5 ms·

I'm not commenting on US fact checkers but the concept made its way to my country of origin some time ago. As I suspected, it turned out to be completely biased

• refurb 11mo ago
  Mike Benz does a nice job of covering the US State department using this for political purposes in other countries. Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal. And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.
• littlecranky67 11mo ago
  Similar observations here in Germany. Those fact checkers pick the facts that supports their agenda and leave out others. Framing is in place just the same. And it does not matter if you look at left or right journalists or left or right fact checkers, it is all the same.
  • throwawayqqq11 11mo ago
    What agenda? Correcting desinfo is a legitimate goal and if you think there were errors made, well, fact check them. I dont like this 'agenda' labeling because its the exact opposite of a factual discourse, it implies malicious intent.
    • outime 11mo ago
      As usual, what looks great on paper often falls short in reality because humans are involved. Who could argue that the concept of fact checkers is inherently bad? After all, they're supposed to chase down all the "disinformation" you mention, and they're there to ensure "factual discourse" to prevent "malicious intent." But if someone opposes fact checkers, they must be a pesky leftie/rightie/whatever label fits, and surely they're against the truth... because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts! In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers, and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking, why cannot everybody agree with me? You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.
      • throwawayqqq11 11mo ago
        Bias != Agenda And the hole fact checking concept falls apart when you prematurely conclude a dialog. This is the most valid critique to any political participant and way more on point: botched online discourse. I am not concluding that fact checker are bad by nature, they are at worst, incomplete, imbalanced ... biased like any other political participant. Shutting them down with visas or labeling them as malicious will not foster the dialog.
        • wakawaka28 11mo ago
          Who do you thinks pays for these "fact-checkers"? The fact is that people were censored based on so-called fact-checkers. It's not as innocent as some jackasses online calling themselves "fact-checkers"... It is so far beyond that, I feel sorry for you for seemingly not knowing. Go start with the Twitter Files as reported by Matt Taibbi.
          • olelele 10mo ago
            And taibbi has no agenda?
  • vinni2 11mo ago
    Do you have any proof of this?May be it’s just the matter of they don’t have resources to fact-check everything?
    • akKsbba 11mo ago
      [dead]
    • sunaookami 11mo ago
      The fact-checking organization "Correctiv" (which was one of the first that got the privilege of marking shared links on Facebook as "disinformation") falsely claimed the right-wing AfD party planned to deport millions of non-Germans in a secret "Masterplan" ("Remigration") which of course did not happen which was confirmed by a court and later by Correctiv themselves.[1] This false report was repeated on every TV station, print and online magazine but the correction was not as widely shared (most people don't even know that the report was fabricated). Keep in mind that the Correctiv report lead to mass protests against the AfD and reactions from a lot of companies and government officials, so it had a HUGE impact. The government also funds projects from Correctiv (a common pattern for these "N"GO's). [1] https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/correctiv-verhandlung-lg-hamburg-masterplan https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/correctiv-verhandlu...
    • littlecranky67 11mo ago
      You just engaged in this Sealioning (see sibling reponse), and it worked :)
• nutjob2 11mo ago
  This is not new. I can call myself Bearer of the Unassailable Truth Who Is Beyond All Doubt or Criticism but that doesn't make me any more accurate than the next guy. The "Fact Checker" title is is meant to describe the task the person seeks to undertake. The evidence and argument they provide gives their opinion weight. The real problem here is that people read a title, or look at how confident someone is, or how well dressed, neat, polite, white, young, old, nerdy, worldly, good looking, well spoken or enthusiastic and think that is means anything at all as to the validity of what they say.
  • vintermann 11mo ago
    I had some contact with an evangelical congregation many years ago, and I remember a woman saying something like, "Everyone has their different spiritual gifts, mine is just that I know if a message is from God." That creeped me out, obviously. She was basically claiming exclusive veto on anything anyone might say. But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.
    • muwtyhg 11mo ago
      Surely in these situations, the fact-checked information is more knowable than God. The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. The woman with a hotline to God cannot possibly provide any proof of her claims. Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.
      • vintermann 11mo ago
        > The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority? There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation" The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them. At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.
• mrtksn 11mo ago
  Since "truth" is more of a philosophical concept than anything else, IMHO the problem with "fact-checking" is largely rooted in the framing of it. Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic. I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth". During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.
  • croon 11mo ago
    > Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth". This is in fact (no pun) what every fact checker I've ever consulted actually does. I assume a lot of people just read the conclusive "Lie"/"Truth", and don't bother with the paragraphs of reasoning and sources they're basing the conclusion on. If there are faults with sourcing evidence, logic, or anything in between, that's where the issue is, but the concept is fine.
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 11mo ago
• duxup 11mo ago
  Outside specific examples, I can never tell what anyone thinks when they're concerned about journalism and bias. As far as I can tell random citizens are no better at spotting it and their own pov drives what is or isn't bias. Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...
  • vorpalhex 11mo ago
    And frequently they are simply contradicted by broadly available evidence. Do the following exercise. In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong. Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories. It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.
    • nitwit005 11mo ago
      Generally, the fact checkers hired for newspapers and the like aren't attempting to assert any sort of correctness, just that the sources actually exist, said what was claimed, etc. A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.
      • wakawaka28 11mo ago
        No, the fact checkers exist to pick their sponsors' preferred sides when there are multiple sources. They have little or no actual expertise of their own but the mere terminology leads the uninitiated observer to directly believe that the "fact-checked" view is objectively true. Everyone else is forced to do the constant rhetorical work of re-explaining why fact-checkers are not what they purport to be. >A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues. Ultimately, fact-checkers are just journalists who attempt to claim a monopoly on truth. Censorship does not work, and can only be tolerated in a free society in VERY limited circumstances, usually after due process. The censorship we've seen during covid and since "fact-checkers" entered public dialog in general is absolutely not acceptable in any way. I don't have a problem with the existence of so-called fact-checkers per se. The real problem is that it's false advertising and a blatant attempt to rally for censorship of wrongthink. If you want censorship, move to North Korea or China, and leave the rest of us alone.