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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

Pretty balanced perspective. I'm almost a bit surprised given how strong most people's opinions on this are.

Not really. They said it was sort of yes and no because he said “you have to show strength” and “demand that Congress do the right thing”. No those are not telling people to storm congress, in the context of what he was saying before, this clearly refers to showing strength and making demands in the form of a protest. The answer is just No. He did not say this. They didn't even give this a "Mostly false" and give a spiel about how "He encouraged people to protest at the capital + his supporters may have interpreted his words that way", they said it was half-true, it was mixture, that claim is no more false than it is true. Rating scale: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check-ratings/

He sure as hell riled people up and he set the seeds for what happened and has a degree of culpability for what happened. However in regards to the specific question "Did Trump Tell Supporters to Storm US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021?" the answer is No. Intermediate ratings on fact checkers are what are used to slip bias into what are not very ambiguous situations, because you can say "Yes, but..." or "No, but..."

The good thing about fact checkers, and the reason I generally support them even if I don't see them quite as neutral, is at least they write down the facts so you can come to your own judgement. I just ignore the ratings they give at this point, the articles are much better.

It depends if you take their question literally or not.

I agree that Trump did not explicitly tell his supporters to Storm the Capitol, as does Snopes.

The grey area is in the riling up you talk about and the phrasing of the question.

Tell/told is often used to convey meaning rather than literal instructions, so I understand why they have stated this is mixed.

I just think that rating the interpretation of what Trump meant, as equally valid to the literal truth of what Trump said, is veering right into the territory of "Alternative facts". How we felt about what Trump said has become just as important as what Trump actually said. His supporters can overlook that what he says is BS and can just focus on "What he meant", and his opponents can ignore that he didn't say something and condemn him for "what he meant".

It all feels very post-truth to me and seeing a fact checker endorse this sort of view is absolutely depressing in a way. These are institutions of which there is broad support for making the arbiters of truth on social media for whom truth is subject to subjective interpretation. In which case what's the point of fact checking at all?

> How we felt about what Trump said has become just as important as what Trump actually said.

This free interpretation of words uses a new (repurposed) trendy term too: "dog whistle". Suddenly you are free to interpret anything one says in the most negative light, just by claiming it's a "dogwhistling" for some group or action you despise.

This was not a balanced perspective at all. It gets various verifiable facts entirely wrong. For example, it claims "senators [] would break laws governing U.S. elections", presumably referring to objecting to results. But not only are there no laws against this, moreover there have been objections for every single presidential election this century!

Snopes also claims that this vote is "ceremonial", yet it was used in the aftermath of the civil war to disenfranchise every southern state which sent electors; that doesn't sound very "ceremonial" to me.

Arguably both of these issues are immaterial to the rating, but then why include them at all? And why trust a fact checker who is demonstrably spreading misinformation themselves, however immaterial it may be?

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