FoxHound56

It is not legally a free speech issue. Sure. But it is in fact very, very dangerous. The amount of power that huge tech companies such as Google and Facebook have over people these days is not very far off from the power a government has over people. If they are using that power to silence people they disagree with then that is extremely dangerous. Even if you happen to agree with them this time, you might not in the future. The fact that they are not a government is irrelevant to how dangerous these actions are, considering they have the power to silence millions of people. It is not in any meaningful way comparable to a restaurant owner showing you the door, considering the scale of these networks.

After looking at many fact checkers and the job they do, I could not disagree more.

People do not speak in simple statements that can be either scientifically "verified" or "not verified". When talking, people often use hyperbole. They speak in approximate numbers (e.g. 20% instead of 17%, simply because it sounds better). Not to mention people often talk about socially complex subjects that cannot be, in ANY way, verified as simply "true" or "false" without interjecting the fact checkers own personal opinion into the mix.

Fact checkers have tried to solve these issues by having "truthiness" ratings. For example, Politifact has the ratings "True, Mostly True, Mostly False, False, Pants on Fire". However, this is obviously a scale that has no objective meaning. As a result, these ratings are applied inconsistently and with a heavy bias towards the fact-checkers own agenda (which, for Politifact, is heavily left-leaning).

How do you objectively decide whether a hyperbole is true or not? How do you objectively decide that numbers are too far off the actual scientific numbers? What rounding is too much? How do you objectively decide the truth of complex social issues and statements, and what data do you trust for determining these "objectively true answers"?

The answer is you can't, and you don't.