8 ms·

Be careful not to jump the gun here. The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false, and it's to their credit that social

by SilasX 5y ago

Be careful not to jump the gun here. The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false, and it's to their credit that social media platforms link a refutation. But when you have a huge number of stories, there are going to be edge cases, and BMJ got snared by one here. As I understand it: BMJ found legit problems with one vaccine's clinical trial. But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. Facebook's approach is to label it with the least-significant category, "needs context", i.e. please don't go overboard with drawing conclusions from this. But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed". Facebook claims that this category doesn't result in the story or poster being penalized, but I'm not inclined to believe that since the users were reporting that they got nasty messages saying their posting in general would get de-prioritized and show up less if they kept reposting such stories.

mc32 5y ago
I’m not sure about the prevalence but one major peeve of mine is when someone states, X is ten meters high. Fact check: Wrong, X is 9.6 meters high. It takes away credibility.
- varispeed 5y ago
  I saw fact checkers going to town to discredit someone not going with the "accepted" narrative. For example they would say: - Wrong, X is 9.999999 high. - Misleading. While X is indeed 10 metres high, the author of the claim measured it from top to bottom instead of generally accepted bottom to top way of measuring. etc.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  One of my favorites, they have since been called out on it and had to fix it: This statement "We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913." was rated "mostly true"[0] While this one "the U.S. federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913." was rated "half true"[1] What more evidence do you need that this whole thing is sort of arbitrary? [0]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/jim-webb-says-us-didnt-have-income-taxes-until-191/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/j... [1]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/ron-paul-says-federal-income-tax-rate-was-0-percen/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/r...
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    I mean, the little cartoon meter is pretty arbitrary. What’s the difference between half true and mostly true? Those two phrases seem mostly equivalent to me. But the more important thing is the analyses I think, they are quite similar in content. And raise the same caveat about the civil war taxes. These fact checks were 3 years apart, so it may be completely different groups of people writing these fact checks. Yet, they both arrive at similar conclusions with slightly different language. I’d say that’s an okay result.
    - mc32 5y ago
      To me the main issue would be that an income tax prior to 1913 were temporary taxes. Technically, yes they were based on income. But when we talk about income taxes today, we don’t talk about them as necessary tools to generate revenue in support of a war that would have an end date. It wasn’t a permanent fixture. Today it’s a permanent fixture and short of one of the Paul clan winning the office, it will continue into the foreseeable future.
- nailer 5y ago
  This is one of my favourites: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ Snopes acknowledges that a convicted terrorist (ie, someone that targeted civilians to enact political change) sat on the board of a BLM funding body then concludes 'mixture' because there is no universally agreed definition of 'terrorism'. > In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    I'd like to watch them sweat if you forced them to fact check "The 9/11 hijackers were terrorists" using the same priors. > In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions of Mohamed Atta - leading a group of young men to hijack planes and fly them into buildings — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - slavik81 5y ago
      It's kind of beside the point, but Mohamed Atta would never be considered a domestic terrorist. He travelled to the United States on a tourist visa, specifically to engage in terrorism. That disqualifies his actions from being 'domestic'.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    I understand what you are saying, but at the same time the claim was that she was a “convicted terrorist”, when in fact she was not convicted of terrorism. That’s just a fact. You can look at her convictions, and there is no conviction for terrorism. There’s plenty to say about her actions, which are certainly terroristic, but her being “convicted” of terrorism is straight up not true, no matter how you feel about it. That’s why they say it’s mixed and subjective, because there is no objective fact you can point to that would back up the position that she was convicted of terrorism. She wasn’t.
treis 5y ago
Having read the original article and BMJ's follow up I think Facebook is right here. The original article does lack context and is not a measured response to the problems found. Especially so considering it was published in November 2021 after hundreds of millions of doses were given and the vaccine was obviously safe and effective. They should have known better than to give fodder to the anti-vax movement.
- CWuestefeld 5y ago
  You seem to be making a normative statement, that journalism should be making editorial decisions in order to nudge toward the outcome they believe is correct (or that some societal watchdog believes is correct?) rather than what's normally considered the goal of detached and dispassionate reporting.
  - treis 5y ago
    Did you read the original BMJ article? It was not detached and dispassionate reporting. That's the problem. It was alarmist and blew the issue way out of proportion because it lacked appropriate context. The only mitigating information they gave was that the company only conducted trials on 1,000 out of 44,000 enrolled patients. But that was buried 10 paragraphs in. There was no neutral party evaluation of the seriousness of the errors. There was no neutral party evaluation of the implication of the errors on the soundness of the study. There was no mention of the obvious effectiveness and safety of the vaccine. In short, it did lack context and it should have been obvious to the BMJ that it would be inflammatory fodder for the anti-vax movement. It should have been nixed and rewritten to frame the errors in a more, as you say, detached and dispassionate way.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Who is the journalist here?
andrew_ 5y ago
> But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. This sort of "greater good" proclivity for squelching information is a terribly harmful thing to the free flow of information.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Cool, but what does that have to do with the present case, where they (claim they) just add context? That's not "squelching" the information.
  - wang_li 5y ago
    When fact checkers “add context” to a statement it exposes that the fact checking isn’t about correctness or truth, but rather about narrative control. Which means it’s biased and one begins to wonder what context they’re leaving out of all the statements they rate as true. In the end calling it fact checking is bullshit, it’s just propaganda. This is also demonstrated by the fact that fact checkers almost always have a range of rulings, some number of pinocchios, pants on fire to mostly false to half true to mostly true. Truth is binary. Contextual addition is trying to control how the reader feels about the truth. I.e. propaganda.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      > Truth is binary. My name is Steve and I’m 35 years old. This statement is half true. The speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s. This is false, but really not far from the truth. I think given these examples, there is definitely room for a spectrum rather than a binary. Otherwise everything is false because language cannot 100% accurately represent reality, and therefore you’ll always be able to find an angle to claim something is false.
jerf 5y ago
"The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false," Prove it, and prove that the underpaid non-specialist moderator who labelled it as such was justified even if they were right. Facebook is not and can not be an arbiter of truth in the abstract, and in the concrete the specific people doing the work certainly are not. Where are Facebook getting these experts who know so much about all the hot issues of the day? Are they calling Harvard PhDs in to look at this specific post? Are they getting people with decades of experience in the fields to debate and come to consensus about whether or not this post is in the gray area or shading to the white? Or are the "fact checkers" random shmoes being paid a pittance to do even less due diligence on what is being posted than the person writing the original post, just checking things off a list that probably fits on a handful of sheets of paper? Assuming it even gets that far, of course, because it's probably also largely just an AI. Fact checking is a marketing term scam. There is no such thing, or at the very least, Facebook moderators staring at things for a few seconds and clicking based on official Facebook dogma isn't it. Facebook moderators are no different than any other random poster on Facebook, they've just got a particular party line to enforce and a special megaphone nobody else gets. That's all it is, a corporation's enforced opinion, not "facts" or "truth". Why should you trust a corporation's official enforced opinion any more just because the corporation found out they can call it a "fact check" and it slips past people's fully-justified cynicism about official corporation enforced opinion?
- SilasX 5y ago
  >Prove it, and prove that the underpaid non-specialist moderator who labelled it as such was justified even if they were right. >Facebook is not and can not be an arbiter of truth in the abstract, I'm not sure you're replying to the right comment, because I wasn't claiming that the BMJ story was demonstrably false[1], and I wasn't defending any action that labeled it as such. The action was to label it as "needs context", a category which specifically exists not to claim that the story is false. So what are you replying to? And are you really disputing that social media spreads a lot of clearly false stuff that isn't a mere matter of interpretation? Why do you consider that so implausible? Edit: As exhibit A, I could probably cite your attribution of claims to me that I didn't make. Now, imagine all the people on social media without your exacting standards of integrity! [1] Just the opposite -- I accepted that they found legit problems!
rajin444 5y ago
> But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed". Not getting a vaccine because the producer is corrupt seems logical to me. What am I missing? The average person has almost no power in evaluating these vaccines and relies almost entirely on trust.
- alexvoda 5y ago
  It is only logical if you assume that the producer is the only source of information that can or can not be trusted. That is not reality. There are many sources of information supporting the same claim even if an important one of them (the manufacturer) can not be trusted. An untrustworthy manufacturer can still make a good product.
  - GauntletWizard 5y ago
    You don't think "The public safety problem of supporting this corrupt company" can be a bigger problem than "The health risk of not taking a vaccine"? I don't believe that's true in this case, but I also don't believe I get to make that decision for everyone.
aiilns 5y ago
How is _BMJ_ an "edge case"? And why should Facebook and its partners decide on what the conclusions to be drawn from this story should be? I'm sorry, but to me your attitude seems arrogant and condescending: the masses cannot tell truth from lie and cannot be trusted to reach the correct conclusions. And I suppose that, if asked, you would advocate for education with emphasis put on critical thinking. But you can't be both for critical thinking and for this paternalistic attitude where people get their cues from the truth-arbiter du jour.
- philistine 5y ago
  Such a large part of social media is nothing but newspaper websites with the numbers filed off. With those fact-checking doodads, Facebook is getting one step closer to being a full on content producer itself.

by SilasX 5y ago

mc32 5y ago

I’m not sure about the prevalence but one major peeve of mine is when someone states, X is ten meters high. Fact check: Wrong, X is 9.6 meters high. It takes away credibility.

varispeed 5y ago
I saw fact checkers going to town to discredit someone not going with the "accepted" narrative. For example they would say: - Wrong, X is 9.999999 high. - Misleading. While X is indeed 10 metres high, the author of the claim measured it from top to bottom instead of generally accepted bottom to top way of measuring. etc.
willcipriano 5y ago
One of my favorites, they have since been called out on it and had to fix it: This statement "We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913." was rated "mostly true"[0] While this one "the U.S. federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913." was rated "half true"[1] What more evidence do you need that this whole thing is sort of arbitrary? [0]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/jim-webb-says-us-didnt-have-income-taxes-until-191/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/j... [1]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/ron-paul-says-federal-income-tax-rate-was-0-percen/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/r...
- ModernMech 5y ago
  I mean, the little cartoon meter is pretty arbitrary. What’s the difference between half true and mostly true? Those two phrases seem mostly equivalent to me. But the more important thing is the analyses I think, they are quite similar in content. And raise the same caveat about the civil war taxes. These fact checks were 3 years apart, so it may be completely different groups of people writing these fact checks. Yet, they both arrive at similar conclusions with slightly different language. I’d say that’s an okay result.
  - mc32 5y ago
    To me the main issue would be that an income tax prior to 1913 were temporary taxes. Technically, yes they were based on income. But when we talk about income taxes today, we don’t talk about them as necessary tools to generate revenue in support of a war that would have an end date. It wasn’t a permanent fixture. Today it’s a permanent fixture and short of one of the Paul clan winning the office, it will continue into the foreseeable future.
nailer 5y ago
This is one of my favourites: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ Snopes acknowledges that a convicted terrorist (ie, someone that targeted civilians to enact political change) sat on the board of a BLM funding body then concludes 'mixture' because there is no universally agreed definition of 'terrorism'. > In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
- willcipriano 5y ago
  I'd like to watch them sweat if you forced them to fact check "The 9/11 hijackers were terrorists" using the same priors. > In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions of Mohamed Atta - leading a group of young men to hijack planes and fly them into buildings — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - slavik81 5y ago
    It's kind of beside the point, but Mohamed Atta would never be considered a domestic terrorist. He travelled to the United States on a tourist visa, specifically to engage in terrorism. That disqualifies his actions from being 'domestic'.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  I understand what you are saying, but at the same time the claim was that she was a “convicted terrorist”, when in fact she was not convicted of terrorism. That’s just a fact. You can look at her convictions, and there is no conviction for terrorism. There’s plenty to say about her actions, which are certainly terroristic, but her being “convicted” of terrorism is straight up not true, no matter how you feel about it. That’s why they say it’s mixed and subjective, because there is no objective fact you can point to that would back up the position that she was convicted of terrorism. She wasn’t.

treis 5y ago

Having read the original article and BMJ's follow up I think Facebook is right here. The original article does lack context and is not a measured response to the problems found. Especially so considering it was published in November 2021 after hundreds of millions of doses were given and the vaccine was obviously safe and effective. They should have known better than to give fodder to the anti-vax movement.

CWuestefeld 5y ago
You seem to be making a normative statement, that journalism should be making editorial decisions in order to nudge toward the outcome they believe is correct (or that some societal watchdog believes is correct?) rather than what's normally considered the goal of detached and dispassionate reporting.
- treis 5y ago
  Did you read the original BMJ article? It was not detached and dispassionate reporting. That's the problem. It was alarmist and blew the issue way out of proportion because it lacked appropriate context. The only mitigating information they gave was that the company only conducted trials on 1,000 out of 44,000 enrolled patients. But that was buried 10 paragraphs in. There was no neutral party evaluation of the seriousness of the errors. There was no neutral party evaluation of the implication of the errors on the soundness of the study. There was no mention of the obvious effectiveness and safety of the vaccine. In short, it did lack context and it should have been obvious to the BMJ that it would be inflammatory fodder for the anti-vax movement. It should have been nixed and rewritten to frame the errors in a more, as you say, detached and dispassionate way.
- 8note 5y ago
  Who is the journalist here?

andrew_ 5y ago

> But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. This sort of "greater good" proclivity for squelching information is a terribly harmful thing to the free flow of information.

SilasX 5y ago
Cool, but what does that have to do with the present case, where they (claim they) just add context? That's not "squelching" the information.
- wang_li 5y ago
  When fact checkers “add context” to a statement it exposes that the fact checking isn’t about correctness or truth, but rather about narrative control. Which means it’s biased and one begins to wonder what context they’re leaving out of all the statements they rate as true. In the end calling it fact checking is bullshit, it’s just propaganda. This is also demonstrated by the fact that fact checkers almost always have a range of rulings, some number of pinocchios, pants on fire to mostly false to half true to mostly true. Truth is binary. Contextual addition is trying to control how the reader feels about the truth. I.e. propaganda.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    > Truth is binary. My name is Steve and I’m 35 years old. This statement is half true. The speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s. This is false, but really not far from the truth. I think given these examples, there is definitely room for a spectrum rather than a binary. Otherwise everything is false because language cannot 100% accurately represent reality, and therefore you’ll always be able to find an angle to claim something is false.

jerf 5y ago

"The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false," Prove it, and prove that the underpaid non-specialist moderator who labelled it as such was justified even if they were right. Facebook is not and can not be an arbiter of truth in the abstract, and in the concrete the specific people doing the work certainly are not. Where are Facebook getting these experts who know so much about all the hot issues of the day? Are they calling Harvard PhDs in to look at this specific post? Are they getting people with decades of experience in the fields to debate and come to consensus about whether or not this post is in the gray area or shading to the white? Or are the "fact checkers" random shmoes being paid a pittance to do even less due diligence on what is being posted than the person writing the original post, just checking things off a list that probably fits on a handful of sheets of paper? Assuming it even gets that far, of course, because it's probably also largely just an AI. Fact checking is a marketing term scam. There is no such thing, or at the very least, Facebook moderators staring at things for a few seconds and clicking based on official Facebook dogma isn't it. Facebook moderators are no different than any other random poster on Facebook, they've just got a particular party line to enforce and a special megaphone nobody else gets. That's all it is, a corporation's enforced opinion, not "facts" or "truth". Why should you trust a corporation's official enforced opinion any more just because the corporation found out they can call it a "fact check" and it slips past people's fully-justified cynicism about official corporation enforced opinion?

SilasX 5y ago
>Prove it, and prove that the underpaid non-specialist moderator who labelled it as such was justified even if they were right. >Facebook is not and can not be an arbiter of truth in the abstract, I'm not sure you're replying to the right comment, because I wasn't claiming that the BMJ story was demonstrably false[1], and I wasn't defending any action that labeled it as such. The action was to label it as "needs context", a category which specifically exists not to claim that the story is false. So what are you replying to? And are you really disputing that social media spreads a lot of clearly false stuff that isn't a mere matter of interpretation? Why do you consider that so implausible? Edit: As exhibit A, I could probably cite your attribution of claims to me that I didn't make. Now, imagine all the people on social media without your exacting standards of integrity! [1] Just the opposite -- I accepted that they found legit problems!

rajin444 5y ago

> But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed". Not getting a vaccine because the producer is corrupt seems logical to me. What am I missing? The average person has almost no power in evaluating these vaccines and relies almost entirely on trust.

alexvoda 5y ago
It is only logical if you assume that the producer is the only source of information that can or can not be trusted. That is not reality. There are many sources of information supporting the same claim even if an important one of them (the manufacturer) can not be trusted. An untrustworthy manufacturer can still make a good product.
- GauntletWizard 5y ago
  You don't think "The public safety problem of supporting this corrupt company" can be a bigger problem than "The health risk of not taking a vaccine"? I don't believe that's true in this case, but I also don't believe I get to make that decision for everyone.

aiilns 5y ago

How is _BMJ_ an "edge case"? And why should Facebook and its partners decide on what the conclusions to be drawn from this story should be? I'm sorry, but to me your attitude seems arrogant and condescending: the masses cannot tell truth from lie and cannot be trusted to reach the correct conclusions. And I suppose that, if asked, you would advocate for education with emphasis put on critical thinking. But you can't be both for critical thinking and for this paternalistic attitude where people get their cues from the truth-arbiter du jour.

philistine 5y ago
Such a large part of social media is nothing but newspaper websites with the numbers filed off. With those fact-checking doodads, Facebook is getting one step closer to being a full on content producer itself.