6 ms·
None of this should be taken as an argument against fact-checking either in theory or in practice. There is no set of fact checking policies that will be free
by huitzitziltzin 5y ago
None of this should be taken as an argument against fact-checking either in theory or in practice. There is no set of fact checking policies that will be free from errors. (Indeed nor are the journalists who write the articles infallible, as they would surely admit.)
What’s important is that the fact checkers accept corrections and recognize that they are fallible too.
- huntertwo 5y agoAfter they’ve already imposed their biases and censored information. It’s ok that I ran over your dog while driving blindfolded - I owned up to it after all. Fact checking has no benefits other than imposing the biases of the fact checkers. Sometimes imposing those biases is “good”, sometimes it’s “bad”. But let’s call a spade a spade - this isn’t fact checking. This is bias imposition.
- DarylZero 5y agoWhatever, better to block the spread of medical information from uninformed sources even if a stopped clock is right twice a day. Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm concerned. The misinformation is worse.
- hattmall 5y agoLots of MDs have been censored lately.
- brightball 5y agoWell, the article highlighted above was censored and fact checked for calling out a bogus study used to support nationwide medical policy…
- Nextgrid 5y agoScience does make mistakes but the process in general is thorough enough that they are rarer than idiots dishing out medical advice & spreading fear on Facebook.
- nradov 5y agoActually most published medical research is false. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- brightball 5y agoIn this case, we aren’t talking about science though. We are talking about fact checking something that accurately questioned the science. If what is being spread can’t stand up to questioning, then it’s merits need to be questioned even further.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"Censor everyone without an MD for all I'm concerned. The misinformation is worse." Have you read 1984 or alike? Maybe do so at times. The BS online surely is bad, but did you know, that you can just buy a MD in certain parts of the world? So, we are in the middle of a question: which countries MD's do we recognize to speak censor free? (and who are "we" btw.) And well, governemnts do have some record of power abuse and missinformation, too. Even the democratic ones. And they take ages to get along and make contracts. So lots of golden firewalled nations then, but less vaxxer bs online? I am not sure, if this is a good trade.
- DarylZero 5y agoEven the MDs shouldn't be able to speak "censor free." MDs also need to be, and are, held to truth standards by censors. But considering medical boards can strip them of their MD, maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false statements.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false statements" Or a chilling effect of unpopular opinions and facts. And a much harder climate to find out, what is a fact at all, if you have to be scared, that some government commitee strips you of your right to publish, if they do not like your results.
- tomp 5y agoThanks, but no thanks. If I've learned anything in the past 2 years it's that sometimes even random information (Twitter shitposters) is better than deliberately misleading fake information (e.g. early-pandemic WHO announcements). I've much more confidence in myself (and my own ability to evaluate information) than in any member of any government (or any "expert" credentialed by said government).
- MrMan 5y agounfounded confidence in your critical thinking skills is a huge cognitive bias
- s1artibartfast 5y agoYes, but what alternative is there when health institutions are willing to blatantly lie for political reasons?
- kube-system 5y agoThere’s plenty of misinformation coming from MDs too. Just because they have an MD doesn’t mean they know anything about topics outside of their specialty.
- mannanj 5y agoIn science you constantly have MD disagrees. How do you propose to reconcile this? Someone very qualified will inherently be "fact checked" because the information the fact checker acted on was old and outdated. Anyways this is severely flawed and mistaken because what they're doing today is censoring everyone with or without an MD that their "black box algorithm" disagrees with. You propose keeping up stale information (which IMO amounts to killing people through misinformation not the reverse) and those with the stance to dumb down all information to the safest common denominator are making the social media experience worse for everyone else.
- Bud 5y agoCould we not use the word "censored" where there is no censorship going on? And no, responding to an article's facts and questioning those facts is NOT censorship. We see that claim all too often these days, and it's absurd.
- DarylZero 5y agoCensorship is not inherently bad. The USA has never extended the general principle of freedom of speech to the subject of medical information, for good reason. Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over. Organized medical societies must retain a monopoly on medical speech. In the pandemic, speech about public health was censored less than treatment advice or drug facts would have been. Tens of thousands died as a result. A disastrous experiment in granting a freedom that no one responsible needs or wants.
- jimbob45 5y ago>Medical speech must be censored or else the snake oil salesmen will take over. Organized medical societies must retain a monopoly on medical speech. Instead of censorship like you're advocating for (an approach that absolutely will not work within the framework of the US constitution), we usually solve this by exclusively allowing the organized medical societies to have and show medical credentials. Those who fraudulently claim to have these credentials are viciously prosecuted. The fraudsters are free to push whatever medical advice they like, provided that they do not mislead others into thinking that they are credentialed.
- DarylZero 5y agoThe FDA censors medical speech. There is no constitutional issue.
- jimbob45 5y agoTo my knowledge, the FDA only gets involved when you try to sell things because that may qualify as false advertisement. However, Facebook posts like the ones in question here don't fall under that umbrella. Disclaimer: I'm fully vaxxed and am happy with the way the FDA is run. My only dog in this conversation is censorship.
- hunter2_ 5y agoMost biases are detrimental (political, cognitive, various phobias), but I'm not sure that a bias toward truth ought to be discouraged. If "in favor of truth" and "leftist" happen to correlate for some particular issue, that doesn't necessarily mean a truth bias needs to be avoided. Nice username :)
- huntertwo 5y agoEDIT: hello fellow hunter2 I’m not a right winger, conservative, or whatever. I’m more “leftist” than the average person, so I’m assuming I’m more “leftist” than the average fact checker. That doesn’t mean I’m absent of biases towards things that are not true. The fact checkers are not using the scientific method or any sort of standard based one evidence to make their determinations. They’re using politically aligned news sources and their own opinions. I’ve not yet seen any news by CNN or MSNBC or any other “reputable” news source be fact checked even though I know they regularly mislead and lie (maybe they have been and I’ve missed it - would love to see that). I’ve seen obvious bullshit by conservative media outlets be fact checked. And I’ve seen cases like this article where actual facts are superseded by political opinion. I’m not advocating for avoiding a truth bias, but that’s not what’s present. We can act all high and mighty and pretend like the left is guided by science, but it isn’t. We’re guided by what our side says is true and don’t question it and don’t look at the science. When someone actually looks at the science and negates what our side says, we fact-check it and say it’s misinformation.
- mannanj 5y agoThey don't even own up to it after the fact. Fixes are implemented in the "shadows". These things reek and smell like politics. I wish I had an alternative to social media.
- dotancohen 5y ago> I wish I had an alternative to social media. You honestly believe that you don't? That's the problem right there.
- reaperducer 5y agoI wish I had an alternative to social media. That's like a drug addict saying, "I wish I had an alternative to heroin." The cure is to detox and move on. Nobody "needs" social media. This is usually the place where the pedant HN crowd (many employed by social media companies) like to imagine a bunch of hypothetical edge cases and pretend that the .0001% situations where social media is useful somehow outweighs the massive harm that social media has done over the last decade plus. This is your brain. This is your brain on social media. Any questions?
- shadowgovt 5y agoCouldn't you just stop using it? Get a subscription to a local newspaper and call it a day?
- i67vw3 5y agoMost of the time, you need to mail them a dozen times to get the “fact-check” tag off from your articles. If their fact check is proven to be false (which it usually happens) they do not voluntary alter and take back their fact-check. They are quick to jump for bogus fact-checking, but not for taking back their wrong fact-checks.
- IshKebab 5y agoFact checking has no benefits? Really? How about reducing the spread of harmful misinformation? Or is that not a good thing?
- huntertwo 5y agoI misphrased it, the “good” result of imposing your biases I was referring to is preventing the spread of misinformation in places like Myanmar where genocide is rampant and amplified by social media. If there were no theoretical benefit, social media platforms would have never been pressured to start fact checking. Imposing your biases is a neutral action that can have good or bad results. But it’s not in defense of the truth.
- IshKebab 5y agoWhat about anti-vaxers? Harmful misinformation isn't confined to places like Myanmar. I don't see how you can just say it's "imposing your biases" to fact check things. The fact checking may be influenced by your biases, but "vaccines are safe and effective" isn't a bias. It's the truth.
- treeman79 5y ago
- mrtranscendence 5y agoBrava, you've drawn a line from "Politifact exists" to "AHHH WE'LL ALL BE IN REEDUCATION CAMPS". When you've calmed down, consider that there are reasons we should compare claims against reality (i.e. fact check) that are not "suppress[ing] undesired opinions or truths".
- MrPatan 5y agoAnd you conveniently danced around the middle step that maybe was important and went right into the absurd one. Maybe you shouldn't be so calm, somebody may be pulling a fast one on you.
- enaaem 5y agoThe issue of fact checking is the centralisation of truth. Errors of fact checking have a much higher impact on society than the influence of news sites. Secondly, we can’t assume all fact checking will be honest mistakes forever. Someday someone will be down right corrupt and will abuse this power.
- josephcsible 5y agoI think your "someday" is now.
- bko 5y agoI think it promotes false certainty. Also note that the fact checker errors are not random uncorrelated errors. Fact checks are performed through a political lens. The subconscious question is asked, how will this affect <policy agenda>? If something is factually correct but could lead to <bad outcome> then the fact checkers will consider that when choosing how to check the claim. For instance, in the article that was censored was about faults in the study that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in schools. The fact checkers read that as a claim that masking does not help limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in schools, which is not what the article was about.
- mike00632 5y agoOn the contrary, it seems that the anti-vaxx misinformation is what's political. I've never seen such strong resentment of vaccines, public health policy and science in general until Republicans came out against vaccines in 2020 for political reasons.
- peter_retief 5y agoI think you are conflating censorship with errors
- luckylion 5y agoIf a censor makes a mistake in censoring a book and later admits it, did he not censor it?
- peter_retief 5y agoTo call something fake news when it is actually true is not an error it is deliberate manipulation of information and is censorship not an error. Deliberately misunderstanding something is also not an error but disingenuous. Why is this so hard to understand?
- luckylion 5y agoSorry, I've misunderstood your original comment / lost the context between it and the parent comment. I had somehow read your comment to mean that it's an error, not censorship.
- peter_retief 5y agoI was not very clear in my comment.
- crisdux 5y agoThese people aren't making honest errors. They are censoring opinions they don't like. It's becoming increasingly more absurd as time goes on.
- UweSchmidt 5y agoBy who though? Facebook? Fact checking can certainly only be done in a transparent process with democratic legitimization. Anyway the idea to take on the responsibility for fact-checking seems kinda awful if I were a corporation I'd try to hand that over to someone else, there is going to be a lot of trouble in that area in the future.
- mannanj 5y agoWhat's important is fact checkers will never be right all the time, and we should have an inherent UI design to account for that and/or convey it to the user rather than the current "witch hunt style" where anyone who posts content is vilified and attacked until a later correction is made (which of course is done under the shadows without the erring entity making any kind of update to your audience that they were wrong). Maybe we shouldn't have ran this experiment instead?
- beervirus 5y ago
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoMaybe they should stop calling themselves fact checkers and use a label like "our thoughts on this issue" like most people do when giving their opinion. Elevating their opinion to the level of fact is arrogant and antisocial. Don't understand why anyone would defend this other than perhaps a belief that the "fact" checkers will always be inclined to "fact" check in favor of their ideological bias. History shows monsters rarely obey their creators once they get powerful enough to break free of the creator's control.