Re:Facebook Threatens Satire Site Over CNN Story That Snopes...
by smsm42 on Friday March 02, 2018 @04:21PM
(#16505811)
> my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing.
True, that ("fact-checking" satire) is not an act of culture war. It is a behavior that makes them very questionable candidate as an arbiter of truth, which Facebook seems to have anointed them to be.
> but it's incredibly obvious why they have to-
No it isn't. On the contrary, them confusing "checking" satire and checking real facts blurs the lines between fictional expression - which can't be rated as true or false as it is not a factual statement - and factual claims which can be evaluated as true or false.
> people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not
That's a bad thing, both from the point of view of robustness - that means that people surrender their agency and critical thinking to some random site on the internet - and from the point of view of choice of that single point of failure - by choosing the site that can't even go as far as distinguishing between factual statement and fictional expression and routinely confuses the two.
If they just said "The Onion is a satire site, the Bablon Bee is a satire site, that's it, move on" - it'd be fine. But the way they do it - to actually evaluate it as a factual statement and assign rating "false" to it - is mixing two concepts, and it's a bad thing. "Fact checkers" regularly commit the same thing by "fact checking" opinions they oppose as "false" - and that is very much a part of the culture war, an attempt to present one opinion as "objective fact" and the opposing one as "objective falsity". Snopes did not do it in this particular case, true - but they did it in other cases, as well as other "fact checker" outlets. That predictably hurt the reputation of the whole business.
True, that ("fact-checking" satire) is not an act of culture war. It is a behavior that makes them very questionable candidate as an arbiter of truth, which Facebook seems to have anointed them to be.
> but it's incredibly obvious why they have to-
No it isn't. On the contrary, them confusing "checking" satire and checking real facts blurs the lines between fictional expression - which can't be rated as true or false as it is not a factual statement - and factual claims which can be evaluated as true or false.
> people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not
That's a bad thing, both from the point of view of robustness - that means that people surrender their agency and critical thinking to some random site on the internet - and from the point of view of choice of that single point of failure - by choosing the site that can't even go as far as distinguishing between factual statement and fictional expression and routinely confuses the two.
If they just said "The Onion is a satire site, the Bablon Bee is a satire site, that's it, move on" - it'd be fine. But the way they do it - to actually evaluate it as a factual statement and assign rating "false" to it - is mixing two concepts, and it's a bad thing. "Fact checkers" regularly commit the same thing by "fact checking" opinions they oppose as "false" - and that is very much a part of the culture war, an attempt to present one opinion as "objective fact" and the opposing one as "objective falsity". Snopes did not do it in this particular case, true - but they did it in other cases, as well as other "fact checker" outlets. That predictably hurt the reputation of the whole business.