I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians.
Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff.
The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in the media churning BS articles is the people who works in the fact checkers, and most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu.
The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table.
This specially evident when they talk about something you really know about.
Of course, because fact-checkers happen to be lefty because of the, let's call, overton-window cycle, then the left choses to ignore this problems and just says it's the right-wingers that chose to ignore facts and yadda yadda.
While this is going on, right-wing, and many times right-wing extremist views, become the new punk and many yougsters are flocking to provide new blood to said ideologies.
> but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style.
It's the same thing in Romania, they strongly monitor and criticise those politicians and public figures who are not europhiles while pretty much ignoring those politicians who are for stronger EU integration and for more power for international institutions and their viewpoints inside of Romania.
Yes, political censorship is often called "fact checking". Facebook invented nothing new, and the sin is them trying to convince us otherwise. The increased censorship has been demanded by the Democrats, and Facebook is obeying.
I'm French, live in China, so familiar from both countries with what you say.
But I think I disagree a bit with your annoyance with agenda setting and journalist incestuous relationship with ideology or politics.
Look I dont know how you're taught in Spain but in France we gave up neutral journalism centuries ago. Each newspaper is clearly categorized and we learn as children, around 7 IIRC all the links (le monde socialist, le figaro gaulist trending christian, l'humanité communist, and so on and there are many more subtle variations too French to list here) and learn to read them all, sometimes with clenched fist, but no truth has ever been reveled by a single perspective: embrace the chaos and join perspective to build a multi facet view.
It's something I despair to see in China where politicians, journalist and the mass try to identify a pure source of truth. But no communist think like another, so even their way will never work.
Let them all fight, balance out the arguments, take a decision in the voting booth and stop dreaming of a universal truth given to you from greater mind: even a genius in his lab building a life saving cure will forget to listen to the victims of the sacrifices he requires for the greater good, and that voice must be heard too.
Fight for MORE ideology and agenda in media in exchange for editorial transparency about it, so you're clear who they propose you to vote for when they present an argument, and you'll be free. Any other way, and it goes with fact checking semi anonymous facebook crap, is doomed to muddy this clarity. That s what facebook must do: what is the political party or alignment behind each piece, and you're done (or almost: also need to learn to read and understand all perspectives, the hardest part in the US it seems).
Being aware of biases is difficult in an attention-starved society, where specific opinions and confirmation biased news reports are pumped to social media with a Denial-of-Service-like frequency. Tribes have formed. We've gotten to a highly polarized society where every answer begins with "But they...". The most hardcore partisans I know follow and share news to essentially keep up with and mock what "They" are up to.
I particularly avoid discussing politics with family and friends. I've started to tell my family and friends that there is no "They". There are only individuals. I'm also fairly convinced that roughly 5% of the population is insane, although the more political you become, you start to believe that number is closer to 50%.
- Nuanced opinions and good information is rarely free, be it in monetary terms, be it in the invested time, relationships, etc. Thus, if you're not planning to give up most of your time for any topic, you better find good proxies. And currently the press provides more noise than signal. This is problematic.
- If you know anything about Spain is that it's basically Game of Thrones made a country. There's so much internal conflict that it even gets translated INSIDE of the newspapers and TV. You can't take any editorial line for granted, because it's more tied to a group of people seeking power than any background ideology or anything similar. So your balance different views style it's not really that practical in Spain.
In fact I can tell you about an Issue where I'm invested that it's awful across the board: Housing policy.
I agree in principle but you're missing a small point: journalists are not proxies to the truth, they are proxies to a perspective.
You should NEVER read an article to learn about an absolute reality, but to understand the arguments on a complex issue by a small group of stakeholders, by no mean guardians of reality interpretation.
If you accept that sad fact of life, that we cant know who's right on anything not spawned directly from physical reality (and even then...), then you can embrace journalistic diversity and read several.
I can give you an example close to me in China: there is a debate to have on Tiananmen: the reaction by the communist was certainly aggressive, but there are nuances. The movement failed to accept several compromises because it grew so big nobody could be delegated to represent it officially and they got stuck on successive waves of negociation that could have ended with progress. The army itself struggled and had to recall a first wave who fraternized with the movement to then lie to a second wave who thought they were crushing a rebellion they misunderstood, which probably made the massacre more violent than it could have been. I think the communists were trapped just as much as the movement into an impasse that led to a massacre they didnt enjoy having to commit. They're not evil per se in that regard: they could not see at the time any alternative.
That's my perspective, it's probably hard to read, but I built this complex opinion by reading beyond my comfort zone. I could be wrong and must continue to listen, but you see how this probably cant appear if you just read one side ? And where China is wrong imo is they refuse to discuss it openly in those terms. If a French immigrant raised in the fear of communism can accept to tolerate their side, what are they so scared of ? Throw perspectives at people and they ll figure someth out.
> You can't take any editorial line for granted, because it's more tied to a group of people seeking power than any background ideology or anything similar.
I don't mean to misrepresent the parent's argument, but I think they would demand the same solution of editorial transparency towards the groups of people seeking power you mention. That said, I might be coming from a place of ignorance here.
That would be a hard thing to achieve, given that we are talking about unnamed, unidentifiable groups.
What GP meant about Spain being similar to GoT, is that there’s a lot of shifting alliances and moving pieces in the background.
You might think channel A has ties to party B, and thus you can asume that they are softening the blow if they’re reporting bad news about B, but Spain has more than two parties (for now), and maybe channel A is actually exaggerating because it would put party C in a good position to sway votes from the opposition while not taking votes from yourself.
As an US equivalent if a third political party had a 10-15% of the votes, you’d see Fox reporting in a way that tried to sway democrats to the third party.
Since in Spain the way seats in congress are allocated benefits parties with bigger percentages, this strategy is possible.
It's even worse than that. Groups inside the National Police do conspire against each other (I think there may be at least three of them) + Center of National Intelligence.
The same happens in the IRS Equivalent, and other institutions, like autonomous comminites (~ US States).
I mean, I'm talking about real plots here, like managing media influence, trying to put people in jail, and all the ingredients for a Netflix series.
It's basically impossible to keep track of it, even for a politics nerd like me.
In France we mean by that that all newspaper have a public well accepted stance on the political spectrum, with candidates they push without hiding and ideologies they maintain.
As long as their leaders and famous journalists are clear they're a perspective and not "the truth", I m fine with the communists fighting the nationalists in their respective newspapers even if I disagree with what I read. At least I know what and why they think these things and I can sometimes accept an argument if only to build an iterative counter argument myself.
The difference I saw with facebook even in France, is that it's all blurred. I cant cross the Figaro with the Monde to figure two of the sides of an issue, now I receive some neutral looking information with a vague source. It struck me when a colleague started repeating an horrendous story and we investigated together to realize she was sourcing it from a facebook post by our "the onion" equivalent !!! She couldnt see the source because it's too blurry in between her grandma rants and some cnn-style generic information.
It doesnt change that in the US I see with worry that even when lines are clear, the debate is heated. Also because there's no spectrum but just two solutions to any issue: democrat and republican. What was hailed as a miracle in democracy (just 2 fuzzy groups of dispationate interest) is starting to look like a weakness (to the death identity conflicts pushed by their respective extremes) while with 13 parties in elections in France, you can express nuances.
> even a genius in his lab building a life saving cure will forget to listen to the victims of the sacrifices he requires for the greater good
As a nerd in a building trying to build things to save lives from disease (“cure” is too strong a word), there are explicit ethics reviews my work has to go through, with an almost bizarre frequency, so I disagree with this statement specifically. Otherwise, I enjoyed your comment.
For us to grow beyond entrenched binaries takes self awareness. Could you perhaps see how another doctor who hs caused harm before may have believed they were truly only doing good - and this could have been enabled by them being barraged with ethics reviews?
"What do you mean i caused harm i have to do all these things to prove that i dont do harm"
Meanwhile history shows clearly the sacrifices that were taken.
I love what you wrote here, a well written and fascinating take!
One thing though, do french people actually read several different newspapers on different sides? My preconceived notion is that they still just pick one to get their main source of news, even though they might be aware of the others.
And a second thought. If we can agree that there is sometimes truth to be found in what happened, what convinces you that summing up falsehoods from the left and falsehoods from the right will equate to the truth? (I've heard from some people that they "read all sides" but I haven't noticed their perspective being better in any obvious ways)
For example: vaccines don't have side effects, don't worry about it, and we need to get everyone vaccinated so we should force them (left) VS vaccines are alright but seems like they're dangerous and fuck the government so they shouldn't force people to do that (right).
The sum of the two doesn't really teach you the truth, but highlights the direct contradictions while giving you the impression that you have to pick one side of another (the US is super bipartisan, not like France which at least has several different parties with different opinions).
The truth here is: vaccines reduce likelihood of bad symptoms, gestation time and viral load, which in turn reduces chances of spreading and therefore chance of mutation which is a feared unknown (hello Omicron), some vaccines do seem to cause issues with younger folks (20-29 years old can get myocarditis) so we should be careful, but all in all, we don't have a better way to fix this situation than getting a lot of folks vaccinated.
It's one thing to embrace diversity of opinion. However recently in the USA some right wing outlets have become nothing short of 50% straight lies and right-wing propaganda mixed in with some small amount of truthful reporting. See Newsmax or OANN which are mostly lies and Fox which is a strange mix of normal news and "opinion news" that often also full of lies but not as often as the others.
So what? Honestly, I don't understand the direction of your point.
Is it Don't have opinion diversity? Control what people hear and believe? Don't allow (what you consider to be) lies? There are so many responses to each of these.
I would argue that hyper partisan outlets like Fox which don't even care to try to be truthful has exacerbated tribal nature of US politics and reduced its ability to actually have any meaningful competition of ideas. Sure, having a perspective or ideology is fine but I think out and out lying should have consequences. I think you need a regulator preventing misinformation. Beyond that, having a point of view - which you can back up with reasonable argument - is to be desired.
Who would be the regulator? How would the regulator be chosen? How would information be determined to be misinformation? When something truthful is named misinformation, what happens? When a political group accuses this regulator of suppression, what then? When your political opposition gains control of the regulator, what then? How would this regulator also comply with the US Constitution, particular its free speech guarantees?
And now you are coming to the understanding that the first amendment is being weaponized against us. They're hacking our minds through emotions (especially anger) and imagery to further their funders corporate goals. I see no solution but having some regulation. They can be sued in the legal system for defamation, why not start with that as the bare minimum of conduct when reporting the news?
I actually like this idea of a status quo; but it depends on teaching children this from birth. In the US, I was taught that NYT and CNN are reputable and reliable sources of the truth. As an adult, I find them "pretty good" at best.
> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu.
Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which I understand may in some ways be your larger point) and consumers of journalism today. Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus. I don’t believe it is fair to say this doesn’t require expertise.
> Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing.
And yet I think it’s pretty obvious journalism is not about truth anymore. Gawker might be dead, but the Gawker style of “journalism” is well alive.
You don’t even need to dig that deep to see something is rotten, the two biggest news channels in the US spend the day saying the opposite of one another.
I don’t disagree with this. I even like the way you put journalism in quotation marks. I (and apparently their legal representatives in many cases) consider those news stations you mentioned to be more entertainment than journalism. Put another way, the point of my original comment was that good journalists make mistakes too, but that shouldn’t mean anyone can be a journalist or there is no expertise required to do so. It should mean the opposite. What I’m beginning to take away from this and some of my other replies is that it’s become practically impossible to tell the good, bad, and poser journalists apart. I just don’t want that to mean that we devalue journalism as a whole.
> This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism
It's right in line with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[1].
> Journalism should be about creating an objective conduit for civic impetus.
This is a jump from objecting to "is" statements to making an "ought" statement. It also seems to most likely be promoting what I've heard called "advocacy journalism", which I have the impression is a good chunk of why trust in the news is down.
In the US, there was a brief period when real fact-checking existed. Then the political activists saw that the regular press had lost all credibility, but the fact-checking brand still retained some, so they made a hard push to take them over. Which by the time of covid has been already mostly complete, and with the push to fight "medical misinformation" (which was quickly defined as any information that contradicts the currently approved doctrine, no matter how scientifically based, factually correct or practically useful) "fact-checking" has been completely subverted to serve the preferred narrative and suppress any heretical thought.
> The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table.
I am sad to note that the situation in the US is exactly the same. Though the majority of "fact-checkers" and all major social networks are on single side of the said wars.
Thing is, if the idea is to stop wrong conspiracy theories from veing talked about, it makes sense to ban legitimate science that points in the direction of the conspiracy.
If you want to do propaganda, then misinformation is useful. But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder.
Especially with covid it seems like social media has decided to counter propaganda rather than misinformation. I can see why, but I think it is wrong. Especially if the argument is 'this is false'.
To me, this shows once again that content moderation against misinformation does not fit with private parties.
> But even using only good-faith articles as sources, you can still make your propaganda, it will just be harder.
That's what, at their best, most of the media are doing. Presenting well-researched, balanced, truthful stories, carefully selected to promote their own ideology. Forget journalism - this even happens in peer-reviewed science:
Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
Using an article critical of the pfizer trials in a well balanced truthful way is one thing.
Using that same article to argue that e.g. the government is trying to poison us (or microchip us) is another thing entirely.
I think we need to work against the latter. I don't think censoring good-faith articles that are often abused is the way to do that.
There is a serious flaw in the way schools teach people about propaganda, that leaves people believing that propaganda is synonymous with lying, and if a claim is factual then it isn't propaganda. Propaganda is any communication that is calculated to further an agenda. Propaganda uses truth, lies, everything in-between, and everything else (claims that don't lay on the truth-lie continuum at all; e.g. subjective values.)
That definition would forbid any kind of "call to action" communication, would it?
Debates are all and good, but at some point, a decision has to be reached. Especially for a problem like the current pandemic, this unfortunately involves calls for every individual to radically change their behaviour. That fits the definition of "agenda" pretty well.
So if any "any communication that is calculated to further an agenda" is forbidden, how would you fight the pandemic?
Remember the lab leak conspiracy theory, that got people banned on the spot? Every fact checker would tell you there's no scientific basis for it, every scientist worth of their name is opposing to it and it's a complete fabrication spread around by conspiracy nuts. Except it turned out not only it is not so, but people who said it knew it wasn't so and were lying because of vested interests, which they failed to disclose and hoped to keep hidden, but "conspiracy nuts" revealed it and the house of cards collapsed. For example:
Note they didn't say with scientific humility "we do not know if that scenario actually happened, more data is needed, it's too early to make the conclusion". They say "it's ridiculous and debunked" and rate it "pants on fire" (i.e. an obvious outrageous lie). They act as if they are the ultimate authority with absolute knowledge of the facts and expertise to make such calls - while they don't have neither the facts nor the expertise. And this happens again and again.
I read the entire link you posted.
The conclusion presented lacks nuance. But other than that I see no issue with that debunking. Even drawing that conclusion is understandable at the time it was initially published. But I agree, the conclusion was too categoric for the nuance presented in the rest of the article. They even mention that a leak is a possibility being investigated. Now, since that possibility has more standing, they even retracted the article. They did not delete it, they uptated it with a notice at the very top and it is there for everyone to read.
Remember that the ones spreading this theory before any evidence of any kind, were very much pushing a biowarfare angle. They still are but now they are more diluted ammong the larger group supporting a lab leak theory.
The conspiracy theories these people were pushing as a lab release had themes of gerontocide, eugenics, mind control by 5G, microchipping, general anti-vaxx beliefs most blaming Bill Gates as a sort of Bond villain.
All of these are still being pushed.
Do we have more plausible sources an accident happened? Yes.
Was it reasonable to blame China for biowarfare against the whole world including itself, or to accuse Bill Gates for planning to exterminate half the population? No.
Fully agree that Snopes comes off very much in her support here - however, at least they still seem to do their job and describe her actual actions in due detail in the article - even if this leads to a completely ridiculous outcome ("Can bombing a government building really be called terrorism? Hmm, difficult to say...")
This seems better than the OP's fact checker, which just presents the story as "fully debunked" without actually doing so.
People rarely get anything right. We do the best we can based on the time- and information available while trying not to bite the hand that feeds us. Fact checkers are no different.
Zuck ofc really likes to feed on things. Getting rid of information is okay as long as it doesn't gets in the way of his feeding. FB fact checking is both expensive and crap but still light years ahead of amazon reviews.
In regards to medical “fact checking” at least ( though obviously extended to pretty much anything ) the same people who tell me men can get pregnant and women have penises are the same ones telling me the vaccine is good. The same people who “fact checked” covid passports as a conspiracy theory a year ago and the same ones “fact checking” it as effective and necessary now. The same people who call me selfish for wanting to live normal after so long and the same ones having galas and parties for themselves.
I don’t know about you but I don’t like being gas lighted.
I do not believe fact checks. They have zero credibility.
This will be some snark in this comment, but against my own country and not you and yours. I invite a cross-cultural comment on competence.
Are the partisan fact-checkers in Spain at least competent enough to write grammatical, parsable sentences and titles?
From the BMJ OP: > It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”
Like the BMJ apparently, I first read this with a comma or mdash after 'Disqualifying' -- hence a broken sentence. With more thought, perhaps the inferrable punctuation intended 'Disqualifying-And-Ingored' -- in which case they might or might not be fact-checking a straw-man claim.
A negligible point perhaps, but the one fact-check I recall Dr. John Cambell on YT examining also included a broken sentence. (Small sample size, I know.)
To me, this speaks to the qualifications and processes of the fact-checkers under debate here, attempting as they are to adjudicate in scientific debates.
Attempting as they apparently are to define truth.
(Or perhaps Meta does A/B testing by breaking sentences in search of more engagement.)
In Spain journalism is lazy, but instances of poor writing are much less common than in the anglosphere. They do clickbait, but maybe it's because the spanish language is more formal than english, you can't really bee too creative without writing something meaningless.
English is a bit notorious for "allowing" a lot of creative play with words (like that old quote of "every word can be verbed").
Another thing that affects perceived formality is that "you" in English is both singular and plural and out-of-respect You.
If you've ever done any translation between English and a foreign language, you'd notice that the appetite for such gymnastics is much less. (I think that's part of why there are so many English loanwords in other languages too, but I have no data to back it up)
Definitely wouldn't be the case in the US, they're fact checkers must be entirely legit because the media and politicians say so...
The way a political 'side' can so swiftly (and hypocritically) move into authoritarianism because of self-belief in their moral authority is sad, if unsurprising. Much as religion has justified many atrocities through time for 'good,' people seem terrible at critical thinking once they feel 'right.'
Not exactly doubting you, but is this really accurate? I hear a lot of "fact checkers are biased marxist commies" coming from people who just don't like it when "their side" is criticised.
Which is silly. At least I can talk about fact checkers in my country: they give you a write-up of all the sources and reasoning they pursued to ascertain the truth of some thing, then add their own evaluation in a scale of true, mostly true, false, pants on fire. How can people say they're biased when they give you a 100% transparent detail of how they came to their conclusion?
Also, it's funny when people say that multi-billion dollar media corporations are biased... towards the left x)
> Claim
Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network.
Rating: Mixture
About this rating
What's True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
----
Almost all media organizations are encouraged to publish hate-inducing headlines and clickbait, so in principle fact checking could help people. Stuff like the above Snopes bit is pure partisan comedy that does nothing but undermine the entire idea, though.
I would disagree with fact checkers being “biased and bad” in Spain. Some political parties have copied the misinformation spreading style, and they probably don’t like being called out.
We only effectively have 2 political parties in the USA. there are some other parties but all together they only make up 5-10% depending on the given year. Libertarian and Greens are probably the only ones worth mentioning from a statistical point of view. About 40% of Americans register as independent (no party) but when you talk to them they are usually strongly invested in one party or the other.
That's not who Elon was referring to. And the Economist is primarily owned by the Italian Agnelli family, not jewish people. I'll leave it for you to decide how many other things it gets wrong...
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Aside from the Agnelli family, smaller shareholders in the company include Cadbury, Rothschild (21%), Schroder, Layton and other family interests as well as a number of staff and former staff shareholders.
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We've banned this account for repeatedly posting antisemitic tropes (not allowed here) and for using HN primarily for ideological battle (also not allowed).
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
He was referring to "powerful people" not jewish people. The previous tweet said "Do you think it's in the interest of powerful people to..." So he was playing on that.
Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff.
The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in the media churning BS articles is the people who works in the fact checkers, and most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu.
The reality, at least in Spain, is that fact checkers are just a side-effect of the kulturwars and don't bring any truth to the table.
This specially evident when they talk about something you really know about.
Of course, because fact-checkers happen to be lefty because of the, let's call, overton-window cycle, then the left choses to ignore this problems and just says it's the right-wingers that chose to ignore facts and yadda yadda.
While this is going on, right-wing, and many times right-wing extremist views, become the new punk and many yougsters are flocking to provide new blood to said ideologies.
It's all just so tiresome.