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A comment on Fact Checks. Parent comment

Re:Fact Checks by smsm42 on Sunday October 22, 2017 @06:05PM (#15529230)
It's not like people didn't know how to disagree on the internet before. Google, however, purports to structure this disagreement in a way that predefines certain semantic roles. For example, it designates one content provider as "fact-checker", and their claims as inherently more authoritative (because fact-check is always more authoritative than the article under the check, isn't it?) and capable of rendering verdicts which can not be further challenged, while the other role is completely passive - and even the claims are formulated not by the original article but by the checker, leaving the whole authority only in the hands of the checker role.

This does not look like a good setup to structure the discussion. Why somebody would get so much authority just for using some API? It's like giving people password-less sudo access and then wondering will it work well.

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Re:Fact Checks by darawk on Sunday October 22, 2017 @06:18PM (#15529300)
Why are you assuming that Google is going to trust these people implicitly? They are providing markup so they can associate claims of fact with identities. They can then choose how to weight those claims using other evidence.
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Re:Fact Checks by smsm42 on Sunday October 22, 2017 @08:38PM (#15529882)
> Why are you assuming that Google is going to trust these people implicitly?

How are they going not to? Hand-verify each provider and each claim? Not scalable and volatile, reliable site today can become trashy in two years. It's either completely uncurated list (welcome, 4chan trolls, food bonanza for you!) or list curated according to biases of a small overworked team isolated somewhere deep in the guts of Google corporate behemoth. What other options are there for selection?

> They are providing markup so they can associate claims of fact with identities

URLs already provide that markup. Google's markup assigns specific elevated role to "fact-checkers", implying they are somehow more authoritative than the original article, otherwise there won't be any need for special designated status for them.

> They can then choose how to weight those claims using other evidence.

That's what I am afraid of - that they (Google) would choose to weight the claims according to how they see fit, thus blocking from me information they consider not necessary for me and skewing my informational stream.

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