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Your comment (and the child comments replying to it) would be much stronger if you could point to actual examples of this happening rather than imagined example

by Permit 5y ago

Your comment (and the child comments replying to it) would be much stronger if you could point to actual examples of this happening rather than imagined examples. Personally, I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Are they anywhere similar to this cricket/baseball example you've given, or are they far less egregious?

jscipione 5y ago
- Permit 5y ago
  > Snopes rates the claim that Senator Joe Biden said "we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." as false, Snopes rates the claim "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud." as false. These are different claims, aren't they?
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    A mistaken and false admission is still an admission. And he did make such an admission. I believe, and I suspect most reasonable people would believe, that this was a gaffe and that the President did not mean what he said. It is an admission that should be given very little weight. But it remains an admission nonetheless, and it is a lie for Snopes to claim otherwise.
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      "admit, intransitive verb: To grant to be real, valid, or true; acknowledge or concede. To disclose or confess (guilt or an error, for example). synonym: acknowledge." It can't be both an admission of something real, and a gaffe. If he said "I am a dog" it would be a lie, not an admission that he's a dog (because he simply isn't). Describing an anti-fraud organisation as a fraud organisation is either correct and an admission of a coverup, or false and a mistake and not an admission of anything.
      - torstenvl 5y ago
        No. A statement can relate to truth-or-falsity independent of its own truth or falsity. Example: You falsely accuse me of robbing a bank. I admit I robbed the bank, due to a threat against my family. Later, my defense counsel discovers evidence of the threat. The admission is still an admission. It grants that the accusation is true, even though it isn't. The evidence pertaining to why the admission is false is also fair game to explain why not to give any weight to the admission, but it nonetheless remains an admission. Same here. The public discourse should absolutely correct the record and establish what the President meant. He should probably issue a clarifying statement. But it doesn't change the fact that he made a statement that, by its own words if not by its probable intent, conceded the truth of an accusation.
      - LorenPechtel 5y ago
        I wouldn't even call it a gaffe, merely poorly worded. An X organization can be an organization to accomplish X, or it can be an organization to combat the problem of X. A reasonable person will look at whether X is generally considered positive or negative to decide between these, but a quote-miner won't care.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Its an admission to having an organization focussed on voter fraud. It's not an admission that that organization promotes or organizes voting fraudulently You're ascribing more precision to the statement than is there
      - torstenvl 5y ago
        I'm ascribing no precision to it whatsoever. You're putting the cart before the horse. Before you can argue about what a piece of evidence means, it first has to be evidence. An admission is a type of evidence, given by an individual against their own interest. The fact that there are all kinds of arguments about this evidence not meaning what it is claimed to mean - arguments I wholeheartedly agree with - does not change the fact that it is a statement Joe Biden made that is negative for Joe Biden. This particular admission is extremely weak, clearly ambiguous, and frankly demonstrates that his opponents are grasping at straws. But there's still no getting around the very basic fact that it is an admission.
    - soneil 5y ago
      Surely this is like claiming the Fire Dept are obviously arsonists, otherwise it would have been named the Extinguishing Dept? Or that the 9/11 Commission obviously commissioned 9/11. We have a "Serious Organised Crime Agency" which is more akin to the FBI than the Mafia. What you're describing as a gaffe is a very intentional misrepresentation.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- mavhc 5y ago
  Snopes rated the claim: "Does context matter?" as True! This is obviously just bias on their part
- WD-42 5y ago
  What they debunked was a twitter post that claimed Biden admitted to voter fraud. They didn’t claim that he did not say that sentence. They even posted a full transcript. Did you actually read this before posting it?
  - jscipione 5y ago
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      While Snopes could take on the mantle of hyperliteralism, this would be a pretty paralyzing extension of scope. Would they need to fact-check articles that referenced a PD's "homicide divisions", clarifying that their charter is to investigate homicide instead of perpetrate it? Would they be able to countenance references to a supermarket without clarifying that Safeway has not invented a type of market that can fly and has X-ray vision? There are undoubtedly people whose language skills are poor enough to think that "voter fraud organization" here means "organization to commit voter fraud" instead of "organization to combat voter fraud". I'm not a fan of Snopes at all, but I don't think it's unreasonable that they exclude the tiny segment of the population in need of remedial literacy classes from their target audience.
    - WD-42 5y ago
      Can we agree to be adults here? It’s clear to any reasonable person what he meant. It is bad faith arguments like the one you are making that has made political discourse so toxic in this country.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  Speaking of fact checks, that’s literally not what the page you linked says. Instead, they are rating the claim that “In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud.”
  - jscipione 5y ago
    - gaganyaan 5y ago
      But you're absolutely wrong. As in my other comment, a "voter fraud organization" "perpetrates" voter fraud as much as a "breast cancer organization" "perpetrates" breast cancer. This is the in-your-face, obvious, and common meaning of what he said. Why are you pretending otherwise?
- gaganyaan 5y ago
  It's so obvious to me that the quote means "an organization that combats voter fraud" that I honestly can't believe you're arguing in good faith. And I don't even like Biden. If he had said instead "breast cancer organization", would you start claiming that he's trying to cause more breast cancer in the world? Obviously not, because that's absurd.
  - jscipione 5y ago
    - gaganyaan 5y ago
      That's incredible mental gymnastics. This is like a straw man version of what leftists say the average fox news viewer is like. If this is parody, then congratulations on fooling me.
lenkite 5y ago
Huh, one can fill pages of this. How ‘fact-checking’ can be used as censorship https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0bdc https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0... - covers how Trump's vaccine prediction was 'fact-checked' as false, how the Wuhan leak report was 'fact-checked' and also heavily censored as false, how the reports of Biden's memory boopers were 'fact-checked' as false. Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching... https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-example-of-bad-fact-checking/ https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-example-... https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-the-fact-checkers-snopes-politifact-said-im-a-big-fat-liar-but-lets-look-at-their-facts/ https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-the-f...
- Permit 5y ago
  This article is a very good demonstration of the problem with fact checking, thanks for sharing. > Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching... I imagine I could find more if I wanted to as well, but it probably kicks off a more interesting discussion if we focus on real examples instead of imagined hypotheticals. I was just trying to drive the discussion in that direction.
  - lenkite 5y ago
    Personally, I think its fine if so-called "fact checkers" exist as long as their fact-checking isn't used to flag and censor people.
- teh64 5y ago
  crowkingblog problems: 1. no link to the actual snopes article, which is this: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nbc-vaughn/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nbc-vaughn/ 2. the link "debunking" that the video was edited on the website is hard to confirm, because it is no longer online, and on archive.org it requires a flash player. But at least in the text version (https://web.archive.org/web/20160807110939/http://www.today.com/id/44056945/ns/today-today_people/t/navy-seals-widow-we-were-blessed-be-together https://web.archive.org/web/20160807110939/http://www.today....), there is the reference to christ. investortimes: I think this is a weird semantic argument. Yes, there are fines that need to be paid by water management companies if they do not reduce the amount of water per capita each person uses, and I think investortimes is correct in saying that the cost will probably be somehow passed on to consumers. But that is still not the same thing as saying how it is illegal. The prices will just go up a lot more, and I imagine some kind of usage based pricing will come into effect to make sure the goals are reached. But calling that illegal is like saying it is illegal to run a mining rig in your home because you will be charged a lot for electricity and a power company might force you to reduce the amount of power you are using. So I believe mostly false is still correct. also inb4 tldr
TeeMassive 5y ago
One of my favorites: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-debates/sixteen-fact-checks-second-presidential-debate-n663421 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-debates/... "Trump said Clinton "acid washed" her private email server. She didn't. She used an app called Bleachbit, not a corrosive chemical."
- slothtrop 5y ago
  And we know she didn't because of: fact-checking. Media follies ought not be conflated with fact-checking in abstract.
- biohacker85 5y ago
  This was one of those times I couldn't believe the media took the bait. 1. Trump wants media to report on Hillary deleting her emails. 2. Trump claims Hillary literally acid washed her emails. 3. Media jumps in (they can't help themselves). "Haha Trump is so dumb he thinks Hillary literally acid washed her emails. What really happened is she used software called BleachBit..." 4. Everyone knows how Hillary deleted her emails.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    Or when Trump claimed that the Media barely ever talks about Islamic terrorism. Then they do to prove him wrong. Trump is a master at trolling.
chrononaut 5y ago
> I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. There's a still a problem of scale that fact checkers are attempting to solve. Much like any other outlets of information (news organizations, your neighbor, fact checkers, etc) it is left to the individual to evaluate whether the totality of output from that individual / organization is factually correct. I don't think the answer is to dissuade "fact checkers" similar to that I don't think we should be removing "news organizations" (even biased ones, which they often are), but the need to educate rational thinking skills to be able to evaluate who and how to trust summarized and often opinionated information. > Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Even if there were a pile of egregious examples, the conclusion should be to put reduced weight (or none) on the authors of those examples, and not necessarily the idea of fact checking, considering there could be others that more often communicate the nuance of the situation. (There's also a problem of how fact-checking conclusions are _applied_ into other contexts of course..)
belorn 5y ago
A specific example. I went to a fact-checking conference. During the keynote, the speaker (a previous Wikipedia foundation CEO) used a graph from a study to drive home a specific point. It sounded way too perfect, and I got suspicious. After the talk I looked up the study, found the graph, and below it the research wrote "Do not interpreted the above graph as X! For reasons Y, this would be false. The graph illustrate Z, with the caveats of ...". I contacted the conference holders about the obvious issue of using the graph to prove X, and they forwarded it to the speaker. Nothing happened. This in turn drove home a different point for me. Fact checkers don't care about facts if those facts don't fit in the social context that they are being used.

by Permit 5y ago

jscipione 5y ago

Permit 5y ago
> Snopes rates the claim that Senator Joe Biden said "we have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics." as false, Snopes rates the claim "In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud." as false. These are different claims, aren't they?
- torstenvl 5y ago
  A mistaken and false admission is still an admission. And he did make such an admission. I believe, and I suspect most reasonable people would believe, that this was a gaffe and that the President did not mean what he said. It is an admission that should be given very little weight. But it remains an admission nonetheless, and it is a lie for Snopes to claim otherwise.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    "admit, intransitive verb: To grant to be real, valid, or true; acknowledge or concede. To disclose or confess (guilt or an error, for example). synonym: acknowledge." It can't be both an admission of something real, and a gaffe. If he said "I am a dog" it would be a lie, not an admission that he's a dog (because he simply isn't). Describing an anti-fraud organisation as a fraud organisation is either correct and an admission of a coverup, or false and a mistake and not an admission of anything.
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      No. A statement can relate to truth-or-falsity independent of its own truth or falsity. Example: You falsely accuse me of robbing a bank. I admit I robbed the bank, due to a threat against my family. Later, my defense counsel discovers evidence of the threat. The admission is still an admission. It grants that the accusation is true, even though it isn't. The evidence pertaining to why the admission is false is also fair game to explain why not to give any weight to the admission, but it nonetheless remains an admission. Same here. The public discourse should absolutely correct the record and establish what the President meant. He should probably issue a clarifying statement. But it doesn't change the fact that he made a statement that, by its own words if not by its probable intent, conceded the truth of an accusation.
    - LorenPechtel 5y ago
      I wouldn't even call it a gaffe, merely poorly worded. An X organization can be an organization to accomplish X, or it can be an organization to combat the problem of X. A reasonable person will look at whether X is generally considered positive or negative to decide between these, but a quote-miner won't care.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Its an admission to having an organization focussed on voter fraud. It's not an admission that that organization promotes or organizes voting fraudulently You're ascribing more precision to the statement than is there
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      I'm ascribing no precision to it whatsoever. You're putting the cart before the horse. Before you can argue about what a piece of evidence means, it first has to be evidence. An admission is a type of evidence, given by an individual against their own interest. The fact that there are all kinds of arguments about this evidence not meaning what it is claimed to mean - arguments I wholeheartedly agree with - does not change the fact that it is a statement Joe Biden made that is negative for Joe Biden. This particular admission is extremely weak, clearly ambiguous, and frankly demonstrates that his opponents are grasping at straws. But there's still no getting around the very basic fact that it is an admission.
  - soneil 5y ago
    Surely this is like claiming the Fire Dept are obviously arsonists, otherwise it would have been named the Extinguishing Dept? Or that the 9/11 Commission obviously commissioned 9/11. We have a "Serious Organised Crime Agency" which is more akin to the FBI than the Mafia. What you're describing as a gaffe is a very intentional misrepresentation.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
mavhc 5y ago
Snopes rated the claim: "Does context matter?" as True! This is obviously just bias on their part
WD-42 5y ago
What they debunked was a twitter post that claimed Biden admitted to voter fraud. They didn’t claim that he did not say that sentence. They even posted a full transcript. Did you actually read this before posting it?
- jscipione 5y ago
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    While Snopes could take on the mantle of hyperliteralism, this would be a pretty paralyzing extension of scope. Would they need to fact-check articles that referenced a PD's "homicide divisions", clarifying that their charter is to investigate homicide instead of perpetrate it? Would they be able to countenance references to a supermarket without clarifying that Safeway has not invented a type of market that can fly and has X-ray vision? There are undoubtedly people whose language skills are poor enough to think that "voter fraud organization" here means "organization to commit voter fraud" instead of "organization to combat voter fraud". I'm not a fan of Snopes at all, but I don't think it's unreasonable that they exclude the tiny segment of the population in need of remedial literacy classes from their target audience.
  - WD-42 5y ago
    Can we agree to be adults here? It’s clear to any reasonable person what he meant. It is bad faith arguments like the one you are making that has made political discourse so toxic in this country.
kevinventullo 5y ago
Speaking of fact checks, that’s literally not what the page you linked says. Instead, they are rating the claim that “In October 2020, Joe Biden admitted to perpetrating voter fraud.”
- jscipione 5y ago
  - gaganyaan 5y ago
    But you're absolutely wrong. As in my other comment, a "voter fraud organization" "perpetrates" voter fraud as much as a "breast cancer organization" "perpetrates" breast cancer. This is the in-your-face, obvious, and common meaning of what he said. Why are you pretending otherwise?
gaganyaan 5y ago
It's so obvious to me that the quote means "an organization that combats voter fraud" that I honestly can't believe you're arguing in good faith. And I don't even like Biden. If he had said instead "breast cancer organization", would you start claiming that he's trying to cause more breast cancer in the world? Obviously not, because that's absurd.
- jscipione 5y ago
  - gaganyaan 5y ago
    That's incredible mental gymnastics. This is like a straw man version of what leftists say the average fox news viewer is like. If this is parody, then congratulations on fooling me.

lenkite 5y ago

Huh, one can fill pages of this. How ‘fact-checking’ can be used as censorship https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0bdc https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0... - covers how Trump's vaccine prediction was 'fact-checked' as false, how the Wuhan leak report was 'fact-checked' and also heavily censored as false, how the reports of Biden's memory boopers were 'fact-checked' as false. Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching... https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-example-of-bad-fact-checking/ https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-example-... https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-the-fact-checkers-snopes-politifact-said-im-a-big-fat-liar-but-lets-look-at-their-facts/ https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-the-f...

Permit 5y ago
This article is a very good demonstration of the problem with fact checking, thanks for sharing. > Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching... I imagine I could find more if I wanted to as well, but it probably kicks off a more interesting discussion if we focus on real examples instead of imagined hypotheticals. I was just trying to drive the discussion in that direction.
- lenkite 5y ago
  Personally, I think its fine if so-called "fact checkers" exist as long as their fact-checking isn't used to flag and censor people.
teh64 5y ago
crowkingblog problems: 1. no link to the actual snopes article, which is this: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nbc-vaughn/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nbc-vaughn/ 2. the link "debunking" that the video was edited on the website is hard to confirm, because it is no longer online, and on archive.org it requires a flash player. But at least in the text version (https://web.archive.org/web/20160807110939/http://www.today.com/id/44056945/ns/today-today_people/t/navy-seals-widow-we-were-blessed-be-together https://web.archive.org/web/20160807110939/http://www.today....), there is the reference to christ. investortimes: I think this is a weird semantic argument. Yes, there are fines that need to be paid by water management companies if they do not reduce the amount of water per capita each person uses, and I think investortimes is correct in saying that the cost will probably be somehow passed on to consumers. But that is still not the same thing as saying how it is illegal. The prices will just go up a lot more, and I imagine some kind of usage based pricing will come into effect to make sure the goals are reached. But calling that illegal is like saying it is illegal to run a mining rig in your home because you will be charged a lot for electricity and a power company might force you to reduce the amount of power you are using. So I believe mostly false is still correct. also inb4 tldr

TeeMassive 5y ago

One of my favorites: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-debates/sixteen-fact-checks-second-presidential-debate-n663421 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-debates/... "Trump said Clinton "acid washed" her private email server. She didn't. She used an app called Bleachbit, not a corrosive chemical."

slothtrop 5y ago
And we know she didn't because of: fact-checking. Media follies ought not be conflated with fact-checking in abstract.
biohacker85 5y ago
This was one of those times I couldn't believe the media took the bait. 1. Trump wants media to report on Hillary deleting her emails. 2. Trump claims Hillary literally acid washed her emails. 3. Media jumps in (they can't help themselves). "Haha Trump is so dumb he thinks Hillary literally acid washed her emails. What really happened is she used software called BleachBit..." 4. Everyone knows how Hillary deleted her emails.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  Or when Trump claimed that the Media barely ever talks about Islamic terrorism. Then they do to prove him wrong. Trump is a master at trolling.

chrononaut 5y ago

> I think fact-checking is a hopeless endeavor, but none of the comments here would have convinced me if I didn't already hold this position. There's a still a problem of scale that fact checkers are attempting to solve. Much like any other outlets of information (news organizations, your neighbor, fact checkers, etc) it is left to the individual to evaluate whether the totality of output from that individual / organization is factually correct. I don't think the answer is to dissuade "fact checkers" similar to that I don't think we should be removing "news organizations" (even biased ones, which they often are), but the need to educate rational thinking skills to be able to evaluate who and how to trust summarized and often opinionated information. > Are there any real examples of poor fact checking that people can point to? Even if there were a pile of egregious examples, the conclusion should be to put reduced weight (or none) on the authors of those examples, and not necessarily the idea of fact checking, considering there could be others that more often communicate the nuance of the situation. (There's also a problem of how fact-checking conclusions are _applied_ into other contexts of course..)

belorn 5y ago

A specific example. I went to a fact-checking conference. During the keynote, the speaker (a previous Wikipedia foundation CEO) used a graph from a study to drive home a specific point. It sounded way too perfect, and I got suspicious. After the talk I looked up the study, found the graph, and below it the research wrote "Do not interpreted the above graph as X! For reasons Y, this would be false. The graph illustrate Z, with the caveats of ...". I contacted the conference holders about the obvious issue of using the graph to prove X, and they forwarded it to the speaker. Nothing happened. This in turn drove home a different point for me. Fact checkers don't care about facts if those facts don't fit in the social context that they are being used.