If there were any real trustworthy fact-checking web sites, this study would mean a lot more, but there's a LOT of obvious bias on any of the fact-checking sites. That's not to say that nothing is objectively false (or true), but just to say that it's been "fact-checked" doesn't tell anybody which it is.

Liars adapt. Whatever becomes the popular method of checking the truth, they will create their own version of that tool.

There is a similar arms race in science: Charlatans use scientifically sounding language. So you tell people "to be real science, it needs to be published in a scientific journal". Then the charlatans create their own journals. So you tell people "to be real science, it needs to be supported by a meta-analysis". Then the charlanatans create their own meta-analysis. Etc.

It always takes some time to adapt, but if you tell people e.g. "always verify political statements at fact-checking websites", as soon as your idea becomes popular, politicians will create their own "fact-checking" websites. (Or take over the existing ones, whichever is easier.)

I have some heuristics that I use for myself to determine what information I trust... but if they became public and popular, it would be quite easy to subvert them.

Could you point to some examples? Most of the claims of bias I've seen have seemed to come from a person whose position isn't supported by reality, so it becomes easier to deny it and claim bias. But I haven't made a study of it and would love some counter examples.

Take the local one here, faktisk.no:

They'll do real fact checks, but are very selective on what to fact check.

So a journalist from the state broadcasting service states on TV that "these soldiers will shoot at anything that moves".

She says that about what is known by everyone who has a clue to be some of the more restricive and professional soldiers that exist.

Will it be fact checked if I submit it?

No. I tried.

They'd rather publish a bunch of factual but funny and trivial fact checks than pointing out that a mainstream reporter is - at least in my opinion - lying through her teeth to make people hate a certain small nation.

You might take a look at this one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/unemployment-low-trump/

The claim is that Trump got unemployment to a 50 year low. Snopes rules it "Mostly False".

The problem I have with that is that unemployment really was at a 50-year low. Snopes just wanted to deny Trump any credit for it so they throw up a lot of dust and smoke about whether the president deserves credit for it.

Compare that with this one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-created-more-jobs-tr...

In this case, the claim is that Obama created more jobs than Trump during adjacent 3-year periods. Snopes rules it true, full stop. They don't throw in any caveats about whether the president should get credit.

Whether a sitting president deserves credit for economic conditions is always a debatable point. Politicians will just hold whatever position is convenient for them and partisans will line up on their respective sides. I can't help but notice that Snopes lines up pretty predictably on one side of any political issue.

Here's a well-known one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/joe-biden-no-empathy/

You'd have to be pretty biased to call a literal quote unchanged by context a "mixture" of truth.

I'm at a loss. The claim is clearly "Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden once said he had "no empathy" for the plight of younger people." If you read that broadly, like in the sense that any normal person would read it the first time they come across it, it reads as if Biden made some sort of blanket statement applying to all plights of all younger people, period. Like he's basically admitting to be a sociopath against younger people. I mean... that's clearly not what he said or meant.

> The claim is clearly "Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden once said he had "no empathy" for the plight of younger people."

That's not the claim. That's an editorialized take about the claim, altered from the original and stated just-so (so it that contains a weakpoint, which you are now litigating—because that's what the weakpoint was crafted to enable); the "plight of younger people" comes from the editorial purporting to debunk it, not the source tweet.

The closest thing to a claim in the source tweet is that the original words were spoken and the person who said it is the one who was speaking.

How about this one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/clinton-body-bags/

There’s nothing factually wrong with that article at all, but the entire article is loaded full of opinion and unnecessary adjectives. If someone posted that to Wikipedia they would get rejected for “lacks encyclopedic tone”.

And why does it matter? because if I try forwarding this to anyone who actually believes or sort-of-believes in the Clinton conspiracy theories, the first message they get from reading it is “I’m a democrat and I think this is the stupidest of stupid conspiracy theories and you’d have to be stupid to entertain it” and then they dismiss the whole article before they ever make it down to the useful case-by-case analysis.

If a fact checking website wants to be taken seriously by both sides, they need to refrain from attacking the people they are arguing against.

Here's one: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pelosi-healthcare-pass-the...

For a democracy to work you need a basis of shared facts with opinions on top that need decision. In the later years we have seen a movement to erode this basis of democracy to make discussions on top of the basis of facts impossible and replace it with tribalist attacks against each other.

Preventing fake news and fact checking is not about attacking sound political opinions, but about making them possible.

I agree with you up to the point where "consensus" becomes a replacement for "verifiable fact", which is usually the next step in this chain.

There are also some things that need to be consensus without being fact-based, for instance that we want to live in a democracy.

Not everyone does want to live in a democracy. I may disagree with them, but I'd like them to have the same ability to discuss their ideas as I do. Including advocacy up to the point of civic disruption, if not necessarily violence.

> For a democracy to work you need a basis of shared facts

This is an Achilles' Heel which is unfortunately now well known by the enemies of democracy. An article from last year[0] highlighted this quite well:

> The Kremlin specialises in offering alternative “narratives”: about who poisoned Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, for example. The goal is to confuse the public and to spread the idea that the truth is unknowable. It’s a form of epistemological warfare.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2020/jul/12/covering-...

Please stop peddling this post-truth bullshit. No one is "deciding which politics is wrong", they're talking about people spreading things that are verifiably false.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."

"Eschew flamebait."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Of course there's truth and falsehood, but the fact checking is hardly 100%.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3gy_CLXho

Or you can read, e.g. Snopes' explanation that being convicted of making bombs to blow up a government building doesn't make one a "convicted terrorist" because there's no such crime as "terrorism."

I don't know what the relevance of the Maher clip is. I stopped watching after a couple minutes, but all I saw was about how Democrats have false beliefs about COVID. I don't see what this has to do with fact checking.

If you're referring to this Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/), the "mixed" ruling seems perfectly reasonable. Saying someone is a "convicted terrorist" is a fuzzy claim, because there is no such charge one can be convicted of. It's not like "convicted murderer".

Claiming that it's mixed because there's no such charge is avoiding the question, which is "if a normal person reads this, would he get an accurate impression of what happened?" If someone is convicted of a crime which an ordinary person would look at and say 'that's terrorism', then it's true or mostly true. The fact that there isn't literally a definition of "convicted of terrorism" should at most change "true" into "mostly true".

That's how fact checking sites usually introduce bias--they don't actually lie about literal facts, they just have shifting standards about when things need to be absolutely literally true, when they can give false impressions, and what counts as "mostly" when something is mostly true or false or mixed.

> I don't see what this has to do with fact checking.

It's weird that the group that is getting the most dangerous misinformation about Covid has a better idea of the risks of it. And this is one area in which fact checking has been prominent and possibly over-zealous. It can shut down conversations too quickly instead of letting people come to understanding.

I think it's at least partially because it's hard to advocate for a middle-of-the-road position, each side thinks you're an undercover partisan for the other. So it's hard to advocate for something like quit complaining about masks, they're not that great but they are helping, vaccines work and you should get them unless you have medical issues, but they're not 100%, some lockdowns probably cause more harm than help, some of the rules are either nonsense or enforced in silly ways that have nothing to do with Covid risk, and the virus is dangerous but the risk isn't evenly distributed across all populations, and even if it's not a big risk to you personally, you're being a real jerk if you go out a lot and help unknowingly spread it.

For the latter point, bombing government buildings is a central example of terrorism and nobody thinks there's a crime of "terrorism" when they hear "convicted terrorist." By the same standard, Snopes would have to say that the 9-11 hijackers were not terrorists. The slipperiness of the word is entirely a matter of people who want it to be about the goodness or badness of the person instead of achieving political goals by initiating violence.

I'd agree that the fact-checking infrastructure is not well-adapted for COVID, or any kind of rapidly developing situation where the facts are not entirely clear.

As for Rosenberg, you're focusing on the terrorism and ignoring the convicted. She was not convicted of terrorism, or even of bombing buildings, but of explosives possession. The word "convicted" has to mean something. I believe that O.J. Simpson is a murderer, but calling him a "convicted murderer" would be false. If the claim was "convicted of felonies due to her involvement with a terrorist organization", there would be a much better case for "true."

Snopes is the one choosing which version of the claim to fact-check, though, so choosing that version to downplay the whole "helped bomb a government building" thing is not very reasonable here, just like the choice of saying that "convicted terrorist" can only mean "convicted of a crime called terrorism that does not exist" instead of the meaning most people would use which is being "convicted of a crime that involved bombing government buildings, which is a central example of 'terrorism'".

They are fact checking the particular claim that went viral on twitter. Nuance doesn't go viral. If you care about the veracity of the claim, presumably you will read the extensive explanation of the 'mixed' rating and form your own conclusions. That's why it's 'mixed' and not 'false.' You can't just go to Snopes and say "oh snopes says it's false" in this case.

p.s. the crimes she was convicted of did not include bombing government buildings, that part of the tweet is strictly false.

See, a normal person would look at this and say the bombing was the important thing, not the minutea.

They could very well have picked a different tweet, it's not like they're forced to pick this and only this tweet.

Both weakman and motte and baileys are old rhetorical tricks, they're not very convincing.

So now you're saying that the tweet Snopes responded to may not be unequivocally true, but there is some other tweet that was circulating about Rosenberg at the same time, circulating at least as widely as this one, that is unequivocally true?

In the absence of evidence for such a tweet, why should I consider the Snopes fact check a 'weakman'?

As for minutiae, that's the whole point of fact checking, to care about minutiae and not whether a statement just generally feels right. It's not about whether Rosenberg is or was a good person, it's about whether the specific claim made about her was unequivocally true.

I just want to thank you for showing how effective this sort of propaganda is. A weakman is whenever you pick an easy claim to rebut instead of the harder one, it has nothing to do with your made up rules about what should or should not be fact-checked that seeks to minimize their agency, despite no evidence of them following such a rule in the first place. And the comment down thread just points out how that 'rule' you made up doesn't even apply to begin with.

So why should anyone attempt to prove that Snopes is following this rule when I have yet to see any evidence that this is, in fact, how Snopes operates, when even if we assume it is their standard, they don't appear to be following it very consistently?

That's a very odd burden of proof--asking me to prove that they follow a rule you just made up--don't you think?

The function of Snopes is to address rumors that are flying around the Internet (originally via chain emails, now via Twitter/Facebook), not to address every claim anyone has ever made about something. I didn't make that up, it's right on the Snopes site: "...we fact-check whatever items the greatest number of readers are asking about or searching for at any given time" (https://www.snopes.com/faq/decide-fact-check)

If the claim that was flying around the Internet at the time was that Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist, that's the appropriate one to address.

I certainly don't claim that Snopes is perfect, or that their choices never exhibit political bias or bad judgment. But I think this case is an odd one to pick as the key evidence that Snopes is untrustworthy.

The problem is that this is transparent bias. They may claim to adhere to that, yet it's clear in other cases that they've picked far more obscure Tweets instead of the viral ones.

This is intentional manipulation, they already know that most people read headlines (which are frequently the least accurate part of any story) and ratings fill a similar role.

Worse, they'll later compile the ratings into statistics and spread the misrepresentations further, all while claiming that technically in paragraph 7 they did admit the thing, which is why that's called a motte and bailey strategy.

Oh yeah, choosing what to fact-check is a really powerful tool. For example, I remember a Snopes fact check going hugely viral a while back as proof that the reason people believed that antifa is violent was because of right-wing lies. The thing is, that fact check had to cherry-pick an obscure tweet with only a few hundred retweets - something Snopes wouldn't normally bother touching at all - because all the more widely viewed tweets about the exact same incident posted and spread by people with more reach didn't make the same error and matched what Snopes claimed the truth was. By choosing what to fact check in a misleading way, Snopes had actually helped seed viral misinformation on social media far more widespread than what they were debunking.

If you indirectly contribute to terrorizing people based on race because you provide aid and comfort to a racist, are you a terrorist?

Could you please not post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think in that case the person is a racist. I find the label and term terrorism extremely troubling as it always can be spun as "what is a terrorist in one group might be the freedom fighter to the other"

the label terrorism is usually only successful in the most homogenos and brainwashed cultures, where all complexity and nuance is stripped away. it's great for propaganda or when you need to criminalize a whole society of people.

Saying that "fact-checking" websites are often crap isn't the same as saying there's no such thing as true and false. And have you read the paper? If you haven't, what are you spreading?

Asking “who fact checks the fact checkers” is not post-truth bullshit.

That is pretty reasonable thing. In science we do peer review. So why not in fact checking? Not that peer review process isn't corrupted in many ways, but still it is there.

Not that I think similar process was possible in fact checking...

I disagree with your assessment. "Verifiably false" typically means "Corporate media says it's false."

Media on all sides cannot be trusted. You're being downvoted by people that trust media.

Everyone who tells you something had a reason to do so. If it wasn't "you paid them", then its a good bet someone else did. Even when you paid them to tell you the truth, you have to assess what they mean by "truth" and how honest their effort to deliver it was.

If a doctor says "take this pill," do you huck it down or look it up and see if its something you actually wanted to eat?

People trust "authority" too much.