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Re:The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free by askxnakjsn on Monday August 03, 2020 @09:57AM (#24037796)
The bad thing about snopes is they don't have a spectrum, it's a binary 'fact or not fact' system. This means even a slight bit of bias can be the difference between fact or not.

But the more important question is why a random website is being used as the basis for truth. They don't even try to hide the bias in their language, it's just filled with words you would never see in an academic document.

Re:The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free by foobarbecue on Monday August 03, 2020 @10:00AM (#24037845)
Re:The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free by askxnakjsn on Monday August 03, 2020 @10:06AM (#24037927)
I was thinking more along the lines of a true spectrum, like a percentage system. What you have here is a bunch of qualitative truthiness symbols decided arbitrarily, it's not much different from just saying true or false.

For example, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marijuana-electron-microsc... this article would lead a passerby to believe that there is equal parts truth and lie in this picture + caption. In reality I would judge this as 'mostly true' because the caption is more true than it is false.

Re:The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free by michaelcampbell on Monday August 03, 2020 @11:44AM (#24039163)
This is starting to strain credulity. It says "mixed", not "evenly mixed" or anything to imply even-ness of true/false.

The NEXT 2 PARAGRAPHS say, in simple language, what part is true and which is not.

Re:The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free by foobarbecue on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @08:49AM (#24049382)
You said "binary."
Re:The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free by DangitBobby on Monday August 03, 2020 @10:22AM (#24038097)
I saw one on PolitiFact about Biden a while back. The claim was that he's been fighting to cut social security benefits for the last 40 years. The verdict was "mostly false" but if you read the contents [1], it's "mostly true." You see shit like this all the time.

1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/12/bernie-san...

Re:The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free by stjohnswarts on Monday August 03, 2020 @11:20AM (#24038805)
It's more in the middle. He clearly was going with the flow of politics at the time on budget hawking. It hardly seems like he wanted to eliminate/privatize SS like most conservatives who aren't retired want to do. So there a levels to "cutting social security" like most complicated topics from freezing it to reducing it to eliminating it. I agree though their mostly false doesn't seem reasonable to me from a statistical analysis of what they presented in the article