5 ms·

I've not seen any examples of the "official" fact-checkers being wrong; have you?

by cmdli 2y ago

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...).
- paulddraper 2y ago
  > Trump says the unemployment rate for African-American youths is 59 percent. > In May, the bureau said the employment-population ratio for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 41.5 percent. Flipped over, that would mean that the unemployment ratio - although such a statistic is not published by the bureau - would be 58.5 percent. That’s pretty close to the 59 percent figure Trump cited, Sinclair noted. > Mostly False Crazy
  - pona-a 2y ago
    > But there are differences between the ratio and the widely used unemployment rate, which Trump used in citing the percentage. > The unemployment rate reflects the number of jobless people who are actively seeking work as a percentage of the available workforce - defined as those who have jobs or trying to find one. > The May unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent. The rate for whites in the same age group was 9.1 percent. > The employment-population ratio is a far broader measure that counts all civilians in its equation - even those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job. In the 16- to 24-year-old category, it includes high school and college students who are not employed or seeking jobs.
- cmdli 2y ago
  In the examples you provided, they mostly deal with hotly-contested information around Covid-19, where there exists countless amounts of incorrect information, politicized reporting, and straight up propaganda. I'm not surprised that Facebook's fact-checkers got a couple articles mislabeled, especially if they blended in with the wave of genuine disinformation that accompanied the pandemic. Given that there seems to only be two articles that are listed as falsely reported as misinformation (the Reason article and the BMJ article also mentioned in the Telegraph report from today), I have to assume that there actually aren't that many large errors on the part of the fact checkers. If there were more than two or the mistakes were much bigger, then the free speech advocates would never stop mentioning it. There can definitely be bias when it comes to fact-checking, I wouldn't deny that. I also think that education and knowledge sharing can be greatly harmed by social media incentives to provide the most "engagement". Having an actual human in the process somewhere introduces some error but also cuts down on a lot of the dumb crap that would otherwise spread.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    You asked if I saw examples and said that you haven't seen any examples; I showed you examples. There certainly are more examples, and the free speech advocates I know do talk about the subject generally quite a bit. One I just now remembered: Dr. John Campbell (https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching) has run into issues with this and has pointed out many other cases where established "knowledge" about Covid that we were previously not allowed to criticize, turned out to be objectively wrong. These disputes have resulted in many other people being censored despite later being shown to be correct, or at least reasonably justified by the best information available at the time. This is someone who was proactively warning about the potential severity of Covid well before others, and advocating for proper hand-washing very early on (before more science emerged suggesting that skin contact is a relatively minor transmission vector). In the early days of the pandemic, he was complaining loudly about Fauci's initial mask rhetoric, arguing that the general population absolutely should wear masks and that production needed to step up. He's been doing serious medical content on Youtube for 17 years (sort by oldest to see) and first posted about Covid on Jan 26 2020 when awareness was still low and it was imagined that the virus had been contained to China and presented extensive detail on what little was known at the time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0). But now he mostly makes videos against "the establishment", out of frustration with their unwillingness to consider new science over dogma.
e2021 2y ago
Joe Biden is sharp as a tack and any videos purporting to show the opposite are cheap fakes deceptively edited by the Republicans and their far right allies [1] [2] [3] [1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/21/cheap-fake-videos-and-the-phrase-itself-take-2024/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/21/cheap-fake-vi... [2] https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-videos-age-cheap-fakes-misinformation-a4f2fb5215e9d46520fbaf1cbd79b0b9 https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-videos-age-cheap-fake... [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/biden-g7-video-joe-cheapfake-kept-going-viral-rcna157591 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/biden-g7-video-j...

I've not seen any examples of the "official" fact-checkers being wrong; have you?

by cmdli 2y ago

I've not seen any examples of the "official" fact-checkers being wrong; have you?

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...).

paulddraper 2y ago
> Trump says the unemployment rate for African-American youths is 59 percent. > In May, the bureau said the employment-population ratio for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 41.5 percent. Flipped over, that would mean that the unemployment ratio - although such a statistic is not published by the bureau - would be 58.5 percent. That’s pretty close to the 59 percent figure Trump cited, Sinclair noted. > Mostly False Crazy
- pona-a 2y ago
  > But there are differences between the ratio and the widely used unemployment rate, which Trump used in citing the percentage. > The unemployment rate reflects the number of jobless people who are actively seeking work as a percentage of the available workforce - defined as those who have jobs or trying to find one. > The May unemployment rate for blacks ages 16 to 24 was 18.7 percent. The rate for whites in the same age group was 9.1 percent. > The employment-population ratio is a far broader measure that counts all civilians in its equation - even those who don’t work and aren’t looking for a job. In the 16- to 24-year-old category, it includes high school and college students who are not employed or seeking jobs.
cmdli 2y ago
In the examples you provided, they mostly deal with hotly-contested information around Covid-19, where there exists countless amounts of incorrect information, politicized reporting, and straight up propaganda. I'm not surprised that Facebook's fact-checkers got a couple articles mislabeled, especially if they blended in with the wave of genuine disinformation that accompanied the pandemic. Given that there seems to only be two articles that are listed as falsely reported as misinformation (the Reason article and the BMJ article also mentioned in the Telegraph report from today), I have to assume that there actually aren't that many large errors on the part of the fact checkers. If there were more than two or the mistakes were much bigger, then the free speech advocates would never stop mentioning it. There can definitely be bias when it comes to fact-checking, I wouldn't deny that. I also think that education and knowledge sharing can be greatly harmed by social media incentives to provide the most "engagement". Having an actual human in the process somewhere introduces some error but also cuts down on a lot of the dumb crap that would otherwise spread.
- zahlman 2y ago
  You asked if I saw examples and said that you haven't seen any examples; I showed you examples. There certainly are more examples, and the free speech advocates I know do talk about the subject generally quite a bit. One I just now remembered: Dr. John Campbell (https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching https://www.youtube.com/@campbellteaching) has run into issues with this and has pointed out many other cases where established "knowledge" about Covid that we were previously not allowed to criticize, turned out to be objectively wrong. These disputes have resulted in many other people being censored despite later being shown to be correct, or at least reasonably justified by the best information available at the time. This is someone who was proactively warning about the potential severity of Covid well before others, and advocating for proper hand-washing very early on (before more science emerged suggesting that skin contact is a relatively minor transmission vector). In the early days of the pandemic, he was complaining loudly about Fauci's initial mask rhetoric, arguing that the general population absolutely should wear masks and that production needed to step up. He's been doing serious medical content on Youtube for 17 years (sort by oldest to see) and first posted about Covid on Jan 26 2020 when awareness was still low and it was imagined that the virus had been contained to China and presented extensive detail on what little was known at the time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPvpfC7NfR0). But now he mostly makes videos against "the establishment", out of frustration with their unwillingness to consider new science over dogma.

e2021 2y ago

Joe Biden is sharp as a tack and any videos purporting to show the opposite are cheap fakes deceptively edited by the Republicans and their far right allies [1] [2] [3] [1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/21/cheap-fake-videos-and-the-phrase-itself-take-2024/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/21/cheap-fake-vi... [2] https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-videos-age-cheap-fakes-misinformation-a4f2fb5215e9d46520fbaf1cbd79b0b9 https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-videos-age-cheap-fake... [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/biden-g7-video-joe-cheapfake-kept-going-viral-rcna157591 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/biden-g7-video-j...