you support "fact checkers", you are not welcome in my life and I will route around you. You could, perhaps, consider yourself to have been "fact checked".
  • Capira 5y ago
    fact.
    • throwaway_2009 5y ago
      [citation needed]
      • andrewclunn 5y ago
        The emergent truth inherently obvious to those with reliably observation, pattern recognition, cognitive ability is far more reliable than the knowledge preached by academic priests from within ivory towers. The rejection of "fact checking" is a rejection of the academic model of institutional knowledge in general. Science (not empiricism mind you, but "science" as a class of researchers and Phds) has been found wanting and the masses no longer trust it. TLDR, citations are for those who are incapable of making the arguments themselves and must outsource their very thought to other men they unquestioningly revere.
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    I consider my doctor a fact checker, and I certainly wouldn't route around them just because they had the extraordinary moral audacity to check facts and not report garbage to me. The BMJ also makes decisions about what is worthy for their name, and yes, that means they "censor" people from appearing on their platform. You could say that one man's garbage is another man's treasure, but I'm not sure I would ever say that to my doctor.
    • 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  This one is much trickier than it looks. Reposting user nojito's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596111), but here in a top level comment: > The fact check was correct in this instance though? > https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-british-medical-journal-did-not-reveal-disqualifying-and-ignored-reports-of-flaws-in-pfizer-vaccine-trial.html https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis... > The conclusions in the original BMJ article make zero sense when actually scrutinized. > https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 Please read both URLs before commenting in depth.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • petilon 5y ago
    The first link is 404. Here's another link on the same topic: https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-british-medical-journal-did-not-reveal-disqualifying-and-ignored-reports-of-flaws-in-pfizer-vaccine-trial.html https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis...
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      Fixed the first link, thanks.
  • oh_sigh 5y ago
    Article makes claim X. Readers of article say it makes claims X, Y, and Z. Independent fact check puts a stamp on article saying "This doesn't say Y and Z", but to most people, who will for the same reason share an article after only reading a title or a little blurb their friend wrote, will write off the article as flawed or fake news because of the fact check stamp. Not really sure what a good solution to this is, other than to "fact check" people's posts on facebook, as well as the links they share. So maybe this link can be shared without the fact checked stamp among epidemiologists on facebook, but Bob's anti-vaxx group may get fact check labels when they try to summarize what is in the article.
• goopthink 5y ago
  In addition to the points raised by BMJ and in the comments below, there is a limit to what independent fact checking can accomplish. For example, are their fact checkers conducting their own scientific experiments validating claims and outcomes of a scientific paper? Are fact checkers reaching out to sources from a news article and verifying quoted information? When “breaking news” or “scoops” are reported presenting totally new information about the world, how can that be verified against other information that - by virtue of something being new - cannot be verified by other preexisting sources? If the fact checking process is limited to verification based on other information that is currently available, and if the fact checking process cannot distinguish between factual information and the opinions people hold as a result of that information, the outcome will be an inevitable echo chamber that reinforces currently dominant views or whatever preexisting biases are present. In short, fact checking is hard and there is a reason why reputable publishing outlets have their own internal fact verification processes before something gets published (including safeguards and retractions, because they make mistakes too), and why news is separated out from opinion-editorial pages... even if it is in style to add opinions (read: “perspective”) to every article.
  • beefman 5y ago
    This isn't about the inherent limits of fact-checking (substantial though they are). It's about the inherent bias of Facebook's fact-checking.
    • dr-detroit 5y ago
      Dont cross Musk or Zuck. They seem like harmless tools but they are the face of the megatechnocrats.
    • Stranger43 5y ago
      All arbiters of truth will eventually end up deferring to whatever the current holders of power wants the narrative to be as that is the nature of power and authoritative fact-checking is merely one more aspect of how power is exercises.
  • AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• BlueTemplar 5y ago
  > As current and incoming editors in chief, we are responsible for everything The BMJ contains. And here lies the crux of the issue : Facebook (and other Meta services) currently don't. While since they decided that they wanted to moderate themselves what people were posting on their websites, and they are neither a small service, or a nonprofit (or potentially other attenuating circumstances), they should be responsible for everything that Facebook (et al.) contains.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • scotty79 5y ago
    > As current and incoming editors in chief, we are responsible for everything The BMJ contains That's also not a very honest claim in such broad sense of term "responsible" that we usually use when we talk about what Facebook does. Was Lancet responsible for publishing Andrew Wakefield paper? Yes. Does it try to pay for damages suffered by every person who had infectious disease with severe outcome that was a result of people not taking the vaccine because of modern anti-vaccine movement this paper has spawned? No. They are responsible for what they wrote. Not for what people reading it did. But when we talk about Facebook we want it to be responsible for all societal impact. So the people shouldn't be surprised that Facebook might not only consider if something is true or accurate, but also if it remains so in the heads of the readers. Because we expect Facebook to consider it.
    • BlueTemplar 5y ago
      To be more clear, I do not want Facebook to be responsible for societal impact, but rather to not even be able to exist because any for profit company that tried to pull this kind of widespread power over communications would have its growth ground to a halt by having to constantly defend itself against legal charges.
• pwned1 5y ago
  Facebook themselves state that their "fact checkers" are not really checking facts, their work is opinion.
  • QuarterReptile 5y ago
    "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
  • gweinberg 5y ago
    They shouldn't be called "fact checkers" then, they should be called "opinion police".
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      Thought police, then?
  • etchalon 5y ago
    That’s a legal distinction.
• a9h74j 5y ago
  Appropriate indignation and demand on BMJ's part. Meanwhile, in the Stossel libel case, Facebook's lawyers allegedly 'claim that Facebook’s “fact-checks” are merely “opinion” and therefore immune from defamation.'
  • EdSharkey 5y ago
    They claimed it was "protected opinion", now that's cocky! > The quote in Facebook’s complaint is, > "The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion."
  • btbuildem 5y ago
    Wow that's twisted
  • lp0_on_fire 5y ago
    I am not a lawyer but that seems like some like a legal "gotcha" claim that most courts would frown upon. They positioned these "fact checkers" as arbiters of truth. At no point in the past year has Facebook indicated that these were merely opinion.
  • sjy 5y ago
    > Meta is alleged only to have superimposed a fact-check label on the Fire Video, describing Climate Feedback’s conclusion that the video was “missing context.” Stossel does not claim that label is actionably false—presumably because it is protected opinion. The conclusion that the video was “missing context” is necessarily a judgment call, one that is “not capable of verification or refutation by means of objective proof.” Seems like a reasonable claim to me. https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Facebook-admits-its-fact-check-is-opinion-page-2.pdf https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Faceb...
    • clusterfish 5y ago
      Either you're checking objective facts, or you're providing subjective opinion. You can't label it as the former in public, but in court claim it's the latter. Legally, maybe, IANAL. Reasonably - no.
• AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  One thing that puzzles me: why people (still?) use Facebook? What's so good about it? There are dozens of platforms where people can post their thoughts, like and be liked. I feel like something's evading me. Is it because I'm an old fart?
  • seeEllArr 5y ago
    Their friends/communities are on it. At least, that's why I haven't uninstalled, I just aggressively unfollow/block things I don't want to see.
  • vmception 5y ago
    People believe they get value from the groups This has largely replaced forums Facebook tried to make a separate groups product for people that just want groups and not the rest of Facebook Just like Messenger can be used without a full Facebook account It is higher value for users than the newsfeed other social network experience, but it mostly sucks too
    • olyjohn 5y ago
      Groups are a disorganized mess of the same repetitive trash over and over. It's the same problem in every group. Just miles and miles of random posts with no way to organize them, and a shit search feature. The only reason it killed forums is because they lowered the effort barrier. Forums were great because it required logins, and a minimal level of competency in order to use it. Only people who really wanted to be part of the forum would join. A simple login was enough barrier to keep out people who didn't want to put in any effort to their contribution. Facebook made it so that you can just go click a button and upload a picture and contribute a shitpost with no effort.
  • mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Facebook is the Internet for millions of people.
  • Enginerrrd 5y ago
    In my experience, Facebook is the platform which is most tied to people you actually have interacted with in real life, and that's by a large margin. I know the reddit account of like 1 person I know IRL (I don't even know my wife's account). ...but my facebook friends consist of basically everyone I know that still has a facebook. A lot of that is just the network effect and momentum, but still.
• natded 5y ago
  Guess we are about to find out that BMJ belongs to racist disinfo right and was always disreputable source.
• Capira 5y ago
  "Fact checkers" are nothing but propaganda.
• YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
  Two things worth noting. First, this is dated from the November 2nd. Second, as has been pointed out by other commenters, this article is worth reading: https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-british-medical-journal-did-not-reveal-disqualifying-and-ignored-reports-of-flaws-in-pfizer-vaccine-trial.html https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis... Unfortunately, the research misconduct that the BMJ letter points to plays right into the hands of anti-vaxxers and anti-science types. Science hard, science communication is even harder, but how is the hardest part caring enough to do the research right? Edit: As has been pointed out, I got the date wrong! This is dated as of 12/17.
  • DrHilarius 5y ago
    You're looking at the date on the original whistleblower article in the BMJ. The open letter is dated today.
  • 323 5y ago
    No, the original article is dated Nov 2. This open letter is dated today (Dec 17) - see sidebar.
    • YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
      Ah, thanks for pointing that out.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  Facebook does fact checking because people decided to blame them for misinformation rather than the people actually doing it. Their customers demanded that they take action, so whether or not the action is useful, they were required to do so.
  • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    > Their customers Which should be pointed out isn't the same as Facebook's users. Facebook's customers are powerful entities that already have nearly unlimited access to promote their messages. What upset them was the ability of others to also push messages, some of which were inconvenient to the powerful. What Facebook's customers are demanding is that only messages they approve be heard.
  • caddemon 5y ago
    The algorithmic news feed incentivizes misinformation in a way that the old chronological feed did not. Facebook absolutely helped to create this situation in the first place.
    • Hamuko 5y ago
      This is basically them trying to fix the money printer in a way that doesn't involve turning off the money printer.
• rob_c 5y ago
  To all on social media. Enjoy your filtered, prescriptive, fact checked approved me feed with just the right amount of anti establishment to keep you from getting up or of your seat. Frankly why any platform can be allowed to decide the worthiness of an article themselves is beyond me. If FB were citing some insane group who score publications/data publicly and openly based on their content is say they're guilty of nothing more than trusting a trusted information outlet. (I'll even accept that the JDL is probably more open than this and they get triggered by small green reptiles) Now that Facebook is deciding what is worthy to be deemed "truth" it has entered firmly into the arena of editorialism. Of course FB want this, it is practically the last brick of the wall around the garden of it's user-base. But it should be something that is illegal as it's clearly broaching on anti-competition territory. (This unfortunately exposes a problem in tech from the monopoly argument. There is always an alternative people can move to, that is not, and should never be, an excuse for crap behaviour by crap companies)
• loudmax 5y ago
  I get the feeling that much of the problem is the Facebook (also Reddit, etc) were originally set up as social networks, but they've sort of become news sites for a lot of people. This didn't matter so much when the news being shared are baby pictures and new music, but it does matter when the news is about vaccines or who actually won the election. Social networking sites aren't set up to verify facts, and it shouldn't be their role to verify facts. I absolutely do want my news sites to verify facts rather than serving up stories to confirm my existing beliefs so they can sell advertising space.
  • NullPrefix 5y ago
    Television was also supposed to solve corruption and injustice. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. It all went downhill when that box started broadcasting fart jokes.
• srcreigh 5y ago
  After reading both articles, I am skeptical about the BMJ article. It paints a bad picture, but it doesn't seem to answer overall picture about the vaccine. Namely, was there testing done by other people for the vaccine? Misinformation doesn't have to be completely made up. The worst misinformation is carefully selected parts of the truth.
• natch 5y ago
  Sounds like Facebook’s punitive measures for users exercising free speech was created by the same people who invented China’s social credit system.
• pfortuny 5y ago
  As a matter of fact, the real question here is… “What IS a fact?” Nobody is asking this. And that is the first problem here.
  • themitigating 5y ago
    I'm 20ft tall
  • etchalon 5y ago
    Nobody is asking that because most people aren’t in a 101 philosophy class.
  • NullPrefix 5y ago
    It depends on what the definition of the word "is" is.
• qwertyuiop_ 5y ago
  Did the ancient Greeks have factcheckers ? I always wondered how they debated without “fact-checking” and muzzling the crap out of other side, yet produce wisdom that stood test of time > Boyer 1991, p. 119 notes, "The Elements of Euclid not only was the earliest major Greek mathematical work to come down to us, but also the most influential textbook of all times. [...]The first printed versions of the Elements appeared at Venice in 1482, one of the very earliest of mathematical books to be set in type; it has been estimated that since then at least a thousand editions have been published. Perhaps no book other than the Bible can boast so many editions, and certainly no mathematical work has had an influence comparable with that of Euclid's Elements". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid's_Elements#cite_note-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid's_Elements#cite_note-...
  • scotty79 5y ago
    > yet produce wisdom that stood test of time Most of it is survivor bias. I'm sure they claimed plenty of stupid things too, those just didn't pass though over two thousand year filter.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• Trias11 5y ago
  If FB/Meta is in conflict of interest with big pharma and politicians trying to peddle drugs - this justifies deeper investigation. FB being so insistent to censor posts regarding side effects and vax concerns - justifies deeper investigation.
• gzer0 5y ago
  > Rather than investing a proportion of Meta’s substantial profits to help ensure the accuracy of medical information shared through social media, you have apparently delegated responsibility to people incompetent in carrying out this crucial task Couldn't help but laugh when I read this. Good on BMJ for standing up.
• scotty79 5y ago
  > “Missing context ... Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” I can agree with that. After learning about this BMJ article some people with certain bias might take it as an evidence that Covid vaccine trials were seriously flawed and resulted in wrong conclusions and that the vaccine is unsafe or ineffective. So plenty of context is sometimes necessary to avoid misleading people despite the fact that everything you say is true.
• TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
  These people really annoy me. Yes, there may be some data integrity and procedural integrity issues with one, or two, or even three of the hundred plus sites/contractors used to collect data on any given vaccine trial. However, by using modern statistical methods, and auditing, we minimize the impact of these possible errors. In addition to this, the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer has now actually left trial and been ADMINISTERED TO MILLIONS OF PEOPLE!!!!! So we actually have data now, in some cases from 6 months ago and longer, showing that, at least for effects that are short term visible, there is very little to worry about. How do we know this .... THROUGH ACTUAL MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF VACCINATION DATA IN THE GENERAL POPULATION. The trial data is LESS AND LESS RELEVANT. This BMJ may have been a reputable publication at some point ... I'm not going to assume it wasn't ... but if you read the study and the article posted you'll very soon realize that this is some shoddy bloody journalism. AND, YES, it will misinform people, because Joe Rogan and the like do not apply suitable skepticism when considering the claims of these "scientific skeptics". I wish everyone could actually take the time to read these long medical articles. But most people can't. I happen to be working on a project where I have to occasionally read and digest "fact finding" content to judge its accuracy. And even I am growing exhausted with what I have a financial interest in doing, because of the sheer stupidity of the interpretations of data by the Joe Rogan crowd ... and it's always something you need to dig a layer deep to uncover too. So sometimes reasonable people without free time can get bamboozled because Rogan and Co. seem to have neocortexes that operate with some strange parameters. P.S. In general I agree that "fact-checking" is a bad idea. I prefer crowd-sourced fact-checking from a community ... basically like Hacker News comments. A lot of fact-checking is just mirroring the prevailing political mood.
• ospzfmbbzr 5y ago
  Fact checking is the business of publicly labeling as false those narratives that people with real power already viewed negatively. It becomes necessary when you lie all the time. The whole notion of fact checkers is laughable -- who pays them? Do they still get paid if they 'fact check' their benefactors? There is no debate. There is no invitation for refutation. It's propaganda.
  • AlexandrB 5y ago
    This all sounds good, but if I assert that the earth is flat on Facebook why shouldn't that simply be labelled false so others can avoid wasting their time trying to refute a ridiculous assertion? And if you agree with that, all we're arguing about is where to draw the line between "obviously false" and "disputed" facts. > It becomes necessary when you lie all the time. There are plenty of people lying and/or grifting on the other side of this power structure as well. There is some non-zero benefit being provided by fact checking, but it's certainly not an ideal situation. The real problem is virality. No one felt the need to fact-check discussion forums because those posts were not likely to spread to millions of people.
    • HideousKojima 5y ago
      >This all sounds good, but if I assert that the earth is flat on Facebook why shouldn't that simply be labelled false so others can avoid wasting their time trying to refute a ridiculous assertion? The issue is I don't agree with all that. Who cares if crazies share flat earth theories on Facebook? You either trust your fellow humans to be able to think critically, or you don't. And if you don't, then why do you trust them with power of life and death over you via the state and voting?
      • themitigating 5y ago
        Because other lies are dangerous and I don't trust people to think critically. We also don't have a direct democracy and maybe that's what saves us most of the time.
• thepasswordis 5y ago
  How do we keep getting this so wrong? No central authority on truth. Not twitter, not Facebook, not the King, not the church. The fact is that many of the “facts” that twitter, Facebook, and google “checked”, they were wrong about, and they are doing j told damage to our society. Facebook is a company which, remember, performed psychological experiments on their users without their consent. Twitter has an opaque algorithm which appears to intentionally foment rage and misunderstanding. Why in gods earth would we trust these people, whose entire business model relies on either subtly misrepresenting reality to make you more “engaged”, or just blatantly tailoring their entire service to make you angry, with being the arbiter of what is true? Do people realize how insane that is? Twitter and Facebook, who appear to be using adversarial psychology techniques to make us angry, theyre going to tell us what is real? They’re going to be in charge of building the foundation of our being? No.
  • dado3212 5y ago
    There were like 10k articles written about how FB is spreading COVID misinformation and causing people to not get vaccinated. You can't have both of these, which is the greater evil?
    • asteroidbelt 5y ago
      > which is the greater evil? In the short term the greater evil is people not getting vaccinated. In the long term the greater evil is erasure of free speech.
  • jensensbutton 5y ago
    If only we hadn't demanded it.
    • lp0_on_fire 5y ago
      if by "we" you mean "entrenched political interests" then yes. I'd be willing to bet my next paycheck that "we", meaning everyday people who just want to occasionally look at pictures of cats or their family on Facebook, weren't interested in "fact checks". Just like most of us weren't interested in the algorithmic click bait they've forced on their users.
• tomohawk 5y ago
  Everyone wants/needs to be the hero of their narrative. Facebook is no different. At some point, they will get over themselves or go out of business, hopefully before they do even more damage. They've already admitted that their "fact checks" are opinion. Why the false advertising, then? I guess the word 'fact' can mean what they want since they have the megaphone and the cancel button.
• choppaface 5y ago
  Facebook / Meta has argued in court that their “fact checks” are opinion and not subject to defamation etc: https://mobile.twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/1469674040805707784/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1469674040805707784%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2021%2F12%2F13%2Ffacebook-quietly-admits-its-third-party-fact-checks-are-opinions%2F https://mobile.twitter.com/PoliticalShort/status/14696740408... This position aligns with Meta CTO boz’s thesis of the “Platinum Rule:” choose personal success over authenticity. https://boz.com/articles/malcontents https://boz.com/articles/malcontents The sad thing for BMJ is they spent so much time “investigating” and trying to criticize here. That’s exactly what Zuck wants—- any news is good news when you’re the dominant network. Following boz’s own advice (“co-opt the establishment not fight it”), BMJ should go after sanctioning the Meta board. E.g. file a breach of fiduciary claim with the SEC. Everybody should be doing that. False “fact checks” can legally mislead users, but you can’t mislead investors. Get Zuck and his empty metaverse vision out of there before Snap and Ticktok take he market.
• ctdonath 5y ago
  How often are “open letters” actually read by the imputed recipient?
• tomohawk 5y ago
  When you have partisans in high positions such as the head of DHS telling companies like Facebook what should be allowed and not allowed, there is a big problem. Here is a video interview of the head of DHS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp3r04dfpZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp3r04dfpZA Just what does the head of DHS consider "misinformation" you have to wonder. It was not long ago we didn't really care, because they would not have dared to infringe on free speach. I wonder what other partisans in power are saying to social media companies?
• streamofdigits 5y ago
  An oligopoly of walled gardens that control all information flow with little accountability based on opaque algorithmic operations and dubious business models is a bad, unworkable design, who could have guessed that? A small minority of people here and elsewhere are tearing their hair at the insanity. In the meantime a tiny municipality in the Netherlands gives the go ahead for meta to build the largest datacenter in Europe. Somehow once the giant wheels of societal regression are set in motion there is nothing to stop them.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  “Fact checking” makes sense when “whitelisting” content, i.e. the New Yorker deciding that only verifiable facts are publishable. It makes no sense for “blacklisting” content where everything is presumed OK. It inherently assumes that Facebook can ascertain the factual truth of something which is just not true.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  The idea that Meta does any meaningful fact-checking would be a hilarious joke if it weren't such a shameless insult to real fact-checkers
• mraudiobook_com 5y ago
  I am seeing this A LOT the last few years wherein the left (politically) will do something they think is clever, like start "fack checking" Republicans. Then slowly the Republicans catch on and start doing the same thing. They are doing it now with the supreme court, they did it with the filibuster, how we should have the right to not be offended, etc etc
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  This is why "fact checker" is a useless job for power tripping jannies.
• ricardobayes 5y ago
  Who checks the checkers?
• sm4rk0 5y ago
  We don't need "fact checkers", we need educated people who can think on their own.
  • zhrvoj 5y ago
    This is anarchy, and it's good.
• ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  Relevant: Stossel's lawsuit against Facebook for libelous statements against him contained in 3rd-party fact-checks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qmht6Tbtzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qmht6Tbtzg 2 of the 3 reviewers had not even seen the video Facebook labeled as "misleading". The other refused a request for an interview.
  • adjkant 5y ago
    More context here, as I had to look it up and this one fits into the same pattern, but adds a layer of muddiness: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/john-stossel-sues-facebook-defamation-fact-check-1235072338/ https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/john-stossel-sues-face... In Stossel's case, one of his video's is being very closely taken to their implications, and being marked accordingly as "misleading" and "missing context". In the case of the BMJ, the factcheck title is fully inaccurate and itself is misleading. The Stossel case highlights this nuance, but in the end appears to be a partisan test of the legal waters. Facebook itself has spoken on that one and has defended it. Of note though is this passage: > In a previous response posted by Climate Feedback to Stossel’s charges about the fact-check rating on the “Government Fueled Fires” video, the organization wrote, “Stossel complains that we should not have rated his post using a claim review of a quote that does not appear in his video. This is a misunderstanding of how fact-checking partners operate on Facebook. Given that many pieces of content posted on Facebook can separately make the same claim, it is not necessary to create a separate claim review article for each post we rate. It is, of course, necessary that the claim we reviewed is representative of the claim in each post we rate, which is true in this case.” It seems like in an effort for efficiency, articles are grouped together. I wonder if some article citing BMJ made the inaccuracies, and then the source got grouped into the same article group. It seems like that is a corner that cannot be cut here. To the surprise of no one, fact checking is hard and trying to group things together will cause problems. It seems to me that the critics are right to point out that fact checking will simply not scale while maintaining accuracy.
    • ErikVandeWater 5y ago
      > In Stossel's case, one of his video's is being very closely taken to their implications What?
• concinds 5y ago
  Fact checking was an innocent thing back in 2008 and 2012 when it was almost solely about fact-checking objective numbers brought up by party candidates in national debates. "The GDP grew by 2.5%!" False, 2.3%. That worked fine. But the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect infected fact-checking, and turned fact-checking into an extreme danger to democracy (ironic, considering it's supposed to "save democracy"). Fact-checkers are not subject experts; they all seem to believe that you can get to the "truth" after half an hour of Googling. That's not true! Even domain experts might need weeks or longer of research to reach a confident opinion on a topic, and that's with a very strong and wide knowledge foundation. An obvious impact of fact-checkers' universal Dunning-Krugerism is that they end up biased against certain facts, if they believe those facts to be "promoting harmful narratives". If people hear about Pfizer's mistakes, they might not want the vaccine, so they're biased towards suppressing the BMJ article. Fact-checking leads to implicit (if not deliberate) paternalism, where information is only allowed to spread if it has no negative connotations. Unfortunately, that means no scrutiny for the FDA, for Pfizer, and a democracy that decays even further. I could give comical examples of recent incorrect fact-checks on European television, where mistake were all biased against narratives that would have harmed the centrist government. Corporations like Facebook, Twitter and Facebook just shouldn't have this much power. Could a grassroots cultural movement like the 60s happen again today? One that's anti-authority, anti-elite? Not a chance in hell, not just because of fact-checkers, but because of how much cultural power has been taken from the people. The elites made sure of that: even music, which was at the very heart of these cultural movements, is now controlled by unchecked corporate power. (And the consequences are disastrous: pre-pandemic, 40% of young people felt chronically lonely; atomization is inevitable in a heavily "controlled" and restrictive culture.)
• MaxMoney 5y ago
  "Fact-Checkers". Imagine relying on someone else to check things that exist.
• nickelpro 5y ago
  The BMJ's article has a patently wrong headline and is clearly crafted to cast doubt on the efficacy and safety of the Pfizer vaccine where no such doubt exists. The Lead Stories article is gaudy and equally clickbaity, but they get the facts right. It looks like this has been a trend with the BMJ, now that Peter Doshi has managed to become an associate editor. Just because the journal is historically important doesn't mean it should be looked at with an uncritical eye. Spreading misinformation, especially from a pulpit of legitimacy, needs to be challenged. I'm sympathetic to arguments that FB has too much power in these things, but in this instance they got it right. The BMJ editorial staff need to be shamed into getting these cranks out of their midst.
• romwell 5y ago
  BMJ sounds like people who've never actually been on Facebook. They complain of nonsensical title: >"Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials" The title is nonsensical because that's the nonsensical claim the fact-checkers are debunking! That's the title the BMJ article (or its screencap) is being shared with. BMJ's article is being used as "proof" that vaccines are a hoax. That's why there's a hoax alert. BMJ's article is "misleading info" in the context of how it's shared on Facebook, where the fact checkers are working. I mean, there are a lot of thing that Facebook does wrong, but this is not one of them. Good job, Mark.
• AlexandrB 5y ago
  Facebook's actions increasingly resemble those of a traditional media company. They make editorial decisions about what to promote via their algorithms and fact check posts. I wonder if there's a risk of them losing section 230 protection if they continue down this path.
  • jcadam 5y ago
    I think they're already there. Further, I think section 230 protection should be limited to smaller companies.
• NoPie 5y ago
  HN is also complicit. I learned about the BMJ letter (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2957 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2957) from the HN article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29582147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29582147 As you can see, it is gone, practically in a few minutes after I had read it. Why? Is it because HN is a tech website and this not related to tech? Even though there are many articles related to covid? Or is it because BMJ articles are meant for healthcare professionals? I am also a healthcare professional but don't have time to read all journals and sometimes I rely on blogs and even HN to bring the most interesting articles to my notice. The third possibility is that some HN voters don't want to admit possibility that the current political establishment was wrong about vaccine mandates. Or at least that some respectable healthcare professionals are against them.
  • dang 5y ago
    Users flagged the post you're linking to. We didn't see that one. I probably would have turned off the flags if I had seen it. Be careful not to draw excessively general conclusions from these data points. The current post, for example, spend 22 hours on HN's front page. That's as much exposure as anything gets here.
• tlogan 5y ago
  I wonder what is BMJ’s agenda? Why do they want that their articles explaining how one contractor botched trial shared on Facebook? Are they saying that it is not true that their article “could mislead people”? And article is like Fox News: “ Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.” Come on guys… this is definitely “click bite” article where headline really does not match the content l.
  • HideousKojima 5y ago
    >And article is like Fox News: “ Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.” I mean, shouldn't it? The fact that this was reported to the FDA and they took no further action to investigate makes all of their other efforts suspect.
    • NoPie 5y ago
      Or it means that FDA is not doing its job properly. It could be do to lack of manpower or whatever but the fact that the FDA did not inspect the sites in question doesn't mean that the complaint wasn't justified. It just means it wasn't investigated, so no clear conclusions can be made.
      • HideousKojima 5y ago
        >Or it means that FDA is not doing its job properly. So you're saying it "raise[s] questions about... regulatory oversight"?
        • NoPie 5y ago
          It definitely does. There have been many scandals with pharma and regulators. Opioid crisis is one example, even though all involved parties currently blame each other and it has not been established who shares the most guilt yet. In either case, we definitely needed alarming articles about risks from newly marketed opioids 10 years ago. The other worry is the recent approval of aducanumab by the FDA.
• jMyles 5y ago
  BMJ has shown a lot of integrity throughout the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They have repeatedly questioned the claims of vaccine makers, especially Pfizer, in a way that no other serious publication, scientific or corporate, has. They platformed the many experts who called into question the evidence basis for masking children in schools, for closing schools, for lockdowns, and several other now obviously failed mitigation strategies at a time when Nature and Lancet had already moved their gaze elsewhere, almost completely failing to catalog the collateral damage. This is incredibly strongly worded for a medical journal, but no more strongly than is warranted: "These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites." ... "We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime." BMJ platformed this particular whistleblower at a time when the facts revealed (most obviously the unblinding) were already the subject of widespread speculation in expert circles, but were magnetically drawn to the memory holes of mainstream social media by 'fact checkers'. And now, with Facebook having demonstrably used its editorial discretion and censorship to protect Pfizer's reputation and profits, BMJ has carefully taken them to task in a way that we might expect traditional journalists to do, but haven't. When we look in our rearview mirror at this pandemic and ask ourselves how we can ensure that the next one doesn't provide for states and corporations to go on vulgar grabs for money and power at the expense of the most marginalized in society, BMJ's relatively progressive position on these matters in the past two years will offer a substantial portion of that playbook.
• christmm 5y ago
  This is serious. The damage and lives lost by medical information access being hindered on facebook. Is there an agreement between Facebook and the deep state?
• archhn 5y ago
  There should be a discussion page, like on Wikipedia, for "fact checkers" to publicly interact with those who post "misleading information." It's highly upsetting that there was no process for this entity to challenge the ruling of the "fact checkers." Especially since it is an established medical journal. Why can't we have open discussions about "the facts?" Are we living in a democratic country or an authoritarian country? For those that say "Facebook is a private company, it can do whatever it wants on its platform," I think it's important to distinguish between the legal right for a company to do something and the moral character of their actions. In other words, Facebook may well be within their rights to do what they are doing, but that doesn't mean it is moral. Given that we are a "democratic" country, our moral judgements should weigh heavily against these types of authoritarian actions, even if they are legal.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    > "Facebook is a private company, it can do whatever it wants on its platform," I think it's important to distinguish between the legal right for a company I'll go a step farther. For those who say "facebook is a private company, it can do whatever it wants"... does that include taking a completely hands-off moderation policy? I'm pretty sure that the answer is no - because the U.S. government will step in if they try. They're already in legal trouble over the Myanmar/Rohingya thing - what we're seeing is not Mark Zuckerberg standing up for his moral principles. What we're seeing is government coercion.
    • archhn 5y ago
      Great point. Ultimately there are always coercive forces that put pressure on companies and individuals to comply, even if the legal system isn't directly invoked to force compliance. The case you're making is important because implies that Facebook is being puppeted by the will of the government. If this is true, then Facebook IS the government. If one entity is controlled by another, then the separation between them, i.e., private corporation vs. government, is illusory.
• ConanRus 5y ago
  Everybody knows now that the left media "fact check" is just a censorship. I'd like to see Congress investigating all that shit, but that probably won't happen.
• abacadaba 5y ago
  We landed on The Moon!!!
• linuxhansl 5y ago
  Let's please not throw out the baby with the bathwater and dismiss all fact checking as political, biases, or agenda-driven. Not agreeing on basic facts in the prime problem in our current political discourse. Disagreement is usually a good problem to have and leads to testing the complete problem space. What we are seeing now, though, is the absence of the problem space exploration. Instead any discussion is just dismissed by calling the other party's information "fake news". In that fact-checkers are crucial. Can the fact checkers be wrong? Sure. Could they have an agenda? Sure. Let's fix that. Let's not dismiss them outright as some of the comment here suggest.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Is Facebook competent to be the fact checker? Demonstrably no. So, without necessarily having to judge the universe of possible fact-checking possibilities, we can say that what Facebook is doing isn't working.
  • wskinner 5y ago
    Without getting into the specifics of any individual instance of fact checking, it is not at all clear that the presence of third party “fact checks” advances towards a shared understanding of “the facts”. It may be better for the state of the online discourse to have no “fact checkers” than for them to make perform in this way. And if such mistakes are inevitable given sufficient scale, that means it would better not to have such entities.
  • valvar 5y ago
    There is no such thing as fact-checking without an agenda. What would the incentives be? No agenda, no demand, no-one pays for it.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • 5y ago
• paxys 5y ago
  > We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites. This is where Facebook is going to stop reading and toss out the letter. The claims BMJ is making may or may not be accurate – I personally don't have the scientific knowledge to judge. But ultimately Facebook is going to always defer to the authorities of the jurisdiction it operates in over random third parties.
  • CryptoPunk 5y ago
    It should not. The First Amendment exists for a reason - so we don't have to defer to authorities. The Democrats are responsible for this state of affairs: they have repeatedly threatened the social media giants with legal action lest they combat whatever it is the Democrats deem to be disinformation, which increasingly is indistinguishable from anything that contradicts what powerful government institutions deem to be true.
• aezell 5y ago
  Stop using Facebook, already.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  "Fact Checking" is effective clickbait. Just claiming something is a hoax generates more engagement than claiming something is factual. Humans have a bias towards believing claims that wrongdoing has occurred (self-preservation / avoidance of harm). It is in Meta's commercial interest to hire people to flag stories as a hoax in an entertaining way that gets eyeballs (like a giant red stamp that says "Flaws Reviewed").
• zhrvoj 5y ago
  I'm happy that Nikola Tesla didn't lived in such world. Fact-checkers are dangerous option, especially when backed-up by capital and/or politics.
  • LaputanMachine 5y ago
    I'd rather live in a world with fact-checking than in a world with gene-checking: »The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct ... The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny.« - Nikola Tesla, 1937
    • zhrvoj 5y ago
      This is another subject, about old NT mind before he passed away, different from theme here, and it's not to discuss further. I'm reffering to his productive days. You can take any free minded, stubborn man instead, whose ideas changed the world.
• joelbondurant 5y ago
  Only the USA Fact-Check Algorithm from the Science Ministry can ordain new science facts, Facebook is an illegitimate science authority administrator.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Repeal section 230.
• umvi 5y ago
  So basically everyone's worst fears back when "fact checking" was being introduced were realized - fact checkers becoming thinly veiled political censors that only allow certain narratives through regardless of the actual nuance/truth.
• roody15 5y ago
  Sadly fack checking is often conflated with outright bias and narrative control. You can literally post links and direct quotes from the cdc’s website and get flagged and removed by twitter for “misinformation”.
• verisimi 5y ago
  Who has the truth? "Fact checking" is just a narrative device, to present something as authoritative. The reality is that even for obvious, physical phenomena, whenever there is any complexity, you cannot know the truth. There are all sorts of buried assumptions and theoretical knowledge.
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  So I have a theory (wild conjecture actually). AI needs good training sets - that is large corpuses of data about a domain, which have been accurately labelled so the AI can learn safely. Curated content basically. Image recognition software is suffering from this as all the large corpuses are basically the same three or so. When we move into the realm of knowledge about the human world, economics, politics etc. then having a corpus is easy. Just download reddit, twitter and 4chan. But having a labelled corpus is really hard and trusting one. I mean 4chan might be able to teach an AI but you would not want it to date your sister afterwards. Journalism is basically a means of labelling the corpus of "everything" - and it is only trusted because "most people" trust what WaPo or NYT say. And the new generation of non traditional journalists (err, Captain Disillusion?) are doing something similar. But there is no real means to decide what is a correctly labelled corpus or what is not. We have a long process of discussing the hard stuff - from flame wars to editorial letters to courts and scientific papers. Ultimately if we think AI is going to help us manage the flood of information (and I am not sure how else) we need to put effort into training it - and that basically means journalism. Proper Nournalism. It's not Facebooks job to decide truth. But is it the governments job? Is it everyone's? how do we build this labelled corpus at scale public ally and with trust and verification?
  • ford_o 5y ago
    So what is your theory?
    • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
      Journalism acts as a corpus labelling process for the slow AI that is society, also that most companies have an internal labelling process (we will trust these inputs from outside, and we inherently trust anything internal) - this also needs a rethink (ie that companies will need to have trust in incoming data whether internal or external and that labelling will need to become more explicit.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  Could rogue "fact checking" be considered Defamation on the part of Facebook?
• wyager 5y ago
  Anyone who thinks it make sense to outsource their epistemics is probably correct, but not in the way they think.
• ncr100 5y ago
  Facebook's relationship to accuracy is deeply poor. At the fundamental "entity" level, Facebook continues to glaringly miscategorize the recording of social relationships between people as "friendships". Clicking a "Friend" button for a family member is an insult, and doing the same for a casual acquaintance can incorrectly suggest mutual admiration.
• atlgator 5y ago
  The biggest problem with fact checking sites is that they equate having insufficient evidence with being false. It’s like a claim in the ‘00s that the Government was spying on Americans. A fact checker would say false but we just had insufficient evidence to prove it… until Snowden came along.
  • musicale 5y ago
    > until Snowden came along What about Mark Klein?
• paul7986 5y ago
  What's wrong with the Pfizer vaccine data? I mean the FDA is asking for 55 years to process and release all such public data to the public now.. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants-55-years-process-foia-request-over-vaccine-data-2021-11-18/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/wait-what-fda-wants... . Which to me is concerning as well the CDC just announcing not to get the J&J shot but the other two. Early science .. we all jumped in like guniea pigs ... some forced to like myself where Ive already been burned twice (hernia mesh implant recalled causes pain forever and a med I took damaged an organ) by early science/profits over people crap. Also any media to research where bias (pro or not pro vaccine ... left or right) is.. is hard to believe as truth. Bias clouds the truth always! Im sure any vote on my post is biased based ... pro vaccine or anti. Im in the middle and wanted to wait to see years of data to see/find out which one was the best .. which one was the worst but i wasnt given that opportunity... get vaxed or if not lose everything.
• Kiro 5y ago
  People forced this impossible task on Facebook and are now outraged about the results. Mark can't win.
  • praash 5y ago
    Perfect success isn't realistic in this task, but FB's current attempt is very flawed. If their actions make matters worse than inaction, I'd call it total failure.
• PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Thanks to user sceutre for finding this link/commentary, which really deserves to be at the top of this entire comment page: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-the-bmj/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-t... It's not definitive (nothing in a case like this will be), but is provides way more context for both the particular BMJ article and also recent history at the BMJ in general.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  Facebook can't moderate shit because they are afraid to become a publisher. "Fact checkers" are as horrible as it sounds, power hungry censors. Reddit's zero-paid moderators are worse. Twitter's employees are constantly high on their own drama flagging everything that doesnt suit their favourite flavor of wokism. How the hell did we end up with this situation? I want forums and blogs back.
  • Uhhrrr 5y ago
    IMAO, they shouldn't try. They should say, "Facebook connects you to your friends and family, and you should expect the degree of validity of information shared by your friends and family to be similar to that of the information they share with you in real life. If you want good information in your feed, hold your friends and family accountable for what they say."
    • annadane 5y ago
      To the extent they stay out of "editing" the newsfeed, sure. When they algorithmically (and silently) promote or demote certain things, all bets are off
      • Uhhrrr 5y ago
        Yes, doing that is also a terrible idea.
• rajacombinator 5y ago
  I suspect they would cheer for anti-vax censoring.
• dtrain2017 5y ago
  I cannot believe that this guy was fired on the same day he leaked to the FDA. This means the FDA reported him to Pfizer?? He blew the whistle on the following: some staff were not blinded, potentially unblind recipients, quality control on the paperwork, the patients weren't followed up with. It just adds to my nihilism, tbh.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • DrHilarius 5y ago
    It wasn't clear from the original article whether FDA notified the whistleblower's employer or they found out on their own somehow.
• diebeforei485 5y ago
  There is way too much cheer pressure[1] in favor of [Biden, Democrats, vaccines, Wuhan lab] from the moderators of Facebook and Twitter. 1. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cheer%20Pressure https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cheer%20Pres...
• smsm42 5y ago
  It is hilarious to me that some random people with no relevant credentials to speak of declare an article in a professional journal a "hoax", get their word taken as "fact" by Facebook and wide-ranging censorship decisions performed on the basis of that, and they also get paid handsomely for that (AFAIK selling services to Facebook and alikes is their whole business model). To make it even more hilarious, looks like one of the founder worked for CNN before as entertainment reporter - and we know entertainment reporting is the most scientific and fact-based of all reporting venues, and CNN is the most hoax-free of all networks! By this point, anybody who relies on Facebook and their "fact checkers" as a source of relevant information on any topic is a doofus.
• tmule 5y ago
  Fact-checking is a means to “neutrally” validating a specific narrative, typically the modal elite narrative. Most of what is being fact-checked isn’t trivially binary, nor do the midwits that do this understand anything quantitative. Quite a joke, much like modern American discourse.
• peter_retief 5y ago
  This has been a concern of mine since fact checking became the tool of political ideologues. Many of my professional friends have either left mainstream social media or have become much less active. Not only has this destroyed the credibility of science but has created vicious polarisation of people and destroyed friendships and family relationships.
• DocTomoe 5y ago
  History rhymes. In the medieval ages, book production and reading were rare and highly controlled capabilities unavailable and unpractical to learn to most. Then Gutenberg and his movable type printing press came around, and suddenly affordable media production and with it, reading. People quickly learned that not only you could print books, but also (political) leaflets, and before long, you had all kinds of these early propaganda instruments floating around, some more outrageous or potentially dangerous than others, from commentary about the local counts's promiscuity to divergent religious or reports on UFO sightings[1]. This of course did not suit the powers to be, and they introduced strict controls on what could and could not printed, they set up censorship offices and heavily taxed or banned private, unlicensed movable type presses. We can only dream about what information, which plays, which artifact we lost because they never were created - and we can be thankful that censorship never works 100%, and some still was printed in secret. It took us 300-400 years and several bloody revolutions to get rid of these governmental controls - and it is a process that has not been completely finished in many parts of the western world. Then, much later, the Internet came around, the Web being intended as a document store/sharing system for scientific information ("books"). Access to the net was rare and most people did not see the point in getting it ("reading"). But eventually, the system became more ubiquitous and with more non-scientific info around, people started to flock in ("more readers"). Simultaneously, publishing on the net became more approachable, and this made all kind of low-level information available, which sometimes was outrageous, sometimes outright dangerous ("leaflets"). And in the last five years or so, we have seen an increasing push to supress unwanted information (under the guise of "battling fake news") and opinion ("censor's offices"). And just like back then, we will see that censorship does not work perfectly - but how much information will be lost, how much this will hold back society. This BMJ thing is a symptom of a beginning of things, things will become a lot worse before they become better. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over...
• schleck8 5y ago
  In fact the BMJ is so credible that they call a vaccine engineered and manufactured by Biontech the 'Pfizer vaccine'
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  My own experience with Facebook's fact-checking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734
• jdthedisciple 5y ago
  Ah well, with a smile on my face I remember that we just had the fact-checking discussion here on HN a few months ago. Let me just say: This case proves that so-called "fact-checkers" themselves need to be scrutinized even more than the claims they are "fact-checking".
• gadders 5y ago
  Most fact checkers don't check facts, they manufacture context.
• bArray 5y ago
  A lot of the comments here appear to give Facebook some benefit of the doubt. Whilst this would also be my default position, let's not also forget that Facebook makes money entirely through advertising and Pfizer is a massive sponsor/advertiser [1]. There appears to be a massive conflict of interest here. Also encase it wasn't already clear, 'independent fact checkers' are themselves not free from bias, particularly political bias. I find it deeply concerning that we allow some unaccountable authority to state truths, on very important issues that are heavily political. In UK parliament for example, there is the concept of the 'faithful opposition'. They rarely agree with the government of the day, but what makes them 'faithful' is their opposition in good faith. Where is the faithful opposition to the fact checkers? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlARrmWhHXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlARrmWhHXo
• mschenk 5y ago
  Here is our official reply. When an article by a reputable medical journal suddenly goes viral in anti-vaccine circles on Facebook there usually is more to the story. There was. https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-response-to-a-bmjcom-open-letter-objecting-to-a-lead-stories-fact-check.html https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...
• JakeAl 5y ago
  I didn't see this mentioned as I scanned the comments, "Facebook Quietly Admits In Court Its Third-Party 'Fact-Checks' Are 'Opinions'" https://brjm.org/2021/12/facebook-admits-its-fact-checks-are-opinions/ https://brjm.org/2021/12/facebook-admits-its-fact-checks-are... For anyone who has not read Neil Postman's works, look him up. I'd start with Amusing Ourselves to Death but How to Watch TV News is particularly relevant. All his books are fantastic. https://www.amazon.com/How-Watch-News-Neil-Postman/dp/0786110627 https://www.amazon.com/How-Watch-News-Neil-Postman/dp/078611...
• Imagein 5y ago
  It is important to understand that our intelligence community folks are not only actively pushing their own disinformation, and stifling narratives and alternative channels that they don't want you to hear, but also sponsoring false-flag staged events as well. So "false news" doesn't simply just happen; sometimes it has a multi-million dollar budget behind it. See: Weapons of Mass Destruction; 2 planes bring down 3 buildings; Pure: Ten Points I Just Can’t Believe About the Official Skripal Narrative; moon of alabama bounty on US soldiers; etc. etc.