This is where the distinction between fact and opinion is important.

Whether a person was convicted of a specific crime is a fact. It's true or false. People can disagree about whether the trial was fair, the law was just, etc... but there is an objective truth as to whether the conviction occurred or it did not.

The Snopes article lists the crimes Rosenberg was convicted of, which do not include "terrorism" or anything equivalent to that. She was convicted of multiple offenses involving weapons possession and identity fraud. The article goes on to list numerous other offenses involving a prison break, several armed robberies, and planting bombs for which she was charged, but not tried or convicted. It is therefore correct to say that she is not a convicted terrorist.

The article provides more than enough background for a reader to form the opinion that her activities constituted terrorism, and indeed that is my opinion.

The problem is that fact checkers doesn't have the same standards for every side. If this was about some right wing group that had a member with such a background in a leadership position they would absolutely have marked it as "true, this person is definitely a terrorist, just look at all this evidence!".

Can you provide a pair of examples in which Snopes, Politifact, or a similar mainstream US-based fact checker used clearly different standards for what constitutes a question of fact based on the political orientation of the subject?

They wouldn't even write an article about anything like this if it was the other side. She did work directly with convicted terrorists, she was charged with terrorism but that charge was dropped as a plea deal with those convicted, she was convicted with helping those terrorists. And if they wrote one article because it became a big deal they wouldn't have picked the "convicted terrorist" phrase to fact check, rather they would have fact checked "was X a terrorist" or similar and it would have gotten a clear yes, everything points towards this person was a terrorist.

Choosing what statements or what formulations of statements to fact check is also a part of the bias. People just read the headline, if they read "fact check, X was not a 'convicted terrorist'", they will read that as "X was not a terrorist", the fact checkers knows this and uses that to their advantage when picking the sentence to check and the verdict that will follow.

Snopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak [1][2]. Politifact literally retracted their claims on calling lab leak a conspiracy theory [3]. Reality is all these mainstream media is trying to control the narrative with rhetorical tricks.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/

[2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/

[3] https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/

And at the end of the day, the underlying issue is the intent of sharing this info on social media in the first place. Susan Rosenberg's position as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents is intended to imply that BLM itself is a terrorist organization. No amount of fact checking is going to help in this scenario.

This. Many other organizations are similar degrees of separation from individuals who could plausibly be labelled as terrorists or similar, but I doubt many of the people furious at labelling this claim as "mixed" would demand fact checkers also rate such articles as wholly true if the subject of the headline was an individual closely linked to, say, the Republican party, Fox News or the NRA. And yes, if you want to believe that BLM is a terrorist organisation then the Snopes article provides enough accurate detail about the bad stuff Rosenberg did for you not to change your mind, just as any self respecting fact checker has to acknowledge that however dubious certain insinuations might be, Oliver North et al exist.

I don't think "serves on the board of" counts as a degree of separation.

"Serves on the board of an organisation that provides funding and administrative support to" sounds like a degree of separation. Unless you were talking about Oliver North...

Him too

In the spirit of the discussion.... just as a screen tap counts as a 'zero-length' swipe, serving on the board of directors is a zero-degree separation. But it is still a degree of separation. /s

I could be wrong here, but “Thousand Currents” does not seem to be an alias for “BLM.”

>No amount of fact checking is going to help in this scenario.

Sure it will. You can flag it as false, and make sure nobody can see the posts.

>"to imply that BLM itself is a terrorist organization. No amount of fact checking is going to help in this scenario."

It seems to me the answer to this dilemma is to replace her on the board of directors. Scores of other CEO's and board members have been dismissed or asked to resign over far less. I'm no PR expert, but her background and connections are certainly eyebrow raising, despite all the attempts to hand-waive or dismiss them. Surely they have a large pool of talent from which to draw a replacement with a less problematic history?

> Susan Rosenberg's position as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents is intended to imply that BLM itself is a terrorist organization.

Or, much more reasonably, that it is an organization unconcerned with violence affecting innocent people.

I'm surprised they put mixture when a simple no would suffice.

There is no conviction of terrorism on her criminal record

The people who destroyed the WTC on 9/11 died in the act. There was no trial that would convict them posthumously of terrorism, given that we do not judge the dead (well, not anymore: it used to be a thing, see [1]). So, their criminal records are clear of terrorism convictions.

Does that mean that I will be labeled as a spreader of fake news if I call Mohamed Atta [2] a terrorist?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Atta

But there are plenty of people who are widely believed to have committed terrorist acts without being convicted... Wouldn't you call those people terrorists?

What about pejorative adjectives describing conduct that isn't actually illegal, such as shouting at restaurant wait staff over perceived mistakes? Am I allowed to call that person a "jerk"?

It would be plainly ridiculous to insist that we can only apply adjectives upon conviction by a criminal court. That's not how adjectives work.

>"a simple no would suffice. ..There is no conviction of terrorism on her criminal record"

Can you see why people object to this kind of legalistic thinking? If you follow the reasoning that only a conviction of terrorism qualifies one as a terrorist, what implications follow from that?

The point is that only a conviction of terroism qualifies one as a convicted terrorist. Just like only a conviction of murder qualifies one as a convicted murderer. If someone killed someone else, was convicted of manslaughter, but you personally think it was murder, you might feel justified in calling them a murderer. But it would make no sense for you to call them a "convicted murderer."

At which point, I would say we have successfully deflected off of the word "terrorist" and allowed ourselves to get stuck in in the non-impactful rut of fixating on "convicted".

Which circles back to my original point that the fact-checkers often resort to manipulating language in order to arrive at the verdicts they present. I find this kind of misdirection incredibly dishonest - both intellectually and ethically.

I couldn't really disagree more. Convicted is the key point here. Anyone can throw around the word 'terrorist' to describe someone, but conviction is a concrete fact about the legal system. The people calling this woman a "convicted terrorist" are leaning on the convicted. Without it their claim would feel much less weighty.

e.g. lots of people have called Kyle Rittenhouse a 'terrorist'. Say he had been convicted on one of the charges against him - would it be fair to call him a 'convicted terrorist' just because some people feel he is a terrorist, and he was convicted of something? Clearly not.

"Rosenberg is a convicted criminal who planned terrorist acts" is a far more defensible claim, so why not just say that?

By your definition, no successful suicide bomber would ever be a terrorist, because the dead do not go to trials.

Of course they would, they just wouldn't be a convicted terrorist.

Osama B.L. and I both belong to the same category of "not a convicted terrorist", yet that fact seems quite misleading.

I don't see how it would be misleading. Despite various indictments, AFAIK bin Laden was never convicted of anything. There are many categories you share with him, e.g. "people who didn't live in the seventeenth century" and "people who have never been in my kitchen."

In your view, do adjectives not matter for facticity, only nouns? Could we fairly call Osama bin Laden a Russian terrorist or a female terrorist?

Yes, this is one of the most shameless examples of "fact-checkers" being partisan flak-catchers

During the presidential debate, Trump was talking about how wind mills kill "all the birds", indicating that there are in fact downsides to wind power.

All the "fact checkers" were brought in to discuss how there are other, larger threats to birds, like cats and buildings etc.

Clearly this wasn't a "truth finding fact check", but more of a "don't let Trump score any points" fact check.

"In short, "fact checkers" don't actually understand the definition of what a fact is, but are quick to declare them, and this is contrary to my experience of real, actual truth."

Fact checkers know exactly what a fact is rather they don't like people to know the truth, they instead want to push information that benefits them in some way.