76 ms·

Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

296 points by dberhane 5y ago

alignItems 5y ago
The BMJ itself tightly controls who can say what on its platform, and that is precisely why it gained its reputation. Granted, Facebook is supposed to be more open for everyone, but it’s still their platform, their reputation, and they can decide what to filter - and people can decide to take their discussions somewhere else.
- differentView 5y ago
  But when the largest font describes it as "Partly False Information", it's more than just excluding information, it's making an accusation.
- Veen 5y ago
  The issue is not whether Facebook, as a private company, can filter whatever it likes, but whether it does so reliably and truthfully in a way its users can trust. Facebook can indeed decide what to filter, but its also permissible for other organizations to make users aware that Facebook may filter and display misleading messages based on inaccurate fact checking and that the fact-checking organization that caused the filtering defamed a reputable publication by falsely alleging that their content is a hoax.
- largbae 5y ago
  The BMJ does not claim protections as a platform, whether you call it one or not. BMJ is a publisher, and takes responsibility for the content that it publishes. The argument here is that FaceBook is now also a publisher.
  - alignItems 5y ago
    This is political/legal distinction. Perhaps Facebook now is a publisher and needs to increase censorship even more. Or the law can be changed to differentiate based on the scale of contributions and the corresponding complexity of moderation.
    - fer 5y ago
      The distinction needs to be there, from the moment FB (or Twitter) has a conflict of interest: their revenue depends on the content being engaging, regardless its factuality. In my head, if they do any filtering or ordering of content, they have to be accountable such content, since they are exerting a de facto editorial line. I don't really understand how a newspaper publishing an incendiary op-ed can accountable for it, whereas the same thing as a viral FB post won't hold FB accountable. The only difference is that an editor picks the former, and an algorithm picks the latter. Is that it? Does delegating responsibilities to a computer make us any less responsible of the results?
cblconfederate 5y ago
Facebook should be banned from allowing any content about COVID in its network, for public health reasons. They are a shit company that leeches on the free content of their users, who would expect any kind of good to come out of this. No need to sue them , investigate them etc, just ban anything that mentions covid on their network
jamessb 5y ago
A previous discussion on the"Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg" mentioned in this article had 677 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595598
nickelpro 5y ago
From the last discussion: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-the-bmj/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-t... The BMJ is not the shining city on the hill here. You can have problems with Facebook policing information, but Thacker is unquestionably an anti-vax conspiracy theorist and the BMJ is allowing him to use their reputation to push that narrative.
- NoPie 5y ago
  It states that Thacker has been double vaccinated with Pfizer vaccine. Anti-vax conspiracy theorist? That is clearly nonsense.
  - Avamander 5y ago
    Plenty of quacks follow the principle of "do as I say, not as I do." It's a very common behaviour amongst populist politicians to talk shit about vaccines and then being fully vaccinated.
    - NoPie 5y ago
      It has nothing to do with the author of the article. It just baseless accusations.
    - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
      I didn’t read the article, but isn’t it plausible that whatever they did allegedly did wrong wasn’t significant enough to warrant recommending against taking the vaccine?
      - NoPie 5y ago
        They didn't recommend anything against the vaccine. It is just overzealous fact-checkers who (similarly to antivax) couldn't admit that they were confused about the article and mislabelled it as false.
- jjgreen 5y ago
azalemeth 5y ago
Frankly, if I were the BMJ I would start contacting lawyers and issuing writs. I'm unsure of exactly what or where or how, but the principle that peer-reviewed scientific articles are being shadowbanned as "false" and unshareable by a for-profit, unqualified US organisation is...deeply offensive. A large lawsuit by an organisation such as the BMJ (an impact factor 40 journal first published in its current form in about 1840) would, at the very least, highlight how Facebook rapidly has become a publisher and its algorithms shape what people see. It's like making a collage. If you put newspapers in a shop window, and sell them, you're a shop. You don't write the newspapers. If you cut out individual letters from newspapers and give them to people, you're not a shop, and you've made the message you create. Facebook is cutting out alternate sentences-to-paragraphs from the tabloids and selling a set of stories it thinks its users like, interspersed with ads. That question of degree is very much the sort of thing that legal brains like to get involved in.
- frereubu 5y ago
  Deeply offensive doesn't mean illegal. Unless there's a law that you can point at which bans this, there's no point in hiring lawyers because any challenge will be immediately thrown out. The real issue here in my view is that Facebook - a private company with no legal requirement to keep publishing anything that people post - is becoming the de facto news source for vast numbers of people. And, God help me, I have some sympathy for Facebook here if, as another commenter says, this study is being taken out of context and being used to push anti-vax conspiracy theories. It's such a complex issue.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    If they are actually being labelled as false as part of the justification , there is at least an arguable case of defamation, stronger in a jurisdiction like Britain where truth of the damaging published characterization is a defense that the defendant must prove rather than falsity of the claim being an element that the plaintiff must prove.
    - danuker 5y ago
throw8932894 5y ago
Facts are facts! If the fact checking does not match reality, it is the reality that needs to be fixes!
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  "Facts are facts", the favorite phrase amongst people who want to hide framing is almost equally important.
- rahoulb 5y ago
  “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” Facts may be facts. But conclusions vary.
300bps 5y ago
Lead Stories falsely defamed The BMJ by referring to their story as a hoax and creating a headline that says they were wrong without actually refuting anything. They then hide behind the “missing context” label which sounds innocent enough but they did far more than that. There is something very dangerous about wanting to discuss a serious issue seriously and being squelched because it doesn’t fit some narrative. I’ve personally had three shots from Pfizer, I’ve had them administered to my children and I want to hear if there are possible issues with them from reputable sources without those reputable sources being shut down by self-appointed information police.
bobcostas55 5y ago
The entire idea of "fact checking" on social media is premised on the notion that fact checkers have some kind of superior epistemic merit compared to the checkees. When you're fact checking random people or journalists that may or may not be true, but why does Zucc think facebook's checkers are superior to the BMJ? What are the fact checker's credentials, and most importantly what is their track record? The extreme opaqueness of the process is certainly not an encouraging signal.
- gadders 5y ago
  I think they are mostly journalists that couldn't get hired on at a major newspaper.
  - GameOfFrowns 5y ago
    >I think they are mostly journalists that couldn't get hired on at a major newspaper. Brutal.
  - syshum 5y ago
    So this would imply they are trustworthy and dedicated to the truth, because we know major newspapers are neither trustworthy nor have any connection with the truth these days
    - gadders 5y ago
      Or maybe just not as good at writing?
    - pdpi 5y ago
      You could just as easily say “wow, if not even those untrustworthy major newspapers will hire them, they really must play fast and loose with the truth”.
  - octoberfranklin 5y ago
    We could use more reporters and fewer journalists.
  - 5y ago
throwaway2474 5y ago
I hope that at some point we get to see an in-depth business case study of Pfizer and how they’ve been so successful out of the pandemic. They seem to have an unbelievable grasp of the science-marketing game and how to navigate it successfully at scale. Without getting too far into controversial territory, I’ve observed that - Out of many competing vaccines, Pfizer was always the “cool” one, in both scientific and lay circles - The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug - It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way And yet - You still won’t read this in most mainstream media, and still can’t mention these things in many social contexts - Governments around the world are still pushing Pfizer/Moderna over all other vaccines (hear about AZ recently?) This article is another example of how their marketing machine is working for them. If I ran a multimillion dollar company in a highly regulated industry, I’d be taking very careful notes of him how Pfizer is playing this one.
- locuscoeruleus 5y ago
  > - It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way One of the nordic countries has 10x more infections than the first wave and 0.5x people in intensive care. While the vaccines have failed to stop the pandemic, I disagree that the contribution is not meaningful.
  - throwaway2474 5y ago
    I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. I think the vaccine helped against past strains, and maybe a bit against omicron, but it was vastly oversold.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. You can think that as much as you like, but we have actual numbers on hospitalization/death in the two populations, and there's a clear, large difference even in the Omicron surge.
gadders 5y ago
- amcoastal 5y ago
  I will never truly understand the infatuation with Hunter Biden. Oh, the son of a candidate to be president/the president is using their position for personal gain in a corrupt fashion? That's certainly not something that has been happening for the last half decade...
  - GameOfFrowns 5y ago
    The accusation is that Hunter Biden was merely the proxy to buy Joe Biden. >That's certainly not something that has been happening for the last half decade... So, then what's keeping the 'liberal' media from reporting on the Biden/Burisma connection with the same zealotry the media showed when reporting on the Trump family's dirty dealings? Instead of that, they killed the Hunter Biden story in the run up to the election.
    - tagoregrtst 5y ago
      But to salvage whatever is left of their reputations outside a small group of true believers, they have since acknowledged that the laptop story is real. After the election, of course ;) The most annoying part of where we are is that I no longer know where to get fair reporting. I guess its always been like that, especially for foreign reporting, but its so laughably bad now :(
  - gadders 5y ago
    I think the implication (and no idea if true or not) is that he is also helping his Dad enrich himself. Plus there are some weird sexual family dynamics hinted at as well.
    - tagoregrtst 5y ago
      “ and no idea if true or not” Well I think traditional media have acknowledged that the laptop is real. Of course that doesn't mean there was anything salacious on it and the excerpts arent in fact fake
InsomniacL 5y ago
"Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong" Where has it gone wrong? “We did not call into question the integrity of The BMJ’s story, only the comprehensiveness of it. That’s the point of a ‘Missing Context’ rating. The BMJ article is being used as evidence of Vaccine Conspiracy theories, it's not like the warning is on the Article, it's where it's shared on Facebook and the missing context label is relevant in that context. A context where the vast majority of people viewing the facebook posts will not understand the BMJ may cover a sub-topic where the results do not reflect on the outcome of the parent topic...
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  1. The screenshot shows Facebook is telling owners groups of group that the information is "partly false." "Partly false" is obviously a distinct claim, and one that does not appear to be supported. 2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness.
  - InsomniacL 5y ago
    > 1. The screenshot shows Facebook is telling owners groups of group that the information is "partly false." "Partly false" is obviously a distinct claim, and one that does not appear to be supported. This is only shown to Group Admins, you're correct that it's wrong however it's clearly a simple wording mistake with limited impact. > 2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness. That's a big stretch, 4,000 - 8,000 thousand articles are published to the BMJ each year, one of them having a label on social media with 'missing context' is not censoring quality reporting.
- Hnrobert42 5y ago
  Indeed, the very controversy around the label is evidence that the article needs more context.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    This really seems like a Kafka trap.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Did the people who pushed the “Fact Checking” system ever consider what the people reading the misinformation the fact check would appear under would think when they saw the fact check? Because I really doubt the thing going through their head is “wow this might be wrong”. Trust in any government, media or institution has already been completely burned for those people and things like “Fact Checks” to them only makes the misinformation seem more legit. I’d bet if you actually engaged with those people you’d discover this system accelerated misinformation not curbed it.
- rdtsc 5y ago
  Very good point. That’s exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union. People craved banned things. Books, ideas, articles, authors, items from the West, etc. Being banned automatically increased their appeal.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  That's a nice idea, but not actually true. > “When people saw those warning labels, 95% of the time they did not go on to view the original content,” the company says. Moreover, if an article is rated “false” by their “fact checkers”, the network will “reduce its distribution”. This means that, while an author or poster is not aware that censorship is taking place, the network could be hiding their content so it is not widely disseminated. The piece above was censored by FB as misinformation, before they apologised for the error. - https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-leak-theory/ https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-lea...
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    > the network will “reduce its distribution” That's a different subject, I'm talking about what's happening in the persons head when they see it. Not about if the network actually just shadow-censors it so they never see it in the first place.
germandiago 5y ago
In my country there is no media I believe less than the fact-checking one, officially given to friends of my current government to the wife of one of the most well-known people in Spain, for its channel "La Sexta", her name is Ana Pastor, wife of Ferreras. Besides controlling the media nearly as a monopoly, they receive favors from government like public money, when they are supposed to be private media. Same for Cadena Ser, for which there are jokes as "the most public private radio ever". All this, at least in Spain, are the same people and I consider it basically a layer of corruption with the tax payer money. Also, they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true (there is a video in Internet from Joan Planas where he requested to correct information), they did not correct the information giving excuses about the inability to do it (so they were aware of the "error"). That is the level of confidence I have in fact checking in Spain. In other countries, I do not know, but I see it as a fight for the monopoly of the truth and to control and censor with the excuse of better quality of information, which is not true here. Besides that, fact-checking should not be even a thing, because things are not so clear sometimes. In fact, I have seen some articles from those fact-checking agents with extreme bias loads with the only purpose of shifting people opinions. Those were not facts, they were merely perspectives and why you should think what they say and why it is not correct according to them to use one term or another. All in all, propaganda.
- kgwgk 5y ago
  > they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true I loved the time there was a claim that you could spend three days in jail for such and such and they 'fact-checked' it as false because you could be detained for a maximum of 72 hours. [Edit: I misremembered slightly. It was "a few days" but the point stands. Three days qualify as "a few".]
alignItems 5y ago
From Lead Stories' Response [1]: > The "Missing Context" label applies to content that (while true or real) might still be misleading because crucial information is missing. Given the enormous engagement the article received and the kinds of reactions it elicited that certainly seems to have been the case here. “Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial” > The BMJ.com headline, shown above, fails to make two important distinctions: > The allegation concerns just three of the 153 sites at which the vaccine was tested on 44,000 participants. It would have been less misleading to say "data integrity issues at 3 of 153 Pfizer trial sites." Given how many of the social media audience would read just the title, perhaps the missing context label is accurate. [1] 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...
- Semaphor 5y ago
  I agree with you, but if that is their standard, I’m expecting to see "Missing context" labels on almost every news article being shared on facebook, as headlines are almost exclusively clickbait to some degree.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  I didn't walk away with a clear picture: Was it "data integrity issues at 3 out of 153 sites [no idea about the remaining 150]" or was it "... [the others were fine]"? The FDA audits were at some other sites of those 153 and reportedly did not find any incongruences. Which need not mean there were no issues, but it's certainly a prior.
- d23 5y ago
  I'm coming to the same conclusion. Judging by just how far down I had to come to find this comment even on a site like HN, it's pretty clear people are uninterested or unable to read, put things into context, and think critically. I'm surprised people can't even recognize the smell of something wrong, even when it's out in the open: > The BMJ has locked horns with Facebook and the gatekeepers of international fact checking after one of its investigations was wrongly labelled with “missing context” and censored on the world’s largest social network. The tone of the very first sentence is off. This is the publication describing itself.
rdtsc 5y ago
> Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.” Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing the party? Not so fast! In order to get past them you have to use euphemisms hoping they won’t catch them. Or, profusely praise the ideology hoping to appease them so they’d let your article through, hoping they would be flattered and let your one slightly controversial idea at the end through. No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.
- d35007 5y ago
  > No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same. If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Reminds me of John Mulaney > If we're comparing the badness of two words and you won't even say one of them... That's the worst word.
  - rdtsc 5y ago
    > If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same. I didn't say they are _exactly_ the same, that's pretty obvious. Especially that one is a country and the other is a company. So it's a bit of straw man, isn't it? Not every single person who criticized the government or published anything that was censored was sent a labor camp. Those had been eliminated by the 60s. However people didn't get promoted, lost their jobs (is a journalist losing their job and not being able to be hired because they pointed out something controversial that different?), added to blacklist. The response to that was the people auto-censored themselves. They didn't want to get in trouble so they didn't talk about certain things. Those that tried used a few trick to get around the censors, and I outlined those already.
kryogen1c 5y ago
the idea of "fact checking" has a false premise - its begging the question[0]. we need to disabuse ourselves of this notion that we can know the Truth or the "facts" if we just checked enough. there is no such thing as contextless infromation. is the sky blue? depends. maybe it emits a certain spectrum based on gas content on our planet, but color is a perceptual experience. did trump\biden say X? maybe; is that the whole question - that their mouth made a set of sounds? did they say it, or did they mean it? could they have changed their mind? did they mean it but only tried halfheartedly? this can be true of hard sciences too. aspects of newtonian physics were known to be true, verifiably by all experimental data, until one day they were proven false. not that physics are so dogmatic, but if facebook can factcheck the bmj, im sure theyd fact check some patent clerk. i have been pondering the words of the history enthusiast dan carlin[1]. he thinks the most important person in history was JFK because he chose peace and didnt deploy nukes when everyone around him was forcefully recommending WWIII due to the known motives, the "facts" of russia and cuba. i wonder what the fact checkers would have been saying about that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question [1] https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ EDIT: the due dilligence required to learn about a topic and have the gall to report about its "truth" is called journalism, not fact checking. its not called facebook journalism because that would too obviously be a steaming pile of shit.
- pdpi 5y ago
  You don’t need to have a nuanced perspective on the truth to be able to spot outright lies and nonsense. E.g. Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population. I’m perfectly OK with fact checkers getting rid of that level of nonsense while letting most of everything else true.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    An example of a fact that can be checked would be the height of a tree or the size of an island. Whether person X helped group Y do Z is vastly more complex and can be answered on several levels. It’s best left to the public to apply literal common sense. Also, most political debates are on this level of abstraction, making fact-checking a non-starter
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madaxe_again 5y ago
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that Facebook made the right call here. The problem isn’t the content, but rather the audience, and how they react to said content. People generally don’t read articles - particularly lengthy articles, particularly articles written by academia for academia - they read the headline, perhaps the lead, and then go post and spread their interpretation of the information. The BMJ have a reputation as being a reputable source of information. Take these two together, and you have a wavefront of posts claiming that the BMJ agrees that vaccines are dangerous and poorly tested, and the story isn’t what the article holds, it isn’t nuanced, it isn’t moderate, it’s “look, this proves that bill gates wants a microchip in you, and the BMJ confirms it!”. So, you have a difficult choice. Do you allow a factual article and the reputation of the BMJ to be used as fodder for anti-vaxxer sentiment, or do you try to dampen the squib and decrease the propagation of the distorted interpretations? If anything, there should perhaps be a middle road, where in order to share or comment on an article, you have to answer a series of questions about what the article says. This would dampen the network effect, and would hopefully ensure that people are actually forced to read the content they’re sharing, rather than relying on a headline and a strapline interpretation added by the sharer.
pessimizer 5y ago
I'm an absolute enemy of both "fact checking" and corporate regulation of speech, in coordination with government, on forums as large and general as Facebook. That being said, this supporter of the Facebook action, who is well qualified to speak, offers very good arguments that this was not science but instead guest editorial by a regular woo/conspiracy pitcher, and another specific indictment of recent BMJ editorial decisions. Didn't convince me that "fact checking" isn't vile, but it convinced me that in this specific case, the content was shit: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-strike-back-against-mark-zuckerberg-and-facebook/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-s... EDIT - actual link: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-the-bmj/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...
- tpoacher 5y ago
  I don't think a blogpost full of empty vitriolic arguments is the best rebuttal proving "the content was shit". It just shows this particular blogger had some axe to grind and cannot be taken seriously. My understanding of the issue is that the content itself was "not shit", but the timing and context in which it was likely to be perceived at the very least, associated it with less palatable implications, which may or may not hold, and are typically borne by counterproductive groups. And there was some evidence that indeed this was how the article was perceived by such groups. But the article itself, in a completely epistemic sense, was "not shit" at all. It was actually very insightful for anyone interested in the context of the actual science involved. So this is not as black and white as you suggest, imho, and even if it were in this particular case, the broader issue raised is still important: If you do science A which is useful for good thing B, but has the potential to be falsely interpreted as bad thing C by bad group D, should we expect an overreaching group E to shadowban/discredit A? I say no. I would much rather have a proper discussion instead.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Your characterization of the blog post lacks any reference to the blog post. Here's one: > Thacker’s main source was a “whistleblower” named Brook Jackson, who had worked at Ventavia for only two weeks. As I described, the allegations were either big nothingburgers that wouldn’t have affected the quality of the data (e.g., not appropriately using sharps containers to dispose of sharps) or were mainly insinuated and implied without actual evidence (e.g., unblinding or even falsifying clinical trial data). The article follows a familiar format for disinformation. Very definitive and serious accusations are leveled very early in the article, followed much later in the article by “facts” that do not actually substantiate such definitive and serious allegations. ----- It might actually help if I include a better link, what I posted was actually a follow-up that was the first to come up in my history: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-the-bmj/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...
civilized 5y ago
I'm not familiar with the fact checker Lead Stories and was curious what else they publish. I went to their Twitter feed [1] and something caught my eye, a story about the mortality of COVID vs the Spanish Flu [2]. The headline posted on Twitter was "Fact Check: COVID-19 IS Deadlier Than The Spanish Flu And Seasonal Flu" [3]. That headline shocked me, because if you follow the mortality statistics, there is no way COVID's worldwide mortality rate could draw anywhere near the mortality rate of the 1918 flu epidemic, which has been estimated at 1-6% of the entire world population (17-100 million deaths, world pop in 1918 approximately 1.8 billion) [4, 5]. COVID has been estimated at about 7 million deaths so far out of a world population of 7.9 billion [6], for a global mortality rate of around 0.1%. Even looking at total excess deaths, which includes a lot of non-COVID causes, you have 20 million, still at the lower end of the 1918 epidemic's range with a much larger world population [7]. Lead Stories eventually defends their claim by comparing Spanish Flu mortality to peak COVID mortality in New York during the early epidemic - a bizarre case of cherry-picking. To their credit, Lead Stories did update their headline soon after tweeting that to remove the claim about Spanish Flu, but the lead sentence still reads as follows: > Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading... This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading. Considering this and their significant failures in the BMJ incident, I would hesitate in trusting this fact checker to consistently provide high-quality, unbiased checks. [1] https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom [2] https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-19-is-deadlier-than-the-spanish-flu-and-seasonal-flu.html https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-... [3] https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/1483585218741248000?s=20 https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/148358521874124800... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu [6] https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-69-million-deaths-globally-more-double-what-official-reports-show https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-... [7] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
- sertraline 5y ago
evancoop 5y ago
On some level, this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors and vociferous debates. So, what's preferable? Unfettered venom and lies mixed with the best attempts at rationality or the discourse moderated by unseen arbiters and algorithms? Ideally, there would be multiple forums. But given how technology scales and how network effects operate, we'd likely wind up with a few enormous entities. Thus, I refer back to the choice above. Which will it be?
- sharkjacobs 5y ago
  > this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors the classic anecdote of the husband who does a really bad job washing the dishes so his wife won't ask him to do them anymore
- robmccoll 5y ago
  Neither. Change the law to make platforms like Facebook accountable for the content published on them. Here's how you do that without damaging speech or making platform companies impossible: make platform protections dependent on revenue stream. If you are paid by the author to publish their work, you are a protected platform and it isn't your content. If you make money by selling advertising alongside the content or by selling a subscription to the content stream, you are exposed to libel lawsuits, incitement, hate speech, false advertising, etc. The rest will sort itself out. Previously journalism cleaned itself up because it could be held accountable for outright lies. There is incentive to make outrageous claims because outrage sells. The balance is to create civil and criminal repercussions for provable lies. Lies spread on social media like wildfire because outrage sells and more eyeballs means more money for the platform, so the platform and the authors are incentivized to create and spread misinformation. There is no balance against it, so it will continue to grow.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Wait... > If you make money by selling advertising alongside the content [...] you are exposed to libel lawsuits [...] The rest will sort itself out. By "sort itself out" you mean Facebook would moderate and remove 100x more content? I cannot see how that is not the only outcome if you make platforms liable for the content its users post.
Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Who is this clownery even for? Does anyone care about „fact checking“ at all? Personally I have maximum distrust towards those fact checking offers, there always seems to be an agenda behind it.
aceon48 5y ago
It was never about fact checking. It was always about narrative control.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
addicted 5y ago
Fact checking on media is bad. The BMJ article, however, was horrible. Poorly sourced (based entirely on someone who was fired and didn't have the technical capabilities they had to judge the claims they were making) and the BMJ editors have basically descended into new age woo instead of real science (I am not sure if this affects the journal, but the specific article was BS).
intended 5y ago
Every time these conversations come up on HN - there’s a number of comments saying that fact checkers have to decide things in a rush - contrasted against authors who spend time on an article. Am I missing something about American fact checkers ? The sites I know have limited resources so they spend their time on quality work in the few places they can. How does fact checking work in the states ? Is there something non obvious about fact checking groups?
intended 5y ago
Welcome to the future ? Stop fact checking sites, and social media becomes even worse than it is. Use fact checkers, and you love with false positives and false negatives. Then narratives form around those errors ( because we are pattern recognition machines, even when there are no patterns). So what’s the out ? All fact checking will create some amount of False pod/negative. No amount of money, time or resources can avoid that.
bo1024 5y ago
There is a different issue with the "fact checking" approach: it allows Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) to deflect blame from their algorithm. FB's narrative is that the problem is the people who post untrue stuff, and fact checking will fix the problem (actually it won't, but it will show FB tried their best). But the problem is FB's algorithm which promotes and publishes rampant misinformation. FB should be held accountable for what they decide to show people. Not deflect accountability onto their users.
FredPret 5y ago
The very existence of fact-checking demonstrates a deplorable intellectual arrogance. Do these people meditate deeple and then receive divine inspiration as to what is really true? Do they have transcendent superbrains that work better than everybody else’s? Do they have access to Secret Wikipedia that contains only true and current facts? The truth of everything we do will be visible only centuries from now, after all strong political feelings we have shifts somewhere else. (Today we look at Ancient Rome and do not care about the Reds and the Greens.) Also, most human statements cannot be evaluated for truth, including this one. We communicate mostly feelings, sentiments, our sense of something, and the odd number or two.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  I think individuals like FredPret have never tried to run any kind of forum or publicly editable resource on the internet. Bad actors telling simple lies for lol's and/or profit do exist and they will ruin communities. Inline fact checking is a feature of all successful forums, whether the fact checking is done by the institution or the community is immaterial to the true existence of the need. If computers with all of their precision require checksums and error correction in data transfer protocols it seems arrogant and perhaps willfully ignorant to think humanity does not also require this for the continued propagation of accurate and useful data. People often conflate "general existential uncertainty" with the "knowability of truth inside a shared frame of reference", in this case our shared frame of reference is physical reality and propositional statements can be "grounded". Some people just stop trying because they are tired. Some because they lack the tools to evaluate data and create confidence intervals. Like most nerd skills, talented data analysts can be hard to find. The very existence of this article and the ensuing discussion shows that the internet continues to surface facts and route around censorship. The efficacy and methodologies forums use will continue to evolve and require refinement, and have evolved from the early BBS days, some forums will also tend to be run in an overly authoritarian/restrictive/harmful way, just like in the old BBS days. All online community that philosophically and practically reject error correction tend to end up shut down by the state for child pornography or overwhelmed with snake oil salesmen preying on the credulous.
  - 5y ago
huetius 5y ago
I think my only strong opinions on fact checking are that the situation has exposed the problems inherent in techne without episteme, and that it is no longer tenable to punt on philosophical questions.
RHSeeger 5y ago
Without trying to express any opinion on the correctness of Facebook's behavior in this specific instance... this quote in the BMJ writeup concerned me > The Lead Stories article, though it failed to identify any errors in The BMJ’s investigation, nevertheless carried the title, “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying and Ignored Reports of Flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.” > The first paragraph wrongly described The BMJ as a “news blog” and was accompanied by a screenshot of the investigation article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or inaccurate. It is _entirely_ possible for a story to be factually correct and still be completely misleading. Just because it doesn't outright lie doesn't mean it's not misleading. For example, I can point out that "Senator <X> voted, multiple times, against adding funds for the support of military veterans", and that would leave a lot of people with the idea that Senator <X> is specifically trying to prevent funding for veterans. However, it's just as likely that the bills in question were primarily about something that the senator was against, and the veterans part was a tiny "pet addon"; and the senator was voting against the more substantial goal of the bill. That type of misleading information is used ALL the time, and nothing about it is factually incorrect... but it's still intentionally misleading. It's goal is to make people believe something that isn't true.
rob_c 5y ago
The only way to counter bad speech is with more speech.
encryptluks2 5y ago
If you want to go up against the trillion dollar vaccine companies, then you better be able to buy congress and pay off social media, cause otherwise they are getting more from censoring anything that may be seen as negative towards their trillion dollar enterprise.
tynpeddler 5y ago
If this is BMJ's best argument, then I'm going to have to side with Facebook on this one. This quote right here basically sums up the silliness of the BMJ's argument: >Alan Duke, editor in chief of Lead Stories, told The BMJ that the “Missing Context” label was created by Facebook specifically “to deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real.” This whole episode is one more piece highlighting the difficulties caused by casual readers attempting to read technical literature. Technical literature covers topics that average readers have little to no experience with and as such non-technical readers are prone to drawing unsupportable conclusions from them. Honestly, any technical article can be slapped with the "Missing Context" flag by default. The positions in this article are pretty simple. BMJ publishes a report showing that one of the contractors performing studies for Pfizer's covid vaccine had practices that were flawed but did not render the data unusable. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on these facts. This article was widely shared on Facebook, primarily by anti-vaccine groups. Lead Stories is asked by Facebook to fact check the article and Lead Stories assigns the "Missing Context" flag Extrapolating from context, I'm going to assume that anti-vaxxers were arguing that this was proof that the vaccine is entirely unreliable and should not be used (this seems like a safe assumption because it's the conclusion that anti-vaxxers always come to no matter the evidence). It's important to note that BMJ and Lead Stories both agree that this conclusion is entirely unsupportable by the article. The BMJ is intended for a technical audience, so from a technical reader's standpoint, the article is complete as it is. Lead Stories is reading from the viewpoint of a non-technical reader; someone who lacks the skills and experience necessary to understand the article. So Lead Stories points out that readers need more information than is in the article in order to understand it. This is trivially non-controversial from the plain english definition of "technical literature". It's even more true in light of the fact that anti-vaxxers are using the article to build flawed arguments that are resulting in the deaths of thousands. BMJ's response to the situation is unsupportable and, perhaps intentionally, is arguing something completely differently than Lead Stories. That's not to say BMJ doesn't have a real grievance. They should push back on the wording Facebook provided in their notice. Facebook states that the article is partly false, which Lead Stories does not agree with. Facebook also, ironically, does not provide sufficient context on the meaning of the "Missing Context" label. But none of these problems with Facebook refute the appropriateness of the "Missing Context" label.
EricE 5y ago
What I find fascinating is that anyone pays attention to or takes these "fact checkers" seriously. The only people benefiting from "fact checkers" are the big tech companies that can use them as a shield to hide behind.
Blackstrat 5y ago
Facebook has already admitted in court (John Stossel’s lawsuit) that their fact checkers aren’t fact checks but rather opinions. It is time to de-platform Facebook.

296 points by dberhane 5y ago

The BMJ itself tightly controls who can say what on its platform, and that is precisely why it gained its reputation. Granted, Facebook is supposed to be more open for everyone, but it’s still their platform, their reputation, and they can decide what to filter - and people can decide to take their discussions somewhere else.

differentView 5y ago
But when the largest font describes it as "Partly False Information", it's more than just excluding information, it's making an accusation.
Veen 5y ago
The issue is not whether Facebook, as a private company, can filter whatever it likes, but whether it does so reliably and truthfully in a way its users can trust. Facebook can indeed decide what to filter, but its also permissible for other organizations to make users aware that Facebook may filter and display misleading messages based on inaccurate fact checking and that the fact-checking organization that caused the filtering defamed a reputable publication by falsely alleging that their content is a hoax.
largbae 5y ago
The BMJ does not claim protections as a platform, whether you call it one or not. BMJ is a publisher, and takes responsibility for the content that it publishes. The argument here is that FaceBook is now also a publisher.
- alignItems 5y ago
  This is political/legal distinction. Perhaps Facebook now is a publisher and needs to increase censorship even more. Or the law can be changed to differentiate based on the scale of contributions and the corresponding complexity of moderation.
  - fer 5y ago
    The distinction needs to be there, from the moment FB (or Twitter) has a conflict of interest: their revenue depends on the content being engaging, regardless its factuality. In my head, if they do any filtering or ordering of content, they have to be accountable such content, since they are exerting a de facto editorial line. I don't really understand how a newspaper publishing an incendiary op-ed can accountable for it, whereas the same thing as a viral FB post won't hold FB accountable. The only difference is that an editor picks the former, and an algorithm picks the latter. Is that it? Does delegating responsibilities to a computer make us any less responsible of the results?

cblconfederate 5y ago

Facebook should be banned from allowing any content about COVID in its network, for public health reasons. They are a shit company that leeches on the free content of their users, who would expect any kind of good to come out of this. No need to sue them , investigate them etc, just ban anything that mentions covid on their network

jamessb 5y ago

A previous discussion on the"Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg" mentioned in this article had 677 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595598

nickelpro 5y ago

From the last discussion: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-the-bmj/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-t... The BMJ is not the shining city on the hill here. You can have problems with Facebook policing information, but Thacker is unquestionably an anti-vax conspiracy theorist and the BMJ is allowing him to use their reputation to push that narrative.

NoPie 5y ago
It states that Thacker has been double vaccinated with Pfizer vaccine. Anti-vax conspiracy theorist? That is clearly nonsense.
- Avamander 5y ago
  Plenty of quacks follow the principle of "do as I say, not as I do." It's a very common behaviour amongst populist politicians to talk shit about vaccines and then being fully vaccinated.
  - NoPie 5y ago
    It has nothing to do with the author of the article. It just baseless accusations.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    I didn’t read the article, but isn’t it plausible that whatever they did allegedly did wrong wasn’t significant enough to warrant recommending against taking the vaccine?
    - NoPie 5y ago
      They didn't recommend anything against the vaccine. It is just overzealous fact-checkers who (similarly to antivax) couldn't admit that they were confused about the article and mislabelled it as false.
jjgreen 5y ago

azalemeth 5y ago

Frankly, if I were the BMJ I would start contacting lawyers and issuing writs. I'm unsure of exactly what or where or how, but the principle that peer-reviewed scientific articles are being shadowbanned as "false" and unshareable by a for-profit, unqualified US organisation is...deeply offensive. A large lawsuit by an organisation such as the BMJ (an impact factor 40 journal first published in its current form in about 1840) would, at the very least, highlight how Facebook rapidly has become a publisher and its algorithms shape what people see. It's like making a collage. If you put newspapers in a shop window, and sell them, you're a shop. You don't write the newspapers. If you cut out individual letters from newspapers and give them to people, you're not a shop, and you've made the message you create. Facebook is cutting out alternate sentences-to-paragraphs from the tabloids and selling a set of stories it thinks its users like, interspersed with ads. That question of degree is very much the sort of thing that legal brains like to get involved in.

frereubu 5y ago
Deeply offensive doesn't mean illegal. Unless there's a law that you can point at which bans this, there's no point in hiring lawyers because any challenge will be immediately thrown out. The real issue here in my view is that Facebook - a private company with no legal requirement to keep publishing anything that people post - is becoming the de facto news source for vast numbers of people. And, God help me, I have some sympathy for Facebook here if, as another commenter says, this study is being taken out of context and being used to push anti-vax conspiracy theories. It's such a complex issue.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  If they are actually being labelled as false as part of the justification , there is at least an arguable case of defamation, stronger in a jurisdiction like Britain where truth of the damaging published characterization is a defense that the defendant must prove rather than falsity of the claim being an element that the plaintiff must prove.
  - danuker 5y ago

throw8932894 5y ago

Facts are facts! If the fact checking does not match reality, it is the reality that needs to be fixes!

sascha_sl 5y ago
"Facts are facts", the favorite phrase amongst people who want to hide framing is almost equally important.
rahoulb 5y ago
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” Facts may be facts. But conclusions vary.

300bps 5y ago

Lead Stories falsely defamed The BMJ by referring to their story as a hoax and creating a headline that says they were wrong without actually refuting anything. They then hide behind the “missing context” label which sounds innocent enough but they did far more than that. There is something very dangerous about wanting to discuss a serious issue seriously and being squelched because it doesn’t fit some narrative. I’ve personally had three shots from Pfizer, I’ve had them administered to my children and I want to hear if there are possible issues with them from reputable sources without those reputable sources being shut down by self-appointed information police.

bobcostas55 5y ago

The entire idea of "fact checking" on social media is premised on the notion that fact checkers have some kind of superior epistemic merit compared to the checkees. When you're fact checking random people or journalists that may or may not be true, but why does Zucc think facebook's checkers are superior to the BMJ? What are the fact checker's credentials, and most importantly what is their track record? The extreme opaqueness of the process is certainly not an encouraging signal.

gadders 5y ago
I think they are mostly journalists that couldn't get hired on at a major newspaper.
- GameOfFrowns 5y ago
  >I think they are mostly journalists that couldn't get hired on at a major newspaper. Brutal.
- syshum 5y ago
  So this would imply they are trustworthy and dedicated to the truth, because we know major newspapers are neither trustworthy nor have any connection with the truth these days
  - gadders 5y ago
    Or maybe just not as good at writing?
  - pdpi 5y ago
    You could just as easily say “wow, if not even those untrustworthy major newspapers will hire them, they really must play fast and loose with the truth”.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  We could use more reporters and fewer journalists.
- 5y ago

throwaway2474 5y ago

I hope that at some point we get to see an in-depth business case study of Pfizer and how they’ve been so successful out of the pandemic. They seem to have an unbelievable grasp of the science-marketing game and how to navigate it successfully at scale. Without getting too far into controversial territory, I’ve observed that - Out of many competing vaccines, Pfizer was always the “cool” one, in both scientific and lay circles - The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug - It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way And yet - You still won’t read this in most mainstream media, and still can’t mention these things in many social contexts - Governments around the world are still pushing Pfizer/Moderna over all other vaccines (hear about AZ recently?) This article is another example of how their marketing machine is working for them. If I ran a multimillion dollar company in a highly regulated industry, I’d be taking very careful notes of him how Pfizer is playing this one.

locuscoeruleus 5y ago
> - It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way One of the nordic countries has 10x more infections than the first wave and 0.5x people in intensive care. While the vaccines have failed to stop the pandemic, I disagree that the contribution is not meaningful.
- throwaway2474 5y ago
  I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. I think the vaccine helped against past strains, and maybe a bit against omicron, but it was vastly oversold.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. You can think that as much as you like, but we have actual numbers on hospitalization/death in the two populations, and there's a clear, large difference even in the Omicron surge.

gadders 5y ago

amcoastal 5y ago
I will never truly understand the infatuation with Hunter Biden. Oh, the son of a candidate to be president/the president is using their position for personal gain in a corrupt fashion? That's certainly not something that has been happening for the last half decade...
- GameOfFrowns 5y ago
  The accusation is that Hunter Biden was merely the proxy to buy Joe Biden. >That's certainly not something that has been happening for the last half decade... So, then what's keeping the 'liberal' media from reporting on the Biden/Burisma connection with the same zealotry the media showed when reporting on the Trump family's dirty dealings? Instead of that, they killed the Hunter Biden story in the run up to the election.
  - tagoregrtst 5y ago
    But to salvage whatever is left of their reputations outside a small group of true believers, they have since acknowledged that the laptop story is real. After the election, of course ;) The most annoying part of where we are is that I no longer know where to get fair reporting. I guess its always been like that, especially for foreign reporting, but its so laughably bad now :(
- gadders 5y ago
  I think the implication (and no idea if true or not) is that he is also helping his Dad enrich himself. Plus there are some weird sexual family dynamics hinted at as well.
  - tagoregrtst 5y ago
    “ and no idea if true or not” Well I think traditional media have acknowledged that the laptop is real. Of course that doesn't mean there was anything salacious on it and the excerpts arent in fact fake

InsomniacL 5y ago

"Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong" Where has it gone wrong? “We did not call into question the integrity of The BMJ’s story, only the comprehensiveness of it. That’s the point of a ‘Missing Context’ rating. The BMJ article is being used as evidence of Vaccine Conspiracy theories, it's not like the warning is on the Article, it's where it's shared on Facebook and the missing context label is relevant in that context. A context where the vast majority of people viewing the facebook posts will not understand the BMJ may cover a sub-topic where the results do not reflect on the outcome of the parent topic...

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
1. The screenshot shows Facebook is telling owners groups of group that the information is "partly false." "Partly false" is obviously a distinct claim, and one that does not appear to be supported. 2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness.
- InsomniacL 5y ago
  > 1. The screenshot shows Facebook is telling owners groups of group that the information is "partly false." "Partly false" is obviously a distinct claim, and one that does not appear to be supported. This is only shown to Group Admins, you're correct that it's wrong however it's clearly a simple wording mistake with limited impact. > 2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness. That's a big stretch, 4,000 - 8,000 thousand articles are published to the BMJ each year, one of them having a label on social media with 'missing context' is not censoring quality reporting.
Hnrobert42 5y ago
Indeed, the very controversy around the label is evidence that the article needs more context.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  This really seems like a Kafka trap.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Did the people who pushed the “Fact Checking” system ever consider what the people reading the misinformation the fact check would appear under would think when they saw the fact check? Because I really doubt the thing going through their head is “wow this might be wrong”. Trust in any government, media or institution has already been completely burned for those people and things like “Fact Checks” to them only makes the misinformation seem more legit. I’d bet if you actually engaged with those people you’d discover this system accelerated misinformation not curbed it.

rdtsc 5y ago
Very good point. That’s exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union. People craved banned things. Books, ideas, articles, authors, items from the West, etc. Being banned automatically increased their appeal.
mandmandam 5y ago
That's a nice idea, but not actually true. > “When people saw those warning labels, 95% of the time they did not go on to view the original content,” the company says. Moreover, if an article is rated “false” by their “fact checkers”, the network will “reduce its distribution”. This means that, while an author or poster is not aware that censorship is taking place, the network could be hiding their content so it is not widely disseminated. The piece above was censored by FB as misinformation, before they apologised for the error. - https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-leak-theory/ https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-lea...
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  > the network will “reduce its distribution” That's a different subject, I'm talking about what's happening in the persons head when they see it. Not about if the network actually just shadow-censors it so they never see it in the first place.

germandiago 5y ago

In my country there is no media I believe less than the fact-checking one, officially given to friends of my current government to the wife of one of the most well-known people in Spain, for its channel "La Sexta", her name is Ana Pastor, wife of Ferreras. Besides controlling the media nearly as a monopoly, they receive favors from government like public money, when they are supposed to be private media. Same for Cadena Ser, for which there are jokes as "the most public private radio ever". All this, at least in Spain, are the same people and I consider it basically a layer of corruption with the tax payer money. Also, they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true (there is a video in Internet from Joan Planas where he requested to correct information), they did not correct the information giving excuses about the inability to do it (so they were aware of the "error"). That is the level of confidence I have in fact checking in Spain. In other countries, I do not know, but I see it as a fight for the monopoly of the truth and to control and censor with the excuse of better quality of information, which is not true here. Besides that, fact-checking should not be even a thing, because things are not so clear sometimes. In fact, I have seen some articles from those fact-checking agents with extreme bias loads with the only purpose of shifting people opinions. Those were not facts, they were merely perspectives and why you should think what they say and why it is not correct according to them to use one term or another. All in all, propaganda.

kgwgk 5y ago
> they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true I loved the time there was a claim that you could spend three days in jail for such and such and they 'fact-checked' it as false because you could be detained for a maximum of 72 hours. [Edit: I misremembered slightly. It was "a few days" but the point stands. Three days qualify as "a few".]

alignItems 5y ago

From Lead Stories' Response [1]: > The "Missing Context" label applies to content that (while true or real) might still be misleading because crucial information is missing. Given the enormous engagement the article received and the kinds of reactions it elicited that certainly seems to have been the case here. “Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial” > The BMJ.com headline, shown above, fails to make two important distinctions: > The allegation concerns just three of the 153 sites at which the vaccine was tested on 44,000 participants. It would have been less misleading to say "data integrity issues at 3 of 153 Pfizer trial sites." Given how many of the social media audience would read just the title, perhaps the missing context label is accurate. [1] 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...

Semaphor 5y ago
I agree with you, but if that is their standard, I’m expecting to see "Missing context" labels on almost every news article being shared on facebook, as headlines are almost exclusively clickbait to some degree.
MauranKilom 5y ago
I didn't walk away with a clear picture: Was it "data integrity issues at 3 out of 153 sites [no idea about the remaining 150]" or was it "... [the others were fine]"? The FDA audits were at some other sites of those 153 and reportedly did not find any incongruences. Which need not mean there were no issues, but it's certainly a prior.
d23 5y ago
I'm coming to the same conclusion. Judging by just how far down I had to come to find this comment even on a site like HN, it's pretty clear people are uninterested or unable to read, put things into context, and think critically. I'm surprised people can't even recognize the smell of something wrong, even when it's out in the open: > The BMJ has locked horns with Facebook and the gatekeepers of international fact checking after one of its investigations was wrongly labelled with “missing context” and censored on the world’s largest social network. The tone of the very first sentence is off. This is the publication describing itself.

rdtsc 5y ago

> Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.” Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing the party? Not so fast! In order to get past them you have to use euphemisms hoping they won’t catch them. Or, profusely praise the ideology hoping to appease them so they’d let your article through, hoping they would be flattered and let your one slightly controversial idea at the end through. No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.

d35007 5y ago
> No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same. If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Reminds me of John Mulaney > If we're comparing the badness of two words and you won't even say one of them... That's the worst word.
- rdtsc 5y ago
  > If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same. I didn't say they are _exactly_ the same, that's pretty obvious. Especially that one is a country and the other is a company. So it's a bit of straw man, isn't it? Not every single person who criticized the government or published anything that was censored was sent a labor camp. Those had been eliminated by the 60s. However people didn't get promoted, lost their jobs (is a journalist losing their job and not being able to be hired because they pointed out something controversial that different?), added to blacklist. The response to that was the people auto-censored themselves. They didn't want to get in trouble so they didn't talk about certain things. Those that tried used a few trick to get around the censors, and I outlined those already.

kryogen1c 5y ago

the idea of "fact checking" has a false premise - its begging the question[0]. we need to disabuse ourselves of this notion that we can know the Truth or the "facts" if we just checked enough. there is no such thing as contextless infromation. is the sky blue? depends. maybe it emits a certain spectrum based on gas content on our planet, but color is a perceptual experience. did trump\biden say X? maybe; is that the whole question - that their mouth made a set of sounds? did they say it, or did they mean it? could they have changed their mind? did they mean it but only tried halfheartedly? this can be true of hard sciences too. aspects of newtonian physics were known to be true, verifiably by all experimental data, until one day they were proven false. not that physics are so dogmatic, but if facebook can factcheck the bmj, im sure theyd fact check some patent clerk. i have been pondering the words of the history enthusiast dan carlin[1]. he thinks the most important person in history was JFK because he chose peace and didnt deploy nukes when everyone around him was forcefully recommending WWIII due to the known motives, the "facts" of russia and cuba. i wonder what the fact checkers would have been saying about that. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question [1] https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/ EDIT: the due dilligence required to learn about a topic and have the gall to report about its "truth" is called journalism, not fact checking. its not called facebook journalism because that would too obviously be a steaming pile of shit.

pdpi 5y ago
You don’t need to have a nuanced perspective on the truth to be able to spot outright lies and nonsense. E.g. Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population. I’m perfectly OK with fact checkers getting rid of that level of nonsense while letting most of everything else true.
- FredPret 5y ago
  An example of a fact that can be checked would be the height of a tree or the size of an island. Whether person X helped group Y do Z is vastly more complex and can be answered on several levels. It’s best left to the public to apply literal common sense. Also, most political debates are on this level of abstraction, making fact-checking a non-starter

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madaxe_again 5y ago

I’m going to stick my neck out and say that Facebook made the right call here. The problem isn’t the content, but rather the audience, and how they react to said content. People generally don’t read articles - particularly lengthy articles, particularly articles written by academia for academia - they read the headline, perhaps the lead, and then go post and spread their interpretation of the information. The BMJ have a reputation as being a reputable source of information. Take these two together, and you have a wavefront of posts claiming that the BMJ agrees that vaccines are dangerous and poorly tested, and the story isn’t what the article holds, it isn’t nuanced, it isn’t moderate, it’s “look, this proves that bill gates wants a microchip in you, and the BMJ confirms it!”. So, you have a difficult choice. Do you allow a factual article and the reputation of the BMJ to be used as fodder for anti-vaxxer sentiment, or do you try to dampen the squib and decrease the propagation of the distorted interpretations? If anything, there should perhaps be a middle road, where in order to share or comment on an article, you have to answer a series of questions about what the article says. This would dampen the network effect, and would hopefully ensure that people are actually forced to read the content they’re sharing, rather than relying on a headline and a strapline interpretation added by the sharer.

pessimizer 5y ago

I'm an absolute enemy of both "fact checking" and corporate regulation of speech, in coordination with government, on forums as large and general as Facebook. That being said, this supporter of the Facebook action, who is well qualified to speak, offers very good arguments that this was not science but instead guest editorial by a regular woo/conspiracy pitcher, and another specific indictment of recent BMJ editorial decisions. Didn't convince me that "fact checking" isn't vile, but it convinced me that in this specific case, the content was shit: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-strike-back-against-mark-zuckerberg-and-facebook/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-s... EDIT - actual link: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-the-bmj/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...

tpoacher 5y ago
I don't think a blogpost full of empty vitriolic arguments is the best rebuttal proving "the content was shit". It just shows this particular blogger had some axe to grind and cannot be taken seriously. My understanding of the issue is that the content itself was "not shit", but the timing and context in which it was likely to be perceived at the very least, associated it with less palatable implications, which may or may not hold, and are typically borne by counterproductive groups. And there was some evidence that indeed this was how the article was perceived by such groups. But the article itself, in a completely epistemic sense, was "not shit" at all. It was actually very insightful for anyone interested in the context of the actual science involved. So this is not as black and white as you suggest, imho, and even if it were in this particular case, the broader issue raised is still important: If you do science A which is useful for good thing B, but has the potential to be falsely interpreted as bad thing C by bad group D, should we expect an overreaching group E to shadowban/discredit A? I say no. I would much rather have a proper discussion instead.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Your characterization of the blog post lacks any reference to the blog post. Here's one: > Thacker’s main source was a “whistleblower” named Brook Jackson, who had worked at Ventavia for only two weeks. As I described, the allegations were either big nothingburgers that wouldn’t have affected the quality of the data (e.g., not appropriately using sharps containers to dispose of sharps) or were mainly insinuated and implied without actual evidence (e.g., unblinding or even falsifying clinical trial data). The article follows a familiar format for disinformation. Very definitive and serious accusations are leveled very early in the article, followed much later in the article by “facts” that do not actually substantiate such definitive and serious allegations. ----- It might actually help if I include a better link, what I posted was actually a follow-up that was the first to come up in my history: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-the-bmj/ https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...

civilized 5y ago

I'm not familiar with the fact checker Lead Stories and was curious what else they publish. I went to their Twitter feed [1] and something caught my eye, a story about the mortality of COVID vs the Spanish Flu [2]. The headline posted on Twitter was "Fact Check: COVID-19 IS Deadlier Than The Spanish Flu And Seasonal Flu" [3]. That headline shocked me, because if you follow the mortality statistics, there is no way COVID's worldwide mortality rate could draw anywhere near the mortality rate of the 1918 flu epidemic, which has been estimated at 1-6% of the entire world population (17-100 million deaths, world pop in 1918 approximately 1.8 billion) [4, 5]. COVID has been estimated at about 7 million deaths so far out of a world population of 7.9 billion [6], for a global mortality rate of around 0.1%. Even looking at total excess deaths, which includes a lot of non-COVID causes, you have 20 million, still at the lower end of the 1918 epidemic's range with a much larger world population [7]. Lead Stories eventually defends their claim by comparing Spanish Flu mortality to peak COVID mortality in New York during the early epidemic - a bizarre case of cherry-picking. To their credit, Lead Stories did update their headline soon after tweeting that to remove the claim about Spanish Flu, but the lead sentence still reads as follows: > Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading... This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading. Considering this and their significant failures in the BMJ incident, I would hesitate in trusting this fact checker to consistently provide high-quality, unbiased checks. [1] https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom [2] https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-19-is-deadlier-than-the-spanish-flu-and-seasonal-flu.html https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-... [3] https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/1483585218741248000?s=20 https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/148358521874124800... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu [6] https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-69-million-deaths-globally-more-double-what-official-reports-show https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-... [7] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

sertraline 5y ago

evancoop 5y ago

On some level, this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors and vociferous debates. So, what's preferable? Unfettered venom and lies mixed with the best attempts at rationality or the discourse moderated by unseen arbiters and algorithms? Ideally, there would be multiple forums. But given how technology scales and how network effects operate, we'd likely wind up with a few enormous entities. Thus, I refer back to the choice above. Which will it be?

sharkjacobs 5y ago
> this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors the classic anecdote of the husband who does a really bad job washing the dishes so his wife won't ask him to do them anymore
robmccoll 5y ago
Neither. Change the law to make platforms like Facebook accountable for the content published on them. Here's how you do that without damaging speech or making platform companies impossible: make platform protections dependent on revenue stream. If you are paid by the author to publish their work, you are a protected platform and it isn't your content. If you make money by selling advertising alongside the content or by selling a subscription to the content stream, you are exposed to libel lawsuits, incitement, hate speech, false advertising, etc. The rest will sort itself out. Previously journalism cleaned itself up because it could be held accountable for outright lies. There is incentive to make outrageous claims because outrage sells. The balance is to create civil and criminal repercussions for provable lies. Lies spread on social media like wildfire because outrage sells and more eyeballs means more money for the platform, so the platform and the authors are incentivized to create and spread misinformation. There is no balance against it, so it will continue to grow.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Wait... > If you make money by selling advertising alongside the content [...] you are exposed to libel lawsuits [...] The rest will sort itself out. By "sort itself out" you mean Facebook would moderate and remove 100x more content? I cannot see how that is not the only outcome if you make platforms liable for the content its users post.

Traubenfuchs 5y ago

Who is this clownery even for? Does anyone care about „fact checking“ at all? Personally I have maximum distrust towards those fact checking offers, there always seems to be an agenda behind it.

aceon48 5y ago

It was never about fact checking. It was always about narrative control.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

addicted 5y ago

Fact checking on media is bad. The BMJ article, however, was horrible. Poorly sourced (based entirely on someone who was fired and didn't have the technical capabilities they had to judge the claims they were making) and the BMJ editors have basically descended into new age woo instead of real science (I am not sure if this affects the journal, but the specific article was BS).

intended 5y ago

Every time these conversations come up on HN - there’s a number of comments saying that fact checkers have to decide things in a rush - contrasted against authors who spend time on an article. Am I missing something about American fact checkers ? The sites I know have limited resources so they spend their time on quality work in the few places they can. How does fact checking work in the states ? Is there something non obvious about fact checking groups?

intended 5y ago

Welcome to the future ? Stop fact checking sites, and social media becomes even worse than it is. Use fact checkers, and you love with false positives and false negatives. Then narratives form around those errors ( because we are pattern recognition machines, even when there are no patterns). So what’s the out ? All fact checking will create some amount of False pod/negative. No amount of money, time or resources can avoid that.

bo1024 5y ago

There is a different issue with the "fact checking" approach: it allows Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) to deflect blame from their algorithm. FB's narrative is that the problem is the people who post untrue stuff, and fact checking will fix the problem (actually it won't, but it will show FB tried their best). But the problem is FB's algorithm which promotes and publishes rampant misinformation. FB should be held accountable for what they decide to show people. Not deflect accountability onto their users.

FredPret 5y ago

The very existence of fact-checking demonstrates a deplorable intellectual arrogance. Do these people meditate deeple and then receive divine inspiration as to what is really true? Do they have transcendent superbrains that work better than everybody else’s? Do they have access to Secret Wikipedia that contains only true and current facts? The truth of everything we do will be visible only centuries from now, after all strong political feelings we have shifts somewhere else. (Today we look at Ancient Rome and do not care about the Reds and the Greens.) Also, most human statements cannot be evaluated for truth, including this one. We communicate mostly feelings, sentiments, our sense of something, and the odd number or two.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago
I think individuals like FredPret have never tried to run any kind of forum or publicly editable resource on the internet. Bad actors telling simple lies for lol's and/or profit do exist and they will ruin communities. Inline fact checking is a feature of all successful forums, whether the fact checking is done by the institution or the community is immaterial to the true existence of the need. If computers with all of their precision require checksums and error correction in data transfer protocols it seems arrogant and perhaps willfully ignorant to think humanity does not also require this for the continued propagation of accurate and useful data. People often conflate "general existential uncertainty" with the "knowability of truth inside a shared frame of reference", in this case our shared frame of reference is physical reality and propositional statements can be "grounded". Some people just stop trying because they are tired. Some because they lack the tools to evaluate data and create confidence intervals. Like most nerd skills, talented data analysts can be hard to find. The very existence of this article and the ensuing discussion shows that the internet continues to surface facts and route around censorship. The efficacy and methodologies forums use will continue to evolve and require refinement, and have evolved from the early BBS days, some forums will also tend to be run in an overly authoritarian/restrictive/harmful way, just like in the old BBS days. All online community that philosophically and practically reject error correction tend to end up shut down by the state for child pornography or overwhelmed with snake oil salesmen preying on the credulous.
- 5y ago

huetius 5y ago

I think my only strong opinions on fact checking are that the situation has exposed the problems inherent in techne without episteme, and that it is no longer tenable to punt on philosophical questions.

RHSeeger 5y ago

Without trying to express any opinion on the correctness of Facebook's behavior in this specific instance... this quote in the BMJ writeup concerned me > The Lead Stories article, though it failed to identify any errors in The BMJ’s investigation, nevertheless carried the title, “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying and Ignored Reports of Flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.” > The first paragraph wrongly described The BMJ as a “news blog” and was accompanied by a screenshot of the investigation article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or inaccurate. It is _entirely_ possible for a story to be factually correct and still be completely misleading. Just because it doesn't outright lie doesn't mean it's not misleading. For example, I can point out that "Senator <X> voted, multiple times, against adding funds for the support of military veterans", and that would leave a lot of people with the idea that Senator <X> is specifically trying to prevent funding for veterans. However, it's just as likely that the bills in question were primarily about something that the senator was against, and the veterans part was a tiny "pet addon"; and the senator was voting against the more substantial goal of the bill. That type of misleading information is used ALL the time, and nothing about it is factually incorrect... but it's still intentionally misleading. It's goal is to make people believe something that isn't true.

rob_c 5y ago

The only way to counter bad speech is with more speech.

encryptluks2 5y ago

If you want to go up against the trillion dollar vaccine companies, then you better be able to buy congress and pay off social media, cause otherwise they are getting more from censoring anything that may be seen as negative towards their trillion dollar enterprise.

tynpeddler 5y ago

If this is BMJ's best argument, then I'm going to have to side with Facebook on this one. This quote right here basically sums up the silliness of the BMJ's argument: >Alan Duke, editor in chief of Lead Stories, told The BMJ that the “Missing Context” label was created by Facebook specifically “to deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real.” This whole episode is one more piece highlighting the difficulties caused by casual readers attempting to read technical literature. Technical literature covers topics that average readers have little to no experience with and as such non-technical readers are prone to drawing unsupportable conclusions from them. Honestly, any technical article can be slapped with the "Missing Context" flag by default. The positions in this article are pretty simple. BMJ publishes a report showing that one of the contractors performing studies for Pfizer's covid vaccine had practices that were flawed but did not render the data unusable. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on these facts. This article was widely shared on Facebook, primarily by anti-vaccine groups. Lead Stories is asked by Facebook to fact check the article and Lead Stories assigns the "Missing Context" flag Extrapolating from context, I'm going to assume that anti-vaxxers were arguing that this was proof that the vaccine is entirely unreliable and should not be used (this seems like a safe assumption because it's the conclusion that anti-vaxxers always come to no matter the evidence). It's important to note that BMJ and Lead Stories both agree that this conclusion is entirely unsupportable by the article. The BMJ is intended for a technical audience, so from a technical reader's standpoint, the article is complete as it is. Lead Stories is reading from the viewpoint of a non-technical reader; someone who lacks the skills and experience necessary to understand the article. So Lead Stories points out that readers need more information than is in the article in order to understand it. This is trivially non-controversial from the plain english definition of "technical literature". It's even more true in light of the fact that anti-vaxxers are using the article to build flawed arguments that are resulting in the deaths of thousands. BMJ's response to the situation is unsupportable and, perhaps intentionally, is arguing something completely differently than Lead Stories. That's not to say BMJ doesn't have a real grievance. They should push back on the wording Facebook provided in their notice. Facebook states that the article is partly false, which Lead Stories does not agree with. Facebook also, ironically, does not provide sufficient context on the meaning of the "Missing Context" label. But none of these problems with Facebook refute the appropriateness of the "Missing Context" label.

EricE 5y ago

What I find fascinating is that anyone pays attention to or takes these "fact checkers" seriously. The only people benefiting from "fact checkers" are the big tech companies that can use them as a shield to hide behind.

Blackstrat 5y ago

Facebook has already admitted in court (John Stossel’s lawsuit) that their fact checkers aren’t fact checks but rather opinions. It is time to de-platform Facebook.