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From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be

From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US. This is not good imho.

raxxor 2y ago
I think internet discussion worked far better without fact checkers, where some of them cannot really be called accurate. The community notes are the better approach. They aren't always correct either, but it certainly is the better fit for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Fact checkers are the authority approach that just does not fit.
- hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
  I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking, but I've seen tons of discussions where having it would improve things. I have seen people get mad because they can't post BS without it being challenged. To claim internet discussion worked better without fact checking is something I haven't seen any actual evidence for, just opinions like yours. Community notes is just a watered down, more easily 'ignored' version that appeases people that were angry about fact checkers to begin with. Hopefully there is a push-back, likely from EU legislation. Between the AI generators many of these companies are implementing and changes like this, platforms need to be held more accountable for what they allow to be posted on them.
  - raxxor 2y ago
    Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased. EU legislation tries to introduce "trusted flaggers". A ridiculous approach, an information authority by a state-like entity doesn't work, even if they paint these flaggers as independent. They simply are not, a trusted and verifiable fact. Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course. We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
    - hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
      >Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased. I've only seen a handful of cases where they were wrong of heavily biased, but I've seen hundreds of cases where the poster refuses to accept they are wrong and the fact checkers are right. >Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course. Roughly the same info but from less trusted sources and with less controls being higher quality sounds like a big bag of wishes but not grounded in reality. >We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers. I expect lots of partisan complaining and yelling, but not a lot of actual valid challenges.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - raxxor 2y ago
        I don't know. I believe the average internet user has less to gain to feed me wrong info. It happens of course, that is why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet. A fact checker however has economic incentive towards their employers. You can paint them as independent, but the will always be in a precarious situation or are influenced by third party financiers. This does not at all evoke more trust than a random internet person. Trusted source is pretty subjective, but for me "official" fact checkers don't have too much of that.
  - leovingi 2y ago
    > I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking The idea that there is some official governing body that has access to undisputable facts and they have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
    - bavell 2y ago
      A voice of sanity in a cacophony of madness. I hold no sympathy for Meta but it's laughable that so-called "fact-checkers" are anything but "status-quo enforcers".
    - hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
      >The idea that there is some official governing body Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion. >have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous No one is stopping you from posting bullshit, fact checkers simply post the corresponding challenge or facts that allow others to see the lack of truth in your statements. The idea you can say whatever you want, lie all you want, and be unchallenged as some form of right is absurd. Claiming because you can be challenged is censoring you or preventing you from talking is also completely absurd. >and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it. Frankly anyone on this site should be able to separate hyberbolic strawmen from reality.
      - leovingi 2y ago
        > Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion. > Finally, in the midst of operating or considering up to three different avenues of “misinformation reporting” (switchboarding, EI-ISAC, and the “misinformation reporting portal”), by early 2020, CISA had dropped any pretense of focusing only on foreign disinformation, openly discussing how to best monitor and censor the speech of Americans. That's a quote taken directly from the House Judiciary report on "disinformation", page number 31 - https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/EIP_Jira_Ticket_Staff_Report_11-6-23_Clean.pdf https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j... Here's another one > The EIP repeatedly used its fourth category, in particular, to justify the censorship of conservative political speech: the “Delegitimization of Election Results,” defined as “[c]ontent that delegitimizes election results on the basis of false or misleading claims.”166 This arbitrary and inconsistent standard was determined by political actors masquerading as “experts” and academics. But even more troubling, the federal government was heavily intertwined with the universities in making these seemingly arbitrary determinations that skewed against one side of the political aisle. So please, let's not pretend that the fact-checking organizations, the information streams they themselves depended upon and the pressure that was applied to all of the social networks was organic "encouragement" meant to challenge bullshit posted online - it was a censorship campaign by the United States government, plain and simple.
  - kcplate 2y ago
    Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous. Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_bans_of_rcoontown_and_rfatpeoplehate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban... / https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is a great pithy slogan, but modern society needs bleach and chlorhexidine sometimes.
      - naasking 2y ago
        > There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform. That does not imply it reduced hateful speech overall, maybe the censorship just increased antipathy and drove that speech underground or to other platforms where it couldn't be seen.
        ceejayoz 2y ago
        "Off Reddit" is a win. Recruitment in neutral-ish venues like Reddit is critical for extremist groups; people aren't starting on Stormfront.
        naasking 2y ago
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    You must have slept walked through covid then. Citing the simple fact that every western government ignored their own pandemic plans and did adlib bingo instead was enough to get you banned of Twitter, Facebook and reddit for close to two years.
- quantadev 2y ago
  The problem with "Fact-Checkers" was that since they're human they're going to impose their own biases, and their own sense of morality. For well over a decade the majority of them were also left-leaning (per Silicon Valley), and so even true things that conservatives were trying to say got "censored" because these left-leaning folks believed their own sense of truth and morality were superior.
- intended 2y ago
  When you say this, what are you referring to? Was this about the general vibe of online conversations, or are you talking about specific incidences or traits?
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Fact checkers are often wrong, and often corrupted by the activists that end up working at them. For example I’ve repeatedly noticed articles from Politifact that are blatantly wrong or very misleading. When I look up those authors and their other work, their bias is clear. Community notes on X/Twitter is far more effective and accurate.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  The older I get, the more I realize that people just live in different realities and so many contradictory facts can be true. Obviously this is a source of conflict.
  - chillacy 2y ago
    The idea of some kind of universal fact is also misleading, some statements of fact are only statements of belief, others are so ill-defined that people end up debating two different things.
  - naasking 2y ago
    I don't think facts ever contradict each other, it's the stories people create to explain the facts that are at odds. These stories lead people to extrapolate other beliefs which they present as "facts", and it's an organic process of discussion and exposure that changes peoples minds over time. I personally think aggressive fact checking authorities impedes this process, because people don't change their minds when faced with authoritarian power against which they are powerless, and because they are powerless here, they get angry and they disengage. This ends up which reinforcing their beliefs and now you've lost all chance of change.
    - dlivingston 2y ago
      Right. Imagine facts as data points on some Cartesian plane, and the narrative surrounding the facts as the curve fit to those points. The data points might all be sound, but by selectively omitting some, or by weighting their "uncertainty" higher or lower, you can fit just about any damn curve you want to them. One such instantiation of this: https://chomsky.info/consent01/ https://chomsky.info/consent01/
deadbabe 2y ago
[flagged]
nxm 2y ago
Who was checking the fact checkers, when they were wrong quite often?
- red018 2y ago
  [dead]
- red019 2y ago
  [flagged]
- quantadev 2y ago
  [flagged]
- cmdli 2y ago
  I've not seen any examples of the "official" fact-checkers being wrong; have you?
  - zahlman 2y ago
    It's trivial to find examples. I put "fact checkers were wrong" into DDG and turned up: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-facebooks-fact-checkers-wrong/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-f... https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95 https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95 https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-information-science-feedback-wrong-covid/ https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-informati... Even when they aren't wrong, they can be biased. See for example: https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-politifact-fact-check-actually-analysis https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-politifact-fa... Also, compare and contrast how they handled Sanders and Trump's presentations of substantially the same claim: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/13/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-says-real-unemployment-rate-african/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/13/bernie-san... https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/20/donald-trump/trump-misleadingly-puts-black-youth-unemployment-r/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/20/donald-tru... There's an entire site dedicated to pointing out more examples, aptly named https://www.politifactbias.com/ https://www.politifactbias.com/ . They show their work in great detail. It's trivial to introduce bias by simply being selective about who you hold to greater scrutiny (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...).
kristianc 2y ago
> From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US. Zuck has probably done exactly that cost-benefit calculation — FB has put enormous resources into fact checking, and to most people it hasn't moved the needle on public perception in the slightest. Facebook is still seen through the lens of Cambridge Analytica, and as a hive of disinformation. The resources devoted to these efforts haven’t delivered a meaningful return, either in public trust or regulatory goodwill.
nailer 2y ago
Thank God. Fact checkers and political organisations pretending to fact check frequently spread false information. Aside from the 2020 election interference regarding the Hunter Biden laptop (which was falsely claimed to be a Russian disinformation effort), you can visit Snopes right now and read an article on how someone that blew up people (and now works for BLM) may not be a terrorist because ‘there are many different definitions of terrorist’. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- efdee 2y ago
  I think that Snopes link makes it perfectly clear what is going on. Just because you disagree doesn't mean that it's wrong.
  - hyeonwho4 2y ago
    I think the Snopes link indicates the grandparent's point well, if not in the way that was intended: words being subjective and imprecise, the fact checker has many degrees of freedom. If we allow fact checkers to censor content, they will use the linguistic degrees of freedom to censor selectively to the benefit of their political bias. (Your terrorist is my freedom fighter, your demonstrator is my rioter, your just cause is an imposition on my freedoms, etc.) Snopes was careful to show degrees of freedom with this fact check, but most social media fact checkers will not be so careful. Social media fact checkers will have a tendency to censor in the direction of the currently-in-power political party, because that party is able to set regulatory policy on social media companies. So the only thing which will prevent censorship from blowing with the political winds is to not have centralized censorship. Community notes (as implemented at Twitter) require agreement of multiple people who are not in agreement on issues to agree on Notes. I am cautiously optimistic that it may be possible to correct wrong speech with more speech in a nonpartisan manner.
  - nailer 2y ago
    No. Someone who attacks civilians for political gain is a terrorist. Edit for the reply below: yes that very obviously includes being a member of a group that attacks civilians for political purposes. There being debate over whether other groups that do other things should be called terrorists is a separate matter.
londons_explore 2y ago
you can still flag via the community notes system.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
It's ending because the government that encouraged fact checking is ending. The new one has made it clear they despise fact checkers
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Right. And you know what type of government really despises fact checkers? Autocratic / oligarchic governments (Russia, China, etc.)
  - gitaarik 2y ago
    I think Russia would love to have control over a group of supposedly "fact-checkers" to manipulate their citizens.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Sure, and that's the gov't we have now. The previous one was also suppressive but in different ways
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      That's simply not true.
      - infamouscow 2y ago
        Exactly! They simply used lawfare in an attempt to bankrupt, sieze the assets of, and imprison their main political opponents rather than keep the scale balanced (for the sake of democracy) /s
        aprilthird2021 2y ago
        You know lawfare can only be used against you (in the US) to seize your assets, bankrupt you, and imprison you if you commit major crimes right?
- 2y ago

raxxor 2y ago

I think internet discussion worked far better without fact checkers, where some of them cannot really be called accurate. The community notes are the better approach. They aren't always correct either, but it certainly is the better fit for freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Fact checkers are the authority approach that just does not fit.

hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking, but I've seen tons of discussions where having it would improve things. I have seen people get mad because they can't post BS without it being challenged. To claim internet discussion worked better without fact checking is something I haven't seen any actual evidence for, just opinions like yours. Community notes is just a watered down, more easily 'ignored' version that appeases people that were angry about fact checkers to begin with. Hopefully there is a push-back, likely from EU legislation. Between the AI generators many of these companies are implementing and changes like this, platforms need to be held more accountable for what they allow to be posted on them.
- raxxor 2y ago
  Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased. EU legislation tries to introduce "trusted flaggers". A ridiculous approach, an information authority by a state-like entity doesn't work, even if they paint these flaggers as independent. They simply are not, a trusted and verifiable fact. Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course. We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers.
  - hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
    >Claims are challenged all the time by other users and there are enough cases where fact checkers were wrong or heavily biased. I've only seen a handful of cases where they were wrong of heavily biased, but I've seen hundreds of cases where the poster refuses to accept they are wrong and the fact checkers are right. >Community notes provide higher quality info, it is the better approach. That is an opinion of course. Roughly the same info but from less trusted sources and with less controls being higher quality sounds like a big bag of wishes but not grounded in reality. >We will probably see community notes on trusted flaggers. I expect lots of partisan complaining and yelling, but not a lot of actual valid challenges.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - raxxor 2y ago
      I don't know. I believe the average internet user has less to gain to feed me wrong info. It happens of course, that is why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet. A fact checker however has economic incentive towards their employers. You can paint them as independent, but the will always be in a precarious situation or are influenced by third party financiers. This does not at all evoke more trust than a random internet person. Trusted source is pretty subjective, but for me "official" fact checkers don't have too much of that.
- leovingi 2y ago
  > I haven't seen a single discussion be worse off due to fact checking The idea that there is some official governing body that has access to undisputable facts and they have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it.
  - bavell 2y ago
    A voice of sanity in a cacophony of madness. I hold no sympathy for Meta but it's laughable that so-called "fact-checkers" are anything but "status-quo enforcers".
  - hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
    >The idea that there is some official governing body Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion. >have the power to designate what you or I or anyone else can talk about is preposterous No one is stopping you from posting bullshit, fact checkers simply post the corresponding challenge or facts that allow others to see the lack of truth in your statements. The idea you can say whatever you want, lie all you want, and be unchallenged as some form of right is absurd. Claiming because you can be challenged is censoring you or preventing you from talking is also completely absurd. >and, frankly, anyone on a site called Hacker News should be ashamed for supporting it. Frankly anyone on this site should be able to separate hyberbolic strawmen from reality.
    - leovingi 2y ago
      > Platforms were encouraged to create their own departments, and have. There is no "one" or "governing" body here, so this is more hyperbole in this already flagrantly absurd discussion. > Finally, in the midst of operating or considering up to three different avenues of “misinformation reporting” (switchboarding, EI-ISAC, and the “misinformation reporting portal”), by early 2020, CISA had dropped any pretense of focusing only on foreign disinformation, openly discussing how to best monitor and censor the speech of Americans. That's a quote taken directly from the House Judiciary report on "disinformation", page number 31 - https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/EIP_Jira_Ticket_Staff_Report_11-6-23_Clean.pdf https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j... Here's another one > The EIP repeatedly used its fourth category, in particular, to justify the censorship of conservative political speech: the “Delegitimization of Election Results,” defined as “[c]ontent that delegitimizes election results on the basis of false or misleading claims.”166 This arbitrary and inconsistent standard was determined by political actors masquerading as “experts” and academics. But even more troubling, the federal government was heavily intertwined with the universities in making these seemingly arbitrary determinations that skewed against one side of the political aisle. So please, let's not pretend that the fact-checking organizations, the information streams they themselves depended upon and the pressure that was applied to all of the social networks was organic "encouragement" meant to challenge bullshit posted online - it was a censorship campaign by the United States government, plain and simple.
- kcplate 2y ago
  Exposure to many viewpoints, including wrong ones, provides a counterbalancing effect. When you actively try and suppress information you create a “forbidden knowledge” effect where people seek out silos where extreme and wrongheaded information gets passed without the “sunlight is the best disinfectant”—-it grows faster…becomes more wrong, more extreme, and more dangerous. Seems to me in my experience after decades of watching and participating in online discussion extremism really only became more problematic when fact checking and active efforts to suppress took hold. Whatever the good intentions may have been, the results were worse.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_bans_of_rcoontown_and_rfatpeoplehate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_ban... / https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf https://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is a great pithy slogan, but modern society needs bleach and chlorhexidine sometimes.
    - naasking 2y ago
      > There's some academic research to the contrary; banning /r/fatpeoplehate and /r/coontown on Reddit reduced incidents of hateful speech across the platform. That does not imply it reduced hateful speech overall, maybe the censorship just increased antipathy and drove that speech underground or to other platforms where it couldn't be seen.
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        "Off Reddit" is a win. Recruitment in neutral-ish venues like Reddit is critical for extremist groups; people aren't starting on Stormfront.
        naasking 2y ago
- llm_trw 2y ago
  You must have slept walked through covid then. Citing the simple fact that every western government ignored their own pandemic plans and did adlib bingo instead was enough to get you banned of Twitter, Facebook and reddit for close to two years.
quantadev 2y ago
The problem with "Fact-Checkers" was that since they're human they're going to impose their own biases, and their own sense of morality. For well over a decade the majority of them were also left-leaning (per Silicon Valley), and so even true things that conservatives were trying to say got "censored" because these left-leaning folks believed their own sense of truth and morality were superior.
intended 2y ago
When you say this, what are you referring to? Was this about the general vibe of online conversations, or are you talking about specific incidences or traits?

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Fact checkers are often wrong, and often corrupted by the activists that end up working at them. For example I’ve repeatedly noticed articles from Politifact that are blatantly wrong or very misleading. When I look up those authors and their other work, their bias is clear. Community notes on X/Twitter is far more effective and accurate.

silverquiet 2y ago
The older I get, the more I realize that people just live in different realities and so many contradictory facts can be true. Obviously this is a source of conflict.
- chillacy 2y ago
  The idea of some kind of universal fact is also misleading, some statements of fact are only statements of belief, others are so ill-defined that people end up debating two different things.
- naasking 2y ago
  I don't think facts ever contradict each other, it's the stories people create to explain the facts that are at odds. These stories lead people to extrapolate other beliefs which they present as "facts", and it's an organic process of discussion and exposure that changes peoples minds over time. I personally think aggressive fact checking authorities impedes this process, because people don't change their minds when faced with authoritarian power against which they are powerless, and because they are powerless here, they get angry and they disengage. This ends up which reinforcing their beliefs and now you've lost all chance of change.
  - dlivingston 2y ago
    Right. Imagine facts as data points on some Cartesian plane, and the narrative surrounding the facts as the curve fit to those points. The data points might all be sound, but by selectively omitting some, or by weighting their "uncertainty" higher or lower, you can fit just about any damn curve you want to them. One such instantiation of this: https://chomsky.info/consent01/ https://chomsky.info/consent01/

deadbabe 2y ago

[flagged]

nxm 2y ago

Who was checking the fact checkers, when they were wrong quite often?

red018 2y ago
[dead]
red019 2y ago
[flagged]
quantadev 2y ago
[flagged]
cmdli 2y ago
I've not seen any examples of the "official" fact-checkers being wrong; have you?
- zahlman 2y ago
  It's trivial to find examples. I put "fact checkers were wrong" into DDG and turned up: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-facebooks-fact-checkers-wrong/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/07/five-times-f... https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95 https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95 https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-information-science-feedback-wrong-covid/ https://reason.com/2021/12/29/facebook-masks-false-informati... Even when they aren't wrong, they can be biased. See for example: https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-politifact-fact-check-actually-analysis https://www.allsides.com/blog/media-bias-alert-politifact-fa... Also, compare and contrast how they handled Sanders and Trump's presentations of substantially the same claim: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/13/bernie-sanders/bernie-sanders-says-real-unemployment-rate-african/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/13/bernie-san... https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/20/donald-trump/trump-misleadingly-puts-black-youth-unemployment-r/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/jun/20/donald-tru... There's an entire site dedicated to pointing out more examples, aptly named https://www.politifactbias.com/ https://www.politifactbias.com/ . They show their work in great detail. It's trivial to introduce bias by simply being selective about who you hold to greater scrutiny (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...).

kristianc 2y ago

> From bad to worse. Meta is probably one of the single largest funders of fact checking. Now that appears to be coming to an end. Third parties will no longer be able to flag misinfo on FB, Instagram or Threads in the US. Zuck has probably done exactly that cost-benefit calculation — FB has put enormous resources into fact checking, and to most people it hasn't moved the needle on public perception in the slightest. Facebook is still seen through the lens of Cambridge Analytica, and as a hive of disinformation. The resources devoted to these efforts haven’t delivered a meaningful return, either in public trust or regulatory goodwill.

nailer 2y ago

Thank God. Fact checkers and political organisations pretending to fact check frequently spread false information. Aside from the 2020 election interference regarding the Hunter Biden laptop (which was falsely claimed to be a Russian disinformation effort), you can visit Snopes right now and read an article on how someone that blew up people (and now works for BLM) may not be a terrorist because ‘there are many different definitions of terrorist’. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
efdee 2y ago
I think that Snopes link makes it perfectly clear what is going on. Just because you disagree doesn't mean that it's wrong.
- hyeonwho4 2y ago
  I think the Snopes link indicates the grandparent's point well, if not in the way that was intended: words being subjective and imprecise, the fact checker has many degrees of freedom. If we allow fact checkers to censor content, they will use the linguistic degrees of freedom to censor selectively to the benefit of their political bias. (Your terrorist is my freedom fighter, your demonstrator is my rioter, your just cause is an imposition on my freedoms, etc.) Snopes was careful to show degrees of freedom with this fact check, but most social media fact checkers will not be so careful. Social media fact checkers will have a tendency to censor in the direction of the currently-in-power political party, because that party is able to set regulatory policy on social media companies. So the only thing which will prevent censorship from blowing with the political winds is to not have centralized censorship. Community notes (as implemented at Twitter) require agreement of multiple people who are not in agreement on issues to agree on Notes. I am cautiously optimistic that it may be possible to correct wrong speech with more speech in a nonpartisan manner.
- nailer 2y ago
  No. Someone who attacks civilians for political gain is a terrorist. Edit for the reply below: yes that very obviously includes being a member of a group that attacks civilians for political purposes. There being debate over whether other groups that do other things should be called terrorists is a separate matter.

londons_explore 2y ago

you can still flag via the community notes system.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

It's ending because the government that encouraged fact checking is ending. The new one has made it clear they despise fact checkers

insane_dreamer 2y ago
Right. And you know what type of government really despises fact checkers? Autocratic / oligarchic governments (Russia, China, etc.)
- gitaarik 2y ago
  I think Russia would love to have control over a group of supposedly "fact-checkers" to manipulate their citizens.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Sure, and that's the gov't we have now. The previous one was also suppressive but in different ways
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    That's simply not true.
    - infamouscow 2y ago
      Exactly! They simply used lawfare in an attempt to bankrupt, sieze the assets of, and imprison their main political opponents rather than keep the scale balanced (for the sake of democracy) /s
      - aprilthird2021 2y ago
        You know lawfare can only be used against you (in the US) to seize your assets, bankrupt you, and imprison you if you commit major crimes right?
2y ago