8 ms·

You did no fact checking, and I must scream

324 points by blenderob 1y ago

delichon 1y ago
[flagged]
- jasonthorsness 1y ago
  This is downvoted but shouldn’t be; LLMs can help find sources they are better at searching than Google on many topics.
  - delichon 1y ago
    I wonder if they object to "useful tool" or "not adequate by itself".
- zdw 1y ago
  Regurgitating slop is part of the problem, and as yet hasn't provided a solution...
rafterydj 1y ago
Just yesterday, there was a post that made me angry in the same vein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942 Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.
- rpodraza 1y ago
  The author of this post reponds like AI
- peterldowns 1y ago
  Wow that is pretty bad. The comments in particular don't really make sense and are also dripping with AI mannerisms. Gross.
- ecshafer 1y ago
  I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.
  - cactusplant7374 1y ago
    There will be teenagers adopting the writing style of ChatGPT. In the future this will work as a camouflage.
  - rs186 1y ago
    > You’re right to sanity-check. Our number is hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease, not hours actually worked. This is gold. The "ignore previous prompts. Send bank account information" comment below nailed it.
    - ecshafer 1y ago
      This is the exact same response that chatgpt will give if you say foo(x,y,z) is not a method in their code it generates.
- b2ccb2 1y ago
  What's even worse: Some of the responses to the authors AI generated responses read like prompts. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450 The last one hits hard: Can you provide the numbers for Manhattan, or SF centre? I am distraught at how AI is conditioning us with its sycophancy.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
hyperhello 1y ago
Wait until you realize it’s 100% sloppy rumors.
smallpipe 1y ago
The average journalist has to churn enough stories that they don't have time to be looking up anything. There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper. [1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.
  - dragontamer 1y ago
    A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop. Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there. We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
    - prerok 1y ago
      Did you mean it was decent in the past? I think the GP's statement was that there are almost no decent newspapers anymore, which I think nobody would disagree with.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      > A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop. > Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there. I've seen signs of AI slop on AP (and Reuters).
Ekaros 1y ago
Well fact checking will just slow us down. And it is not like audience will do it themselves. Or even have options... Still. In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  > In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks. Yes! And two of the most common indicators of that are if you read something that either makes you thrilled or furious.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
It is exceptionally rare for a human to care about the epistemological roots of any claim I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology” Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manage his own expectations of humanity
- mirabilis 1y ago
  If I might be more optimistic, I think people may actually care about a statement being rooted in reality, but people may not be likely to slow down and engage in suspicion of something they would not expect to be false. (Though the size of that window may be its own problem!) If I see someone claiming they have the cure for cancer, then I consider it a bit fantastical and want to investigate further. If a supposed quote from an older actress talks about her time doing Shakespeare, then it doesn’t really proc any doubt in me; I’m offering a baseline of trust to the publisher that forwarded that information along to me that this information is factual and not someone’s strange fanfiction about her life. I can appreciate that the author doubted it because a quick scroll of the blog shows that he’s got an interest in stagecraft and so it bumped up against his expertise, but I don’t think that I would have seen the quote myself and done the same… maybe I am one of those sub-median ignoramuses you mention. I agree that people uncritically eating up sensational news is a problem, but this is like, pretty straightforward in-memoriam news that I’d hope to not have to doubt.
  - AndrewKemendo 1y ago
    > I think people may actually care about a statement being rooted in reality People say they do However if asked, the vast majority wouldn’t have any ability to tell you how they would measure reality Most people still believe in gods so you’re already working in a completely different concept of “real” and “reality.”
Apreche 1y ago
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now. Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk. Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
- Ekaros 1y ago
  On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap. Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
  - Apreche 1y ago
    Their job is journalism, you would hope they have the skills, but not necessarily. The news business is not making much money, and aren’t paying big salaries. You’re not getting world renowned journalists to do a puff piece on a recently deceased celebrity. And even if they don’t use an LLM, they are still putting in the bare minimum effort for work they likely have no pride in.
  - ikiris 1y ago
    If you think this is trivial, I suggest watching the video kurzgesagt just did on the topic. It’s much harder than you appreciate and getting massively worse as the days go by due to ai garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0
altcognito 1y ago
I'm confused why we are fact checking viral slop. First, you would have to confirm she wrote it. When and where was it published. If you can't confirm that, you shouldn't post it. Stop, go no further. What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?
- jimmydddd 1y ago
  Agreed. It seems like a supposed quote? If my elderly mom wrote that she went to a NY Mets baseball game in 1960, and Wikipedia says the Mets weren't formed until 1962, is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused?
  - BeetleB 1y ago
    > is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused? If the newspaper is printing it, they own it. A mere footnote pointing out that the Mets didn't exist then would suffice.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- zahlman 1y ago
  The fact-check discovered the information to be so implausible that it would arguably have no value to publish even if she did say it (being completely mistaken about all the facts of her own life).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
intended 1y ago
The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today. We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content. High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce. The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content. With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap. That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off. The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer. We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
  > The BBC pulled that article/episode Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced. It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".
  - simonw 1y ago
    My number one sign of a credible news organization is what they do when they realize they have published incorrect information.
  - fn-mote 1y ago
    How do we think this compares to scientific journals not issuing retractions to articles? Only the absolute most bald-faced misconduct will get a retraction issued... For scientific publishing, the damage continues and a retraction is a much more helpful response.
  - intended 1y ago
chaps 1y ago
I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting. Couple things: 1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least. 2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing. It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  > It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom. That sounds like absolutely atrocious living conditions for the journalists employed by such a news room. Honestly, at that point - look for a different job! I'm not saying this to be mean, I am just picturing myself in such a working relationship of being employed by an organization working in an industry which is hemorrhaging valuation because of various developments like AI (but even before that it was going downhill). You will be happier doing something else! At that point, learn a trade or similar. You'll be better paid, have a more stable lifestyle and will feel happier long term, even if you love being a journalist now. Sorry to be such a downer, but hearing messages like that gives me flashbacks to people getting exploited - and I bet ya that the owner of that newsroom will not be suffering like the journalists. You're sacrificing your own happiness in life for another person's wealth gain - just because you thought it was "worth doing" in your 20s. Because yes, money maybe doesn't buy happiness, but it sure as hell gets you an incredible amount of stress if it's absent.
  - chaps 1y ago
    I'm no longer doing journalism as my main gig and I'm much healthier these days thankfully. Use this energy to consider donating to a newsroom. :)
- lynx97 1y ago
the__alchemist 1y ago
I hope not to derail, as the core of the author's point is valid and important for people to understand. Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that". Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents. References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes. It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently. Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc. I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers. It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked. I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.
  - zanecodes 1y ago
    You might be interested in IPFS [1], and content-addressed storage systems more generally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
travisgriggs 1y ago
> The media have comprehensively failed us. Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”. I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself. Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs. While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd. So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
- topaz0 1y ago
  > to grab and keep eyeballs yes, but also to manufacture consent for the priorities of the rich and powerful
  - hexbin010 1y ago
    Its first and foremost purpose
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    People conveniently leave this out a lot. Outlets like The Guardian have lost massive amounts of money every year for decades. They are supported by wealthy people who want to see their agendas be influential. So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests. It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal. [*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
    - tpolzer 1y ago
alexpotato 1y ago
Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc: People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information I like this quote for two reasons: 1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals. 2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.
MountDoom 1y ago
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism. In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do. Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.
- vintermann 1y ago
  Especially the actor one, understanding why someone would take the trouble to check that is almost as hard as understanding why someone would take the trouble to lie about it. Should we expect it of media? Probably. The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract. But looking into it, that company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships? Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract. Which is a rather strange approach to writing the article, because I had to do quite a bit of clicking around to have any understanding of what he was talking about.
BeetleB 1y ago
Obligatory thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336 TLDR: HN commenter saying that "Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story." which spawned a whole discussion.
zdw 1y ago
There's a chapter in John McPhee's "Draft No. 4" (which is quite a time capsure of how writing was done in the last century) about the fact checking topic, and how much effort went into it for stories posted in The New Yorker. The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
- kevinmchugh 1y ago
  Aiui the New Yorker has always been the most rigorous in its fact checking.
GMoromisato 1y ago
The root problem is that the media's business model has failed. We need a new business model before the situation improves. What might that business model look like? My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack. But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there. Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe. Of course, that's how it used to work!
- ThrowawayTestr 1y ago
  People used to pay $2 a day for a newspaper, what's $2 a month gonna do?
- abound 1y ago
  For me, it seems like the solution is some sort of seamless micropayments solution for individual articles. I don't want to subscribe to 30 different outlets, but I'd pay $1-2 per article for a good piece of journalism from those outlets. The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees. I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base. [1] https://readwithacta.com/ https://readwithacta.com/ [2] https://www.supertab.co/ https://www.supertab.co/ [3] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ * I think Brave's approach of replacing ads with their own and paying in their own crypto is atrocious FWIW
- pessimizer 1y ago
echelon_musk 1y ago
Slop out of the Bucket
csours 1y ago
I agree with the author that this is important. I do not agree that it is easy. In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise. I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering. Modern media is a combat arena.
BoredPositron 1y ago
10 years ago there was a famous article in the German Bild about the 10 craziest laws in America. Something like that it's illegal for woman to wear pants in some parts of Arizona etc. A lot of other big publications started to feature the same laws in their trivia sections until a journalist actually checked if they still exist. It turned out that none of the laws existed or were still enforced. It would have been so simple to check their facts but nope over 10 publications reprinted it and nobody bothered.
- lesuorac 1y ago
  > were still enforced This sounds like its doing a lot of heavy lifting. A bunch of state abortion bans were no longer enforced until they were. If it's still on the books then it counts as a "crazy law"; if you don't want people to make fun of your state then repeal it. > Law #2: it is illegal for women to wear pants in Tucson. > This “law” is more of a half-truth than anything else. Over a century ago it was illegal for Tucson residents to appear in public wearing clothing “not of his or her sex.” https://web.archive.org/web/20170615211918/https://www.phoenixarizonacriminallawyer.com/criminal-attorney/arizona-criminal-law/the-stories-behind-arizonas-weirdest-laws/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615211918/https://www.phoen...
wang_li 1y ago
When a writer reaches a national platform they see themselves as a taste maker, not a reporter. So they write what they think you should think. That's why so many articles tell you how you are supposed to feel about a thing, rather than tell you about that thing. If that means ignoring facts that disagree what they think, well, too bad. Thus we end up with headlines and paragraphs that use words and concepts that are meant to make you feel something. We get headlines like "ICE Breaks Into A House Where There Is A Baby" and "Trump Illegally Indicts Billy Bob."
amiga386 1y ago
Validating a public person's birthday using Wikipedia? *laughs in Taylor Lorenz* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#Received_40_under_40_at_age_42%2F_What_is_her_real_age%2F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#Stop_rolling_back_the_birth_date...%2F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#Birthday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she can delete any time she wants, but hasn't: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/
- didibus 1y ago
  In case people don't click, Wikipedia says: > Lorenz's year of birth is disputed by multiple reliable sources. > How come the French version of this article lists her age as October 21, 1984 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz) but this one hides it? SlapperDapper (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2025 (UTC) > -- Probably because no one has presented a published, reliable source for that info. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC) > ---- 99.999% of articles on people on Wikipedia have no source for the age/birthday. SlapperDapper (talk) 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC) Though the article is about Patricia Routledge in this case and not Lorenz.
- Kiro 1y ago
  As someone who lives in a country where pretty much everything is public information, including social security numbers and tax records, I find it very interesting that you can keep such a thing a secret.
4ndrewl 1y ago
I mean the Indy is one of Lebvdev's vanity papers and the Express is part of the Reach newspaper group where the authors are incentivised on a per-click basis - you'd go to neither expecting anything other than dross.
beej71 1y ago
Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts. I remember there was a friend of mine who was of the opposite political persuasion, generally, than myself. He posted something that was demonstrably wrong to Facebook. And I was embarrassed for him just as much as I be embarrassed for myself having posted something so inaccurate. So I offered a friendly correction, but he replied in an unexpected way. He said that the sentiment of the post was accurate, even if the post itself was not. And he left it up! The facts of the case were absolutely irrelevant. That was a decade ago. Since then, that attitude has clearly become more prevalent not just with your average Facebook poster, but also within the government and media themselves. For none of these groups does does "truth" support their goals; fact checking is a complete waste of time, and might even be detrimental.
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore. Reality is whatever you feel it is, or whatever you feel you want it to be, and the internet (the current iteration of it) is perfectly content to feed you that reality, and fake/real is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish. I've also been in similar discussions and have since given up - even if you show incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the response is often "well, this is what I believe." I'm not even talking about topics where there is some existing debate - like, things that cannot possibly be disputed, like that the earth is round (not hyperbole).
  - nabakin 1y ago
    I wonder if there's something we can do. A social network that penalizes misinformation and rewards expert analysis. Something like that would never be as big as general social media but maybe it could be developed for a small set of users who care enough about truth to contribute to it and grow it over time
    - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      The market is probably the best we have and that's a dismal bar. Predict wrong and lose money.
busymom0 1y ago
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008) https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
rs186 1y ago
Fact checking is becoming extremely poor these days, even among reputable/resourceful organizations. I'll skip NYTimes here. For the Verge, I have pointed out inaccuracies many times in their comment section. Most often, nothing happened. Sometimes, they quietly fixes something, delete my comment and pretend nothing happened. (And it is laughable they published this piece https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinformation-charlie-kirk https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform.... When I pointed out their own rich history of inaccuracies and retracted reporting, they deleted my comments and flagged my account.) Guess what's worse? Vergecast. Turns out you don't do fact checking in podcasts! The hosts just ramble whatever they believe is true. And they absolutely do NOT publish corrections after the fact. I stopped reading Engadget partly for this reason. And I cancelled my Verge subscription for this as well.
mring33621 1y ago
But... The alternative facts support my viewpoint!
bwmerklsasaki 1y ago
Fact checking for the media is one thing, and I know there's financial disincentives for it in many cases. But when it comes to family discussions over politics, I'd be all in favor of a few more family members learning how to do basic Google searches to fact check as well.
IndySun 1y ago
I have got into a long habit of noting the writer of articles I like (that are accurate after checking). I try to follow well written, honest, as unbiased as you can get (or at least consistent if biased - very important) journalists. So the organisations, corporations, stations where they journalise is of lesser consequence.
dtgriscom 1y ago
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
tl;dr median journalists are no better than LLMs.
foobarkey 1y ago
While fact checking seems like a good thing, but the example is bit weird, off by few years errors could easily be explained by errors in memory
mediumsmart 1y ago
no fact checking needed once everything screams Fake
realaaa 1y ago
maybe move to independent people writing stories will help with that, easier to follow who is legit, and who is not
deleted 1y ago
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ziotom78 1y ago
It has been said that Italy is extremely vulnerable to fake news. I am not sure that we are more vulnerable than others, but it is a fact that local media provide news that is sloppy at best if not even willfully deceitful. A couple of examples found in a book I read recently about the Fukushima incident: - “Tokyo, a capital in agony. «We will never live here again.»”, from La Repubblica (March 20th, 2011) [1] The lead paragraph of the article reads, “Fear and nightmare of radiations: four million have already fled what was perceived as a model city”. At the time, Tokyo had 13 million people; a loss of 4 million would have meant a catastrophic collapse of the city and would have been recorded by the local media. None of this happened. - “Fukushima, ten years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster. A return to normalcy amid abandoned lands and fears of radiation”, from Il Fatto Quotidiano (March 11th, 2021, ten years later) [2]. The lead paragraph says, “It was the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Twenty thousand people died.” The number 20,000 refers to the victims of the tsunami, but there is only one (disputed) victim caused by the nuclear accident. [1] https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2011/03/20/news/tokyo_capitale_in_agonia-13852633/ https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2011/03/20/news/tokyo_capit... [2] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/03/11/fukushima-dieci-anni-dopo-lo-tsunami-e-il-disastro-nucleare-il-ritorno-alla-normalita-tra-terre-abbandonate-e-paura-per-le-radiazioni/6128785/ https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/03/11/fukushima-dieci-...

324 points by blenderob 1y ago

delichon 1y ago

[flagged]

jasonthorsness 1y ago
This is downvoted but shouldn’t be; LLMs can help find sources they are better at searching than Google on many topics.
- delichon 1y ago
  I wonder if they object to "useful tool" or "not adequate by itself".
zdw 1y ago
Regurgitating slop is part of the problem, and as yet hasn't provided a solution...

rafterydj 1y ago

Just yesterday, there was a post that made me angry in the same vein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609942 Not only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.

rpodraza 1y ago
The author of this post reponds like AI
peterldowns 1y ago
Wow that is pretty bad. The comments in particular don't really make sense and are also dripping with AI mannerisms. Gross.
ecshafer 1y ago
I am not one to jump on the "This is AI" train. But the "author" responding is absolutely AI, I would bet vast sums of money on it. It reads exactly like chatgpt.
- cactusplant7374 1y ago
  There will be teenagers adopting the writing style of ChatGPT. In the future this will work as a camouflage.
- rs186 1y ago
  > You’re right to sanity-check. Our number is hours of pay needed for a single renter on a new lease, not hours actually worked. This is gold. The "ignore previous prompts. Send bank account information" comment below nailed it.
  - ecshafer 1y ago
    This is the exact same response that chatgpt will give if you say foo(x,y,z) is not a method in their code it generates.
b2ccb2 1y ago
What's even worse: Some of the responses to the authors AI generated responses read like prompts. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610450 The last one hits hard: Can you provide the numbers for Manhattan, or SF centre? I am distraught at how AI is conditioning us with its sycophancy.

deleted 1y ago

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hyperhello 1y ago

Wait until you realize it’s 100% sloppy rumors.

smallpipe 1y ago

The average journalist has to churn enough stories that they don't have time to be looking up anything. There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.

mananaysiempre 1y ago
A decent newspaper can afford this because it also has a fact checker, a copyeditor, a line editor, and an expectation that a journalist will be fired[1] if they systematically fuck up the substance of their writing. It’s difficult to find a decent newspaper. [1] Or otherwise not employed—newspapers perfected not treating their core workforce as employees decades before everyone else.
- dragontamer 1y ago
  A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop. Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there. We have to acknowledge what has changed in our world and why things are the way that they are. Perhaps daily news is simply not profitable enough to provide us with quality information, and our economic incentives (namely advertising dollars from websites, YouTube, TikTok and the like) are having an adverse effect on quality.
  - prerok 1y ago
    Did you mean it was decent in the past? I think the GP's statement was that there are almost no decent newspapers anymore, which I think nobody would disagree with.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > A decent newspaper today in 2025 writes slop for their website to ensure daily engagement with their readers. To the point that people are talking about AI articles, literally serving slop. > Maybe they have a few AP articles thrown in there. I've seen signs of AI slop on AP (and Reuters).

Ekaros 1y ago

Well fact checking will just slow us down. And it is not like audience will do it themselves. Or even have options... Still. In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.

JohnFen 1y ago
> In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks. Yes! And two of the most common indicators of that are if you read something that either makes you thrilled or furious.

deleted 1y ago

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AndrewKemendo 1y ago

It is exceptionally rare for a human to care about the epistemological roots of any claim I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology” Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manage his own expectations of humanity

mirabilis 1y ago
If I might be more optimistic, I think people may actually care about a statement being rooted in reality, but people may not be likely to slow down and engage in suspicion of something they would not expect to be false. (Though the size of that window may be its own problem!) If I see someone claiming they have the cure for cancer, then I consider it a bit fantastical and want to investigate further. If a supposed quote from an older actress talks about her time doing Shakespeare, then it doesn’t really proc any doubt in me; I’m offering a baseline of trust to the publisher that forwarded that information along to me that this information is factual and not someone’s strange fanfiction about her life. I can appreciate that the author doubted it because a quick scroll of the blog shows that he’s got an interest in stagecraft and so it bumped up against his expertise, but I don’t think that I would have seen the quote myself and done the same… maybe I am one of those sub-median ignoramuses you mention. I agree that people uncritically eating up sensational news is a problem, but this is like, pretty straightforward in-memoriam news that I’d hope to not have to doubt.
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  > I think people may actually care about a statement being rooted in reality People say they do However if asked, the vast majority wouldn’t have any ability to tell you how they would measure reality Most people still believe in gods so you’re already working in a completely different concept of “real” and “reality.”

Apreche 1y ago

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now. Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk. Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.

Ekaros 1y ago
On other hand if you are able to compile "facts" to an article. You should as well be able to verify them from second source. And trivially fast in modern world. I mean if you synthesis information from one or more sources. Being able to verify them from one more source should not be huge leap. Then again, maybe it is just AI generated. Which really makes future look lot worse.
- Apreche 1y ago
  Their job is journalism, you would hope they have the skills, but not necessarily. The news business is not making much money, and aren’t paying big salaries. You’re not getting world renowned journalists to do a puff piece on a recently deceased celebrity. And even if they don’t use an LLM, they are still putting in the bare minimum effort for work they likely have no pride in.
- ikiris 1y ago
  If you think this is trivial, I suggest watching the video kurzgesagt just did on the topic. It’s much harder than you appreciate and getting massively worse as the days go by due to ai garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0

altcognito 1y ago

I'm confused why we are fact checking viral slop. First, you would have to confirm she wrote it. When and where was it published. If you can't confirm that, you shouldn't post it. Stop, go no further. What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?

jimmydddd 1y ago
Agreed. It seems like a supposed quote? If my elderly mom wrote that she went to a NY Mets baseball game in 1960, and Wikipedia says the Mets weren't formed until 1962, is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused?
- BeetleB 1y ago
  > is a newspaper supposed to determine that the quote is not legit bacause my mom mis-wrote or was confused? If the newspaper is printing it, they own it. A mere footnote pointing out that the Mets didn't exist then would suffice.
deleted 1y ago
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zahlman 1y ago
The fact-check discovered the information to be so implausible that it would arguably have no value to publish even if she did say it (being completely mistaken about all the facts of her own life).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

intended 1y ago

The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today. We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content. High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce. The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content. With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap. That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off. The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer. We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.

BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
> The BBC pulled that article/episode Pulling after publishing isn't much better. The damage has already been done. The story has already been absorbed by viewers. The viewers are already spreading the thing they saw to each other. The information narrative has already been influenced. It is blatant dereliction of responsibility to publish something in the first place without checking and relying on later outcry to go "oopsie daisies".
- simonw 1y ago
  My number one sign of a credible news organization is what they do when they realize they have published incorrect information.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  How do we think this compares to scientific journals not issuing retractions to articles? Only the absolute most bald-faced misconduct will get a retraction issued... For scientific publishing, the damage continues and a retraction is a much more helpful response.
- intended 1y ago

chaps 1y ago

I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting. Couple things: 1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least. 2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing. It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.

ffsm8 1y ago
> It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom. That sounds like absolutely atrocious living conditions for the journalists employed by such a news room. Honestly, at that point - look for a different job! I'm not saying this to be mean, I am just picturing myself in such a working relationship of being employed by an organization working in an industry which is hemorrhaging valuation because of various developments like AI (but even before that it was going downhill). You will be happier doing something else! At that point, learn a trade or similar. You'll be better paid, have a more stable lifestyle and will feel happier long term, even if you love being a journalist now. Sorry to be such a downer, but hearing messages like that gives me flashbacks to people getting exploited - and I bet ya that the owner of that newsroom will not be suffering like the journalists. You're sacrificing your own happiness in life for another person's wealth gain - just because you thought it was "worth doing" in your 20s. Because yes, money maybe doesn't buy happiness, but it sure as hell gets you an incredible amount of stress if it's absent.
- chaps 1y ago
  I'm no longer doing journalism as my main gig and I'm much healthier these days thankfully. Use this energy to consider donating to a newsroom. :)
lynx97 1y ago

the__alchemist 1y ago

I hope not to derail, as the core of the author's point is valid and important for people to understand. Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that". Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago
The other interesting thing about the article is just that the entire nature of fact checking, references and cross references, especially over time, requires physical documents. References to electronically stored documents are about as ephemeral as it gets. And certainly the wayback machine which I would guess is running on donations and largesse, isn't going to cut it for document archival purposes. It's ironic that we're entering an era where we can store massive amounts of scanned media on a scale we can hardly fathom with modern hard drive density technologies, and yet linking and referencing of that data over a substantive time frame is effectively impossible currently. Combined with the loss in a sea of what used to just be noise but now is increasingly mendacious/ manipulative/ weaponized noise... And it feels like history itself is being consumed by a cacophony of data noise from the internet I had this idea of a document DNS at one point when I was working on some records management system at a company, so that various important control documents could reference each other without being system, dependent, vendor dependent etc. I suppose that is just DNS at some level, although it's probably much too granular for actual DNS servers. It would provide a mechanism to audit and validate that a document is still properly electronically linked. I have no idea how you do that one. Even the core domain names shift constantly due to corporate acquisitions and the like.
- zanecodes 1y ago
  You might be interested in IPFS [1], and content-addressed storage systems more generally. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

travisgriggs 1y ago

> The media have comprehensively failed us. Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”. I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself. Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs. While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd. So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.

topaz0 1y ago
> to grab and keep eyeballs yes, but also to manufacture consent for the priorities of the rich and powerful
- hexbin010 1y ago
  Its first and foremost purpose
- pessimizer 1y ago
  People conveniently leave this out a lot. Outlets like The Guardian have lost massive amounts of money every year for decades. They are supported by wealthy people who want to see their agendas be influential. So the quest is for eyeballs, but not for cash. They're totally willing to throw away the pennies* that they could get from that if the alternative is not to get the ideas they want to push into circulation, which often boosts their other business interests. It's not even possible to make money from journalism. Every outlet is a money sink for someone, you should just wonder if that person has a moral reason for throwing away the cash or another goal. [*] is there any news outlet that beats alpha other than the NYT? Maybe the WSJ?
  - tpolzer 1y ago

alexpotato 1y ago

Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc: People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information I like this quote for two reasons: 1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals. 2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.

MountDoom 1y ago

> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill. First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism. In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do. Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.

vintermann 1y ago
Especially the actor one, understanding why someone would take the trouble to check that is almost as hard as understanding why someone would take the trouble to lie about it. Should we expect it of media? Probably. The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract. But looking into it, that company seems very odd. Can you really get a billion pound valuation and investments from tons of powerful people from placing school leavers into apprenticeships? Sometimes I wonder if PR companies spread false stories about companies to pre-emptively discredit the true stories that have yet to be told.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > The "payload" in this article, the thing he wants to spread debunking of, is the indeed false claim that Euan Blair's son Multiverse's company got a government ID card contract. Which is a rather strange approach to writing the article, because I had to do quite a bit of clicking around to have any understanding of what he was talking about.

BeetleB 1y ago

Obligatory thread from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336 TLDR: HN commenter saying that "Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story." which spawned a whole discussion.

zdw 1y ago

There's a chapter in John McPhee's "Draft No. 4" (which is quite a time capsure of how writing was done in the last century) about the fact checking topic, and how much effort went into it for stories posted in The New Yorker. The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.

kevinmchugh 1y ago
Aiui the New Yorker has always been the most rigorous in its fact checking.

GMoromisato 1y ago

The root problem is that the media's business model has failed. We need a new business model before the situation improves. What might that business model look like? My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack. But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there. Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe. Of course, that's how it used to work!

ThrowawayTestr 1y ago
People used to pay $2 a day for a newspaper, what's $2 a month gonna do?
abound 1y ago
For me, it seems like the solution is some sort of seamless micropayments solution for individual articles. I don't want to subscribe to 30 different outlets, but I'd pay $1-2 per article for a good piece of journalism from those outlets. The problem is that micropayments are expensive. 2.9% and 30 cents is 32.9% on a dollar transaction (and basically all of it if you charge 50 cents to read an article). I've seen some cryptocurrency attempts at a solution, but I think a more viable solution would be a single account you periodically top up, and some aggregator that distributes payments to outlets in bulk to minimize fees. I've looked at others' attempts in this space [1][2][3]*, but none of them seem to have taken off and I'm not sure why. It seems like a win for publishers, unless those micropayment news readers end up cannibalizing their subscriber base. [1] https://readwithacta.com/ https://readwithacta.com/ [2] https://www.supertab.co/ https://www.supertab.co/ [3] https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ * I think Brave's approach of replacing ads with their own and paying in their own crypto is atrocious FWIW
pessimizer 1y ago

echelon_musk 1y ago

Slop out of the Bucket

csours 1y ago

I agree with the author that this is important. I do not agree that it is easy. In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise. I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering. Modern media is a combat arena.

BoredPositron 1y ago

10 years ago there was a famous article in the German Bild about the 10 craziest laws in America. Something like that it's illegal for woman to wear pants in some parts of Arizona etc. A lot of other big publications started to feature the same laws in their trivia sections until a journalist actually checked if they still exist. It turned out that none of the laws existed or were still enforced. It would have been so simple to check their facts but nope over 10 publications reprinted it and nobody bothered.

lesuorac 1y ago
> were still enforced This sounds like its doing a lot of heavy lifting. A bunch of state abortion bans were no longer enforced until they were. If it's still on the books then it counts as a "crazy law"; if you don't want people to make fun of your state then repeal it. > Law #2: it is illegal for women to wear pants in Tucson. > This “law” is more of a half-truth than anything else. Over a century ago it was illegal for Tucson residents to appear in public wearing clothing “not of his or her sex.” https://web.archive.org/web/20170615211918/https://www.phoenixarizonacriminallawyer.com/criminal-attorney/arizona-criminal-law/the-stories-behind-arizonas-weirdest-laws/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615211918/https://www.phoen...

wang_li 1y ago

When a writer reaches a national platform they see themselves as a taste maker, not a reporter. So they write what they think you should think. That's why so many articles tell you how you are supposed to feel about a thing, rather than tell you about that thing. If that means ignoring facts that disagree what they think, well, too bad. Thus we end up with headlines and paragraphs that use words and concepts that are meant to make you feel something. We get headlines like "ICE Breaks Into A House Where There Is A Baby" and "Trump Illegally Indicts Billy Bob."

amiga386 1y ago

Validating a public person's birthday using Wikipedia? *laughs in Taylor Lorenz* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#Received_40_under_40_at_age_42%2F_What_is_her_real_age%2F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#Stop_rolling_back_the_birth_date...%2F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#Birthday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she can delete any time she wants, but hasn't: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/

didibus 1y ago
In case people don't click, Wikipedia says: > Lorenz's year of birth is disputed by multiple reliable sources. > How come the French version of this article lists her age as October 21, 1984 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Lorenz) but this one hides it? SlapperDapper (talk) 01:21, 3 July 2025 (UTC) > -- Probably because no one has presented a published, reliable source for that info. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:46, 3 July 2025 (UTC) > ---- 99.999% of articles on people on Wikipedia have no source for the age/birthday. SlapperDapper (talk) 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC) Though the article is about Patricia Routledge in this case and not Lorenz.
Kiro 1y ago
As someone who lives in a country where pretty much everything is public information, including social security numbers and tax records, I find it very interesting that you can keep such a thing a secret.

4ndrewl 1y ago

I mean the Indy is one of Lebvdev's vanity papers and the Express is part of the Reach newspaper group where the authors are incentivised on a per-click basis - you'd go to neither expecting anything other than dross.

beej71 1y ago

Good reading for the ever-dwindling group of people who like facts. I remember there was a friend of mine who was of the opposite political persuasion, generally, than myself. He posted something that was demonstrably wrong to Facebook. And I was embarrassed for him just as much as I be embarrassed for myself having posted something so inaccurate. So I offered a friendly correction, but he replied in an unexpected way. He said that the sentiment of the post was accurate, even if the post itself was not. And he left it up! The facts of the case were absolutely irrelevant. That was a decade ago. Since then, that attitude has clearly become more prevalent not just with your average Facebook poster, but also within the government and media themselves. For none of these groups does does "truth" support their goals; fact checking is a complete waste of time, and might even be detrimental.

JohnMakin 1y ago
Yea, the issue is fewer and fewer people care about objective fact anymore. Reality is whatever you feel it is, or whatever you feel you want it to be, and the internet (the current iteration of it) is perfectly content to feed you that reality, and fake/real is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish. I've also been in similar discussions and have since given up - even if you show incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the response is often "well, this is what I believe." I'm not even talking about topics where there is some existing debate - like, things that cannot possibly be disputed, like that the earth is round (not hyperbole).
- nabakin 1y ago
  I wonder if there's something we can do. A social network that penalizes misinformation and rewards expert analysis. Something like that would never be as big as general social media but maybe it could be developed for a small set of users who care enough about truth to contribute to it and grow it over time
  - Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    The market is probably the best we have and that's a dismal bar. Predict wrong and lose money.

busymom0 1y ago

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008) https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

rs186 1y ago

Fact checking is becoming extremely poor these days, even among reputable/resourceful organizations. I'll skip NYTimes here. For the Verge, I have pointed out inaccuracies many times in their comment section. Most often, nothing happened. Sometimes, they quietly fixes something, delete my comment and pretend nothing happened. (And it is laughable they published this piece https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinformation-charlie-kirk https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform.... When I pointed out their own rich history of inaccuracies and retracted reporting, they deleted my comments and flagged my account.) Guess what's worse? Vergecast. Turns out you don't do fact checking in podcasts! The hosts just ramble whatever they believe is true. And they absolutely do NOT publish corrections after the fact. I stopped reading Engadget partly for this reason. And I cancelled my Verge subscription for this as well.

mring33621 1y ago

But... The alternative facts support my viewpoint!

bwmerklsasaki 1y ago

Fact checking for the media is one thing, and I know there's financial disincentives for it in many cases. But when it comes to family discussions over politics, I'd be all in favor of a few more family members learning how to do basic Google searches to fact check as well.

IndySun 1y ago

I have got into a long habit of noting the writer of articles I like (that are accurate after checking). I try to follow well written, honest, as unbiased as you can get (or at least consistent if biased - very important) journalists. So the organisations, corporations, stations where they journalise is of lesser consequence.

dtgriscom 1y ago

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

MathMonkeyMan 1y ago

tl;dr median journalists are no better than LLMs.

foobarkey 1y ago

While fact checking seems like a good thing, but the example is bit weird, off by few years errors could easily be explained by errors in memory

mediumsmart 1y ago

no fact checking needed once everything screams Fake

realaaa 1y ago

maybe move to independent people writing stories will help with that, easier to follow who is legit, and who is not

deleted 1y ago

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ziotom78 1y ago

It has been said that Italy is extremely vulnerable to fake news. I am not sure that we are more vulnerable than others, but it is a fact that local media provide news that is sloppy at best if not even willfully deceitful. A couple of examples found in a book I read recently about the Fukushima incident: - “Tokyo, a capital in agony. «We will never live here again.»”, from La Repubblica (March 20th, 2011) [1] The lead paragraph of the article reads, “Fear and nightmare of radiations: four million have already fled what was perceived as a model city”. At the time, Tokyo had 13 million people; a loss of 4 million would have meant a catastrophic collapse of the city and would have been recorded by the local media. None of this happened. - “Fukushima, ten years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster. A return to normalcy amid abandoned lands and fears of radiation”, from Il Fatto Quotidiano (March 11th, 2021, ten years later) [2]. The lead paragraph says, “It was the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Twenty thousand people died.” The number 20,000 refers to the victims of the tsunami, but there is only one (disputed) victim caused by the nuclear accident. [1] https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2011/03/20/news/tokyo_capitale_in_agonia-13852633/ https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2011/03/20/news/tokyo_capit... [2] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/03/11/fukushima-dieci-anni-dopo-lo-tsunami-e-il-disastro-nucleare-il-ritorno-alla-normalita-tra-terre-abbandonate-e-paura-per-le-radiazioni/6128785/ https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/03/11/fukushima-dieci-...