– Loosely paraphrased after David Frum
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/mmy39q/o...
Moon landing ? Fact. Trump being US president? Fact. France winning the 2018 World Cup? Fact.
So no, fact checkers do exist and are very important.
However, people do dispute facts, and anything someone disputes is no longer in the purview of the fact checker, by your definition.
It feels very wrong to reconsider what we believe is true, but that's just how it feels when we're wrong.
Fact-checkers as they exist right now are, with extremely few exceptions, exemplary. I would love to be proven wrong, but never have been.
Edit: I can accept an argument (at least in theory) of fact-checkers being selective on what to fact check, but that would still not be an argument against fact-checking, but rather a call for more of it.
Nobody - because fact-checking [of the type under discussion] is essentially an infotainment service, and people providing those services don't wish to draw attention to their competitors.
> Nobody - because fact-checking [of the type under discussion] is essentially an infotainment service, and people providing those services don't wish to draw attention to their competitors.
You are basically suggesting that no one has an interest in disproving something on the internet, which is probably the second thing people engaged with after porn.
No. I'm saying it's an internet standard commercial practice to not provide links sending people to your competitors, no matter what space you are in.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acnn.com+foxnews
I refute your supposition with extremely clear evidence that competitors have no problem mentioning each other, especially when it's in an attempt to refute something they said.
So that solves the commercial aspect. The fact (no pun intended) still stands that fact-checking services are even easier to falsify since their claims are generally binary.
The fact that we're having this discussion should prove that there's an abundance of interest in doing just that on the internet since we both likely have better things to do.
Neither of us are making any money; and, by now, nobody else is reading it.
No, it's examples disproving your claim that they wouldn't want to drive traffic to their competitors by discussing them.
Sidenote: I wouldn't call 150k hits on each website "occasional".
Sidenote 2: Why is linking a relevant factor? They're discussing their competitor. Fact-checking can be done in the same way without direct linking. If linking is relevant, then your qualifier fails regardless.
Since by above proof sites have no problem doing that under "trashing" conditions, there should be tons of fact-checking of fact-checkers, if they failed at their jobs, which was my original question. Why are there not mountains of these examples?
Or just disprove someone else's fact check without mentioning them, or contextualize it if it's unfair, etc.
I haven't even seen conflicting fact checks, is my point. This is approaching impossibility if fact-checkers are lying/biased.
My conclusion as a frequent (critical) reader of them is of course that it's very rare they get it wrong.
> Neither of us are making any money; and, by now, nobody else is reading it.
I'm not doing this for external readers. Like I said, I'd love to be proven wrong, that's how one learns. I'll argue something logically until someone disproves it, shows a faulty assumption, etc - or my thesis still stands. The only way to strengthen your argument is to try to break it, which is what I'm doing. I assume anyone else especially on this site is doing the same thing until indicated otherwise.
Papers looking at whether or not this is desirable tend not to come to that conclusion, e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913811.2013.84... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10584609.2019.16... (2020 meta-analysis) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15205436.2020.17...
I personally hold a belief that a fact-checking publisher has the same biases and profit-motives as any news publisher (or, as motive, political influence of the wealthy).
I don't find it useful to distinguish fact-checking as special and call for specific research on this, as if existing academic research can always be invalidated by a simple re-branding.
I don't know how well this will age, but for now, I think any company claiming to be able to automate fact-checking should be met with a high degree of skepticism.
Just for context, what I imagine in my head when I think of a "fact check" is something like this, basically a specialized or somewhat standardized / formulaic form of journalism:
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/england-banned-fox-news/
- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/18/joe-biden/...
- https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/05/donald-tru...
I deliberately picked a couple of less obvious fact-checks than "is the earth round", because I wanted to highlight how even in politics, on questions where there is high potential for bias, there are cut and dry things which can be fact-checked, or at the very least 'contextualized'.
I'm sure none of this is perfect, but I am not super optimistic that automated content would be of this level of quality.
As inconvenient as it may be, truth is transitory and progress toward it is frequently made through invalidation. It's more prudent and useful to assume facts don't exist.
As for "fact-checkers", who fact-checks them? (Etc...) The notion of visiting a webpage authored by God-knows-who to check whether what's on another webpage authored by God-knows-who is correct or not is absurd.
And we haven't even gotten into subjectivity or nuance.
What you're referring to as outrage bubbles has come about due to a lack of contextualization. One topic this is commonly seen is discussion on GMOs, where both pro-GMO and anti-GMO activists provide misleading facts as supporting evidence in their discussion. In this example and also when it comes to politics, a contextualization engine would be very effective in spurring dialogue and getting people to see multiple sides of an issue.
> When you ask the question, "whose contextualization engine?" and the whole premise falls apart, it becomes clear they have earned any mockery these engines are designed to sheild them from.
Where I personally differ from some of the social networks on this, is I think these should be default on but also come with an off switch. Meaning the user always has the ability to turn them off, but they need to take an active step in order to do so. IMO it's a good compromise.
The reason we lack context is that the world moved from chronological feeds to "engagement" based feeds. Anything that could have served as context gets optimized out, because more clicks. We're not naturally polarized - we have created an environment that favored the more outrageous claims, slowly removing the middle ground as if it didn't exist.
What we need isn't a "contextualizion engine", it's getting rid of active efforts to decontextualize.
Engagement based feeds are more profitable due to ads and also the rich profiles that can be built from aggregated engagement metrics. Unless business models drastically change, no major for-profit entity will make their feeds less engaging.
The contextualization engine sounds like the neutrality doctrine that was used in the US during the mid-20th century to maintain media neutrality. Clearly, at least back then, it passed legal muster. It's worth seeing if it makes sense in a different medium. Are there better alternatives?
That's not to say that I think legal restrictions are necessarily the right answer, but neither is "well, it's more profitable" a reason to not explore that space.
However, probably none of us consider ourselves "activists". We just shake our head and do our job.
"Consumer acceptance of novel food technologies" (17 June 2020) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-0094-x
When it extends to anti-vaccine disinformation, it is an active threat not only to public health but national security. Many of these types of disinformation are actively weaponized and spread by adversaries.
It is right to threat those kinds of threats to the society and nation as we would treat any physical threat -- actively work to neutralize it.
Just because war is moving out of the physical and into the information sphere, does not make it less serious.
It seems unwise to imagine oneself engaged in a war because it just licenses your opponent. The idea of war is that it the extension of policy, which in every other circumstance can be negotiated, but if instead of negotiating policy, these same people are engaged in a deception to exterminate or subordinate an opposition, that's not policy, that's just a power struggle for its own end, and it's not something to be reconciled.
If you want to treat fellow citizens as an enemy force, say so, and they will come to the table as one. But if you want to just decieve them, I'd wonder whether we were the baddies. We probably don't want to make civilian technologists legit targets in this war either.
Surely the people developing or advocating these techs are capable of enough self awareness to recognize how every example of "blatant disinformation," has an equivalent worthy of targeting, so introducing them as anything other than abstractions doesn't really yield perspective.
Dividing people is a bad idea because we have much more in common than is different between us. We should always try to be more inclusive and tone down the class wars and cancellations. We probably won't make any social progress while throwing stones into the opposing tribes instead of working together.
But you can't be inclusive of falsehoods, you can only open to legitimate concerns raised by the various groups, because any solution we find needs to be viable in the real world.
I don't trust revolutionaries - I've been burned before, and also read history. Revolutionaries, social warriors and activists love revolution more than peace itself. If we want to succeed we need to win the peace, not the war.
Conversely if one's opponent(s) considers themselves to be fighting a war and you don't, then you're placing yourself at a severe disadvantage. I'm not sure where you got he idea that the grandparent comment was proposing deception of one's fellow citizens, since it was bemoaning weaponized disinformation which is by definition deceptive.
The idea of war is that it the extension of policy
This is an idea of war that views it as a tool of leverage in interstate negotiations. But if there's evidence to suggest than opponent is using it for other purposes as you describe, then it would be foolish to ignore that.
Just because wrong information can become outgroup culture does not suddenly make the wrong information true.
Particularly when it stipulates world views that vilify whole other groups as allegedly being responsible for everything wrong.
The end result is not just a culture that might endorse violence against others, but something that could probably be described as a cargo cult where wrong information becomes dogmatic tradition.
Antisemitism has already taken such a shape, most if not all of the theories voiced by some modern outgroups are just reboots of allegations that are centuries old and have justified violence for just as long.
Case in point: The whole "elites abducting children to sacrifice them" theory, which regained popularity trough QAnon, is just a more modern take on the William of Norwich blood libel [0].
That has been around for close to a millennium because it's an idea that survives in certain religious outgroup cultures. Do we really have to tolerate the intolerance to be considered tolerant? Is there really no rough line that can be drawn?
Tolerance is meaningful when it is mostly unbearable, otherwise it's just preference. That idea is elaborated well in SSC's "I can tolerate anything but the outgroup." The relative truth of wrong information is a glass house I don't think advocates of censorship are intellectually equipped to defend. Their only tool is deception, and inevitably force, and the points we can score on them have no value.
The deeper controversy is whether on the internet we will accept a rules based order, or discretion. It's the old "rule of law vs. rule of men" issue. What has changed in the last 140 years or so is of course, total, instant globalization, with the internet, but more subtly, that the language used to reason about these things has itself become unmoored.
What I think we should all reflect on is how as individuals we can become a bit less enthusiasitically murderable to one another, before worrying about how we can change what others think. It's the one problem we can all make progress on.
One big step towards that is agreeing on a common conceptualization for the world and universe we live in.
If we can't even agree on such very measurable basics, like the Earth being a globe, what hope can we have on agreeing on anything that's meaningful to our everyday life or anything deeper philosophical?
I originally hoped the web would be the solution to this, a global medium for a global species to arrive at a global worldview, yet here we are, with increasingly more outgroups believing increasingly delusional/unrealistic worldviews.
It's weird that you fully expect that you, or someone else who agrees with you, will be in control of this.
The fact is that the earth is (nearly) round, contrails are not chemical sprays, Capricorn One was a C-grade movie while Apollo-11 went to the moon, and that anti-vax movement was started by a fraud attempting to discredit existing formulas to promote a formula in which the paper's author had a vested interest (and which paper was retracted, along with his MD and license) and that vaccines do work.
That is the point. A society cannot remain cohesive if there are no shared truths.
You may not want to take it seriously, but I'd suggest you consider the following quotes, and why and how disinformation can be weaponized.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” ― Isaac Asimov
"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.". ― Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
On this we agree. This truth needs to be on a scale of one, some, or all truths that are shared. Let's disqualify all, and simplfy to finding an example of one.
The other thing about the truth is that it probably shouldn't be falsifiable, as it's a bit of an all-in bet on whatever that is. It shouldn't be a complicated mystery because then you are back to the relative problem of who has discovered more and how do you know. The perfect example truth is the one that is not knowable either way, but something that can be believed.
We should probably recognize that destabilizing that example shared truth is an attack on social cohesion as well. Can't think of an example at the moment, but I certainly agree it would be the One Important Thing you would need to believe, or you're basically left with a kind of hellscape.
Now, I can understand wanting to combat vaccine hesitancy because that does tangibly affect society at-large (recent measles outbreaks). But most of the disinformation boogeymen you listed are just people with kooky ideas who aren't persuading society.
Lastly, it's okay to be wrong about things. The body of human knowledge is so vast that everyone is bound to be more wrong than right.
Mere ordinary wrongness is a big enough problem. And to the degree that it is mere cultural ignorance, it can be merely annoying.
But intentionally spreading disinformation, fear porn, and cultivating false outrage to inflame divisions in society is much more serious, and should not be conflated with mere buffoonery.
Mere ignorance is something we must unfortunately tolerate.
Active work to spread disinformation that will literally kill people - see [1] or just search for it, where a mere dozen people are responsible for 65% of the spread of disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines, and are working to deliberately undermine vaccination efforts.
This isn't mere ignorance, it will get people killed. And before you say something like "well the fools that believe that idiocy deserve what they get", consider that while they may (sort of their choice), the family, friends, neighbors, first responders, and healthcare workers do not deserve to be exposed unnecessarily to those biohazards.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/06/facebook-insta...
If you want to combat misinformation, pick a better solution. And as I said above, censorship is pretty much impossible, both legally and technologically. It simply cannot be done.
The ENTIRE POINT of the idea is to NOT censor anything, but to add context -- adding information, not censoring it. Letting people make their own decisions.
The problem here is that there is a massive asymmetry. This has been noticed for centuries with the maxim "A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes" (some interesting history on that at [1]).
This is because our brains are tuned to seek out novelty, and to seek out information on threats.
This enables those who want to manipulate us and especially the masses -- creating fake news and fear porn will get the attention of pretty much everyone, and anyone who is not both actively better informed at the time, and actively thinking, will be inflamed and motivated.
Voltaire pointed out that “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The people spreading disinformation treat that as an instruction instead of a warning.
Adding this kind of contextual information seems a far better solution than censoring.
You seemed to be arguing for censorship, which is what I was replying to.
I am absolutely not arguing for censorship, especially since censorship creates it's own blowback, which is often even more helpful to the disinformation.
I am merely arguing that disinformation needs to be fought, especially actively weaponized disinformation.
It looks like this contextualization could be a very good method.
Agree, it only becomes a conflict when both major parties are deliberately weaponizing disinformation.
I think other commenters have warned about this. It's fairly easy to tell what political allegiances you have. Just understand that your parties spread a lot of disinformation as well. As an independent, it makes me cringe to watch liberals act like they aren't responsible for loads of disinformation, hyperbole, fear mongering, and misinformation too. Much less that it doesn't have Russian origins.
Yes, RUS sources are the current major problem, as that 'govt' has been running an active measures campaign to undermine western democracies for close to two decades.
And those measures extend into both parties. They are specifically designed to maximize polarization, as polarization undermines democracy, and the assault on the truth makes everyone more malleable. People don't need to specifically buy into the dezinformatsiya (that's a mere bonus), the win is when people give up and say that the truth cannot be known, so disengage.
The fact is that one major party has fully bought into the active measures (and driven out those who don't go along), but the major wing of the other party is just as dependent on those measures, and that wing is also just as inclined towards authoritarianism if they get power.
The current fight is not between the parties, it is authoritarianism vs democracy.
Fighting dezinformatsiya is key to maintaining democracy and avoiding authoritarianism.
Warnings that we should wear masks were called fake news and anti-Chinese racism.
And every single person I know who is smug about how ignorant other people are for not getting vaccinated ignored warnings about COVID because it wasn't on a major social media platform or cable television.
Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.
If COVID had happened in 2014, it would have been much less of a problem because people would have been able to communicate with each other.
I wish I could say that people have learned from their mistakes.
If you were wrong then, isn't it possible you are wrong now?
In my world people were having early concerns about COVID in January. We were getting sporadic reports from China and it was bad. Experts were saying that it was only a matter of time till it got to the US and the worst part was that we didn’t have enough stockpiles of face masks for everybody. There was advice to save masks for medics and first responders until the supply situation improved.
People were already in a panic and buying up all of the toilet paper for some reason. Then in March the cases spiked and the lockdowns came.
If you were getting a lot of misinformation then maybe you should consider your sources. If someone was lying to you in 2020 they are probably still lying to you.
Every single person I know who needlessly wears a mask and loves showing off how smart they think they are denied that this was coming until it was far too late.
Pick a lane buddy.
It was, and here is an additional irony: In the beginning, downplaying COVID-19 with Chinese people (especially people from Wuhan) did not go over well and was not appreciated: "This is transparent pandering. I don't care how 'not-racist' you are towards me; my family members are dying and my city is in an apocalyptic lockdown so you can shut the fuck up about how this 'isn't serious'". Maybe said more politely, but definitely thought.
There are lessons here:
1. You should worry about the truth or falsehood of a belief rather than the assumed political consequences of that belief.
2. You should engage with people not to demonstrate to them that you hold "good beliefs" -- this is a persistent mistake made by white liberals; they think what they profess to believe is something that matters -- but rather to work together towards shared goals.
And, at the beginning of a global pandemic, there should have been a hell of a lot of shared goals.
If you had no idea who is filling what role, would you agree to the system proposed?
I like it ;) But it will probably never happen.
Probably not, if they are assured to remain your enemies. Wars have almost always been decided on technological capabilities alone, with a few counter-examples. You asked an interesting question, if only a bit narrow.
Going further, most technologies can be directly used for ill.
Is that culture and identity something the rest of the world can live with?
The idea that some people may believe that is central to some cultural identities. For example the Hasidic community, or the defense/military posture of Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsions_and_exoduses_of_Jew...
Being able to detect the tribal flavor of information so that you can filter it out is what got us into this mess in the first place because it indexed on creating outrage bubbles for clicks. Growth comes from opportunity, which usually comes from something being shitty, so militating and cleansing the world of badness isn't doing anyone any favors except consolidating the role of the cleaners.
When you ask the question, "whose contextualization engine?" and the whole premise falls apart, it becomes clear they have earned any mockery these engines are designed to sheild them from.