9 ms·

I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style

I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in the media churning BS articles is the people who works in the fact checkers, and most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu. The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table. This specially evident when they talk about something you really know about. Of course, because fact-checkers happen to be lefty because of the, let's call, overton-window cycle, then the left choses to ignore this problems and just says it's the right-wingers that chose to ignore facts and yadda yadda. While this is going on, right-wing, and many times right-wing extremist views, become the new punk and many yougsters are flocking to provide new blood to said ideologies. It's all just so tiresome.

xwolfi 5y ago
I'm French, live in China, so familiar from both countries with what you say. But I think I disagree a bit with your annoyance with agenda setting and journalist incestuous relationship with ideology or politics. Look I dont know how you're taught in Spain but in France we gave up neutral journalism centuries ago. Each newspaper is clearly categorized and we learn as children, around 7 IIRC all the links (le monde socialist, le figaro gaulist trending christian, l'humanité communist, and so on and there are many more subtle variations too French to list here) and learn to read them all, sometimes with clenched fist, but no truth has ever been reveled by a single perspective: embrace the chaos and join perspective to build a multi facet view. It's something I despair to see in China where politicians, journalist and the mass try to identify a pure source of truth. But no communist think like another, so even their way will never work. Let them all fight, balance out the arguments, take a decision in the voting booth and stop dreaming of a universal truth given to you from greater mind: even a genius in his lab building a life saving cure will forget to listen to the victims of the sacrifices he requires for the greater good, and that voice must be heard too. Fight for MORE ideology and agenda in media in exchange for editorial transparency about it, so you're clear who they propose you to vote for when they present an argument, and you'll be free. Any other way, and it goes with fact checking semi anonymous facebook crap, is doomed to muddy this clarity. That s what facebook must do: what is the political party or alignment behind each piece, and you're done (or almost: also need to learn to read and understand all perspectives, the hardest part in the US it seems).
- boppo1 5y ago
  I actually like this idea of a status quo; but it depends on teaching children this from birth. In the US, I was taught that NYT and CNN are reputable and reliable sources of the truth. As an adult, I find them "pretty good" at best.
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  I see your point, but two objections. - Nuanced opinions and good information is rarely free, be it in monetary terms, be it in the invested time, relationships, etc. Thus, if you're not planning to give up most of your time for any topic, you better find good proxies. And currently the press provides more noise than signal. This is problematic. - If you know anything about Spain is that it's basically Game of Thrones made a country. There's so much internal conflict that it even gets translated INSIDE of the newspapers and TV. You can't take any editorial line for granted, because it's more tied to a group of people seeking power than any background ideology or anything similar. So your balance different views style it's not really that practical in Spain. In fact I can tell you about an Issue where I'm invested that it's awful across the board: Housing policy.
  - danbolt 5y ago
    > You can't take any editorial line for granted, because it's more tied to a group of people seeking power than any background ideology or anything similar. I don't mean to misrepresent the parent's argument, but I think they would demand the same solution of editorial transparency towards the groups of people seeking power you mention. That said, I might be coming from a place of ignorance here.
    - spaniard89277 5y ago
      I'm not really sure I understand what you mean, sorry. Who would demand what? What's "editorial transparency"?
      - xwolfi 5y ago
        In France we mean by that that all newspaper have a public well accepted stance on the political spectrum, with candidates they push without hiding and ideologies they maintain. As long as their leaders and famous journalists are clear they're a perspective and not "the truth", I m fine with the communists fighting the nationalists in their respective newspapers even if I disagree with what I read. At least I know what and why they think these things and I can sometimes accept an argument if only to build an iterative counter argument myself. The difference I saw with facebook even in France, is that it's all blurred. I cant cross the Figaro with the Monde to figure two of the sides of an issue, now I receive some neutral looking information with a vague source. It struck me when a colleague started repeating an horrendous story and we investigated together to realize she was sourcing it from a facebook post by our "the onion" equivalent !!! She couldnt see the source because it's too blurry in between her grandma rants and some cnn-style generic information. It doesnt change that in the US I see with worry that even when lines are clear, the debate is heated. Also because there's no spectrum but just two solutions to any issue: democrat and republican. What was hailed as a miracle in democracy (just 2 fuzzy groups of dispationate interest) is starting to look like a weakness (to the death identity conflicts pushed by their respective extremes) while with 13 parties in elections in France, you can express nuances.
najqh 5y ago
https://media.giphy.com/media/lMgKrkuwr1xB1OaEqA/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/lMgKrkuwr1xB1OaEqA/giphy.gif
paganel 5y ago
> but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. It's the same thing in Romania, they strongly monitor and criticise those politicians and public figures who are not europhiles while pretty much ignoring those politicians who are for stronger EU integration and for more power for international institutions and their viewpoints inside of Romania.
- najqh 5y ago
  It's called globalism.
- kerneloftruth 5y ago
  Yes, political censorship is often called "fact checking". Facebook invented nothing new, and the sin is them trying to convince us otherwise. The increased censorship has been demanded by the Democrats, and Facebook is obeying.
namelessoracle 5y ago
It sounds like someone being a fact checker is the best way to know they arent communicating facts ironically enough. Kinda like a modern day Ministry of Truth.
superflit2 5y ago
Well... Who owns the Media then?
- rabite 5y ago
  cool it with the anti-semitic remarks
  - twic 5y ago
    Rupert Murdoch is Jewish?
    - superflit2 5y ago
      It took a lot of work finding one that was English/scott. There is the famous Elon Musk tweet https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1637457156799.jpg https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1637457156799.jpg
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        When did he tweet that?
        mattrighetti 5y ago
        Looks like May 27th, 2018. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1000560049389907969%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewspunch.com%2Felon-musk-media-owned-new-world-order%2F https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969?ref_...
        reducesuffering 5y ago
        He was referring to "powerful people" not jewish people. The previous tweet said "Do you think it's in the interest of powerful people to..." So he was playing on that.
      - 5y ago
a9h74j 5y ago
This will be some snark in this comment, but against my own country and not you and yours. I invite a cross-cultural comment on competence. Are the partisan fact-checkers in Spain at least competent enough to write grammatical, parsable sentences and titles? From the BMJ OP: > It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials” Like the BMJ apparently, I first read this with a comma or mdash after 'Disqualifying' -- hence a broken sentence. With more thought, perhaps the inferrable punctuation intended 'Disqualifying-And-Ingored' -- in which case they might or might not be fact-checking a straw-man claim. A negligible point perhaps, but the one fact-check I recall Dr. John Cambell on YT examining also included a broken sentence. (Small sample size, I know.) To me, this speaks to the qualifications and processes of the fact-checkers under debate here, attempting as they are to adjudicate in scientific debates. Attempting as they apparently are to define truth. (Or perhaps Meta does A/B testing by breaking sentences in search of more engagement.)
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  In Spain journalism is lazy, but instances of poor writing are much less common than in the anglosphere. They do clickbait, but maybe it's because the spanish language is more formal than english, you can't really bee too creative without writing something meaningless.
  - Eduard 5y ago
    This comment needs several fact checks
  - dieortin 5y ago
    How is spanish more formal than english? You can write in a formal way or in a less formal one, like in most languages.
    - necovek 5y ago
      English is a bit notorious for "allowing" a lot of creative play with words (like that old quote of "every word can be verbed"). Another thing that affects perceived formality is that "you" in English is both singular and plural and out-of-respect You. If you've ever done any translation between English and a foreign language, you'd notice that the appetite for such gymnastics is much less. (I think that's part of why there are so many English loanwords in other languages too, but I have no data to back it up)
boppo1 5y ago
I think this is a pretty good summary for the US as well.
CSSer 5y ago
> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu. Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which I understand may in some ways be your larger point) and consumers of journalism today. Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. I don’t believe it is fair to say this doesn’t require expertise.
- tbrownaw 5y ago
  > This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism It's right in line with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[1]. > Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. This is a jump from objecting to "is" statements to making an "ought" statement. It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism", which I have the impression is a good chunk of why trust in the news is down. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
  - CSSer 5y ago
    > It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism" I’m sorry this is the impression you were given because my intention was the exact opposite.
- PixyMisa 5y ago
  > Isn’t this a bit much? Given the state of American journalism, it is if anything overly kind.
- xondono 5y ago
  > Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. And yet I think it’s pretty obvious journalism is not about truth anymore. Gawker might be dead, but the Gawker style of “journalism” is well alive. You don’t even need to dig that deep to see something is rotten, the two biggest news channels in the US spend the day saying the opposite of one another.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
We only effectively have 2 political parties in the USA. there are some other parties but all together they only make up 5-10% depending on the given year. Libertarian and Greens are probably the only ones worth mentioning from a statistical point of view. About 40% of Americans register as independent (no party) but when you talk to them they are usually strongly invested in one party or the other.
smsm42 5y ago
In the US, there was a brief period when real fact-checking existed. Then the political activists saw that the regular press had lost all credibility, but the fact-checking brand still retained some, so they made a hard push to take them over. Which by the time of covid has been already mostly complete, and with the push to fight "medical misinformation" (which was quickly defined as any information that contradicts the currently approved doctrine, no matter how scientifically based, factually correct or practically useful) "fact-checking" has been completely subverted to serve the preferred narrative and suppress any heretical thought. > The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table. I am sad to note that the situation in the US is exactly the same. Though the majority of "fact-checkers" and all major social networks are on single side of the said wars.
- rocqua 5y ago
  Thing is, if the idea is to stop wrong conspiracy theories from veing talked about, it makes sense to ban legitimate science that points in the direction of the conspiracy. If you want to do propaganda, then misinformation is useful. But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder. Especially with covid it seems like social media has decided to counter propaganda rather than misinformation. I can see why, but I think it is wrong. Especially if the argument is 'this is false'. To me, this shows once again that content moderation against misinformation does not fit with private parties.
  - jevoten 5y ago
    > But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder. That's what, at their best, most of the media are doing. Presenting well-researched, balanced, truthful stories, carefully selected to promote their own ideology. Forget journalism - this even happens in peer-reviewed science: Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2019/07/political_diversity_will_improve_social_psychological_science_1.pdf https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
andrepd 5y ago
Not exactly doubting you, but is this really accurate? I hear a lot of "fact checkers are biased marxist commies" coming from people who just don't like it when "their side" is criticised. Which is silly. At least I can talk about fact checkers in my country: they give you a write-up of all the sources and reasoning they pursued to ascertain the truth of some thing, then add their own evaluation in a scale of true, mostly true, false, pants on fire. How can people say they're biased when they give you a 100% transparent detail of how they came to their conclusion? Also, it's funny when people say that multi-billion dollar media corporations are biased... towards the left x)
- dieortin 5y ago
  I would disagree with fact checkers being “biased and bad” in Spain. Some political parties have copied the misinformation spreading style, and they probably don’t like being called out.
- soundnote 5y ago
  Some of them are straight up clowns: > Claim Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Rating: Mixture About this rating What's True Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies. What's Undetermined In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism." ---- Almost all media organizations are encouraged to publish hate-inducing headlines and clickbait, so in principle fact checking could help people. Stuff like the above Snopes bit is pure partisan comedy that does nothing but undermine the entire idea, though.
headsoup 5y ago
Definitely wouldn't be the case in the US, they're fact checkers must be entirely legit because the media and politicians say so... The way a political 'side' can so swiftly (and hypocritically) move into authoritarianism because of self-belief in their moral authority is sad, if unsurprising. Much as religion has justified many atrocities through time for 'good,' people seem terrible at critical thinking once they feel 'right.'

xwolfi 5y ago

I'm French, live in China, so familiar from both countries with what you say. But I think I disagree a bit with your annoyance with agenda setting and journalist incestuous relationship with ideology or politics. Look I dont know how you're taught in Spain but in France we gave up neutral journalism centuries ago. Each newspaper is clearly categorized and we learn as children, around 7 IIRC all the links (le monde socialist, le figaro gaulist trending christian, l'humanité communist, and so on and there are many more subtle variations too French to list here) and learn to read them all, sometimes with clenched fist, but no truth has ever been reveled by a single perspective: embrace the chaos and join perspective to build a multi facet view. It's something I despair to see in China where politicians, journalist and the mass try to identify a pure source of truth. But no communist think like another, so even their way will never work. Let them all fight, balance out the arguments, take a decision in the voting booth and stop dreaming of a universal truth given to you from greater mind: even a genius in his lab building a life saving cure will forget to listen to the victims of the sacrifices he requires for the greater good, and that voice must be heard too. Fight for MORE ideology and agenda in media in exchange for editorial transparency about it, so you're clear who they propose you to vote for when they present an argument, and you'll be free. Any other way, and it goes with fact checking semi anonymous facebook crap, is doomed to muddy this clarity. That s what facebook must do: what is the political party or alignment behind each piece, and you're done (or almost: also need to learn to read and understand all perspectives, the hardest part in the US it seems).

boppo1 5y ago
I actually like this idea of a status quo; but it depends on teaching children this from birth. In the US, I was taught that NYT and CNN are reputable and reliable sources of the truth. As an adult, I find them "pretty good" at best.
spaniard89277 5y ago
I see your point, but two objections. - Nuanced opinions and good information is rarely free, be it in monetary terms, be it in the invested time, relationships, etc. Thus, if you're not planning to give up most of your time for any topic, you better find good proxies. And currently the press provides more noise than signal. This is problematic. - If you know anything about Spain is that it's basically Game of Thrones made a country. There's so much internal conflict that it even gets translated INSIDE of the newspapers and TV. You can't take any editorial line for granted, because it's more tied to a group of people seeking power than any background ideology or anything similar. So your balance different views style it's not really that practical in Spain. In fact I can tell you about an Issue where I'm invested that it's awful across the board: Housing policy.
- danbolt 5y ago
  > You can't take any editorial line for granted, because it's more tied to a group of people seeking power than any background ideology or anything similar. I don't mean to misrepresent the parent's argument, but I think they would demand the same solution of editorial transparency towards the groups of people seeking power you mention. That said, I might be coming from a place of ignorance here.
  - spaniard89277 5y ago
    I'm not really sure I understand what you mean, sorry. Who would demand what? What's "editorial transparency"?
    - xwolfi 5y ago
      In France we mean by that that all newspaper have a public well accepted stance on the political spectrum, with candidates they push without hiding and ideologies they maintain. As long as their leaders and famous journalists are clear they're a perspective and not "the truth", I m fine with the communists fighting the nationalists in their respective newspapers even if I disagree with what I read. At least I know what and why they think these things and I can sometimes accept an argument if only to build an iterative counter argument myself. The difference I saw with facebook even in France, is that it's all blurred. I cant cross the Figaro with the Monde to figure two of the sides of an issue, now I receive some neutral looking information with a vague source. It struck me when a colleague started repeating an horrendous story and we investigated together to realize she was sourcing it from a facebook post by our "the onion" equivalent !!! She couldnt see the source because it's too blurry in between her grandma rants and some cnn-style generic information. It doesnt change that in the US I see with worry that even when lines are clear, the debate is heated. Also because there's no spectrum but just two solutions to any issue: democrat and republican. What was hailed as a miracle in democracy (just 2 fuzzy groups of dispationate interest) is starting to look like a weakness (to the death identity conflicts pushed by their respective extremes) while with 13 parties in elections in France, you can express nuances.

najqh 5y ago

https://media.giphy.com/media/lMgKrkuwr1xB1OaEqA/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/lMgKrkuwr1xB1OaEqA/giphy.gif

paganel 5y ago

> but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. It's the same thing in Romania, they strongly monitor and criticise those politicians and public figures who are not europhiles while pretty much ignoring those politicians who are for stronger EU integration and for more power for international institutions and their viewpoints inside of Romania.

najqh 5y ago
It's called globalism.
kerneloftruth 5y ago
Yes, political censorship is often called "fact checking". Facebook invented nothing new, and the sin is them trying to convince us otherwise. The increased censorship has been demanded by the Democrats, and Facebook is obeying.

namelessoracle 5y ago

It sounds like someone being a fact checker is the best way to know they arent communicating facts ironically enough. Kinda like a modern day Ministry of Truth.

superflit2 5y ago

Well... Who owns the Media then?

rabite 5y ago
cool it with the anti-semitic remarks
- twic 5y ago
  Rupert Murdoch is Jewish?
  - superflit2 5y ago
    It took a lot of work finding one that was English/scott. There is the famous Elon Musk tweet https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1637457156799.jpg https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1637457156799.jpg
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      When did he tweet that?
      - mattrighetti 5y ago
        Looks like May 27th, 2018. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1000560049389907969%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewspunch.com%2Felon-musk-media-owned-new-world-order%2F https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000560049389907969?ref_...
        reducesuffering 5y ago
        He was referring to "powerful people" not jewish people. The previous tweet said "Do you think it's in the interest of powerful people to..." So he was playing on that.
    - 5y ago

a9h74j 5y ago

This will be some snark in this comment, but against my own country and not you and yours. I invite a cross-cultural comment on competence. Are the partisan fact-checkers in Spain at least competent enough to write grammatical, parsable sentences and titles? From the BMJ OP: > It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials” Like the BMJ apparently, I first read this with a comma or mdash after 'Disqualifying' -- hence a broken sentence. With more thought, perhaps the inferrable punctuation intended 'Disqualifying-And-Ingored' -- in which case they might or might not be fact-checking a straw-man claim. A negligible point perhaps, but the one fact-check I recall Dr. John Cambell on YT examining also included a broken sentence. (Small sample size, I know.) To me, this speaks to the qualifications and processes of the fact-checkers under debate here, attempting as they are to adjudicate in scientific debates. Attempting as they apparently are to define truth. (Or perhaps Meta does A/B testing by breaking sentences in search of more engagement.)

spaniard89277 5y ago
In Spain journalism is lazy, but instances of poor writing are much less common than in the anglosphere. They do clickbait, but maybe it's because the spanish language is more formal than english, you can't really bee too creative without writing something meaningless.
- Eduard 5y ago
  This comment needs several fact checks
- dieortin 5y ago
  How is spanish more formal than english? You can write in a formal way or in a less formal one, like in most languages.
  - necovek 5y ago
    English is a bit notorious for "allowing" a lot of creative play with words (like that old quote of "every word can be verbed"). Another thing that affects perceived formality is that "you" in English is both singular and plural and out-of-respect You. If you've ever done any translation between English and a foreign language, you'd notice that the appetite for such gymnastics is much less. (I think that's part of why there are so many English loanwords in other languages too, but I have no data to back it up)

boppo1 5y ago

I think this is a pretty good summary for the US as well.

CSSer 5y ago

> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu. Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which I understand may in some ways be your larger point) and consumers of journalism today. Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. I don’t believe it is fair to say this doesn’t require expertise.

tbrownaw 5y ago
> This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism It's right in line with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[1]. > Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. This is a jump from objecting to "is" statements to making an "ought" statement. It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism", which I have the impression is a good chunk of why trust in the news is down. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
- CSSer 5y ago
  > It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism" I’m sorry this is the impression you were given because my intention was the exact opposite.
PixyMisa 5y ago
> Isn’t this a bit much? Given the state of American journalism, it is if anything overly kind.
xondono 5y ago
> Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. And yet I think it’s pretty obvious journalism is not about truth anymore. Gawker might be dead, but the Gawker style of “journalism” is well alive. You don’t even need to dig that deep to see something is rotten, the two biggest news channels in the US spend the day saying the opposite of one another.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

We only effectively have 2 political parties in the USA. there are some other parties but all together they only make up 5-10% depending on the given year. Libertarian and Greens are probably the only ones worth mentioning from a statistical point of view. About 40% of Americans register as independent (no party) but when you talk to them they are usually strongly invested in one party or the other.

smsm42 5y ago

In the US, there was a brief period when real fact-checking existed. Then the political activists saw that the regular press had lost all credibility, but the fact-checking brand still retained some, so they made a hard push to take them over. Which by the time of covid has been already mostly complete, and with the push to fight "medical misinformation" (which was quickly defined as any information that contradicts the currently approved doctrine, no matter how scientifically based, factually correct or practically useful) "fact-checking" has been completely subverted to serve the preferred narrative and suppress any heretical thought. > The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table. I am sad to note that the situation in the US is exactly the same. Though the majority of "fact-checkers" and all major social networks are on single side of the said wars.

rocqua 5y ago
Thing is, if the idea is to stop wrong conspiracy theories from veing talked about, it makes sense to ban legitimate science that points in the direction of the conspiracy. If you want to do propaganda, then misinformation is useful. But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder. Especially with covid it seems like social media has decided to counter propaganda rather than misinformation. I can see why, but I think it is wrong. Especially if the argument is 'this is false'. To me, this shows once again that content moderation against misinformation does not fit with private parties.
- jevoten 5y ago
  > But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder. That's what, at their best, most of the media are doing. Presenting well-researched, balanced, truthful stories, carefully selected to promote their own ideology. Forget journalism - this even happens in peer-reviewed science: Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2019/07/political_diversity_will_improve_social_psychological_science_1.pdf https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

andrepd 5y ago

Not exactly doubting you, but is this really accurate? I hear a lot of "fact checkers are biased marxist commies" coming from people who just don't like it when "their side" is criticised. Which is silly. At least I can talk about fact checkers in my country: they give you a write-up of all the sources and reasoning they pursued to ascertain the truth of some thing, then add their own evaluation in a scale of true, mostly true, false, pants on fire. How can people say they're biased when they give you a 100% transparent detail of how they came to their conclusion? Also, it's funny when people say that multi-billion dollar media corporations are biased... towards the left x)

dieortin 5y ago
I would disagree with fact checkers being “biased and bad” in Spain. Some political parties have copied the misinformation spreading style, and they probably don’t like being called out.
soundnote 5y ago
Some of them are straight up clowns: > Claim Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network. Rating: Mixture About this rating What's True Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies. What's Undetermined In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism." ---- Almost all media organizations are encouraged to publish hate-inducing headlines and clickbait, so in principle fact checking could help people. Stuff like the above Snopes bit is pure partisan comedy that does nothing but undermine the entire idea, though.

headsoup 5y ago

Definitely wouldn't be the case in the US, they're fact checkers must be entirely legit because the media and politicians say so... The way a political 'side' can so swiftly (and hypocritically) move into authoritarianism because of self-belief in their moral authority is sad, if unsurprising. Much as religion has justified many atrocities through time for 'good,' people seem terrible at critical thinking once they feel 'right.'