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 nati

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.)