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As long as fact-checkers can be sued for incorrect and malicious fact checking and fact-checking isn't grounds for censorship and information suppression, I would be on-board with you.

The most that fact-checkers do when they are egregiously and utterly incorrect is a correction to an eye-rolling "needs context" label.

The standards of objectivity of fact-checkers (who are all left-leaning partisans) are ridiculously slanted. One set of strict standards for my opposition, another set of lax, wink-wink standards for myself - modern day "fact-checking". Any criticism of the same that becomes popular results in being banned.

> The standards of objectivity of fact-checkers (who are all left-leaning partisans) are ridiculously slanted.

To anyone for whom facts that don't agree with their worldview are signs of a conspiracy, fact checking is pointless anyway. All fact checks that show they're wrong are just "proof" of the conspiracy.

Do you disagree that the vast majority of famous fact checkers lean left, are partisan or have slanted coverage?

There's little need for a conspiracy here, just the Red Tribe distrust of institutions making them less likely to support fact checkers. And fact checkers get their money either from donations or from ads/clicks, so the incentive structure will push them left as that's the only way to survive in a competitive environment.

Please provide an example of where Brooke Binkowski is egregiously and utterly incorrect. She's a hero to me and I'm leery of having hero's.

The comment you are responding to has nothing to do with whomever this person is. It's about fact checking as a general endeavor.

The whole point of judges is that they are humans who exercise their judgement. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's intended to counter a cold, dry, robotic application of the letter of the law.

Exactly. Add to that that in legal trials there is also a proper defense, which is crucial. You don't have that online most of the times.

(Social) media fact-checking also often becomes a form of silent censorship.

>>The difficulty of objective fact-checking doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system.

The limitations of objective fact-checking means we need to understand where we can/should apply it, and its efficacy are limited.

Judges or a legal system are a good example. These are also truth finding institutions. They are very expensive institutions, and produce a very limited stream of narrow truths. That's because truth finding is, as you say, difficult.

Law is an extremely limited system. We (in theory) apply it as little as possible, when other solutions have failed. The system is set up to verify or falsify claims as narrowly as possible to find this solution. Law has specifically defined truth categories like "reasonable doubt," and other rules about how to lean in cases of ambiguity.

The evidence for "person X killed person Y" may be sufficient to acquit person Z of a murder, but not to convict person X.

Fact checking can be used as a tool that newspaper editors use to maintain quality. It doesn't do the same thing in a different context. Fact checking at a newspaper, in wikipedia or for social media is a totally different thing with different limitations and applicability.

> Let's say you're reporting on Obama's birth certificate, and you write 20 pages of a deep dive into where he was born and all the evidence for it. You are complete and thorough, and you end up concluding that he couldn't have been born in Kenya.

Works perfectly fine for personal fact checking. You can do it like this. If it's being done in court, an editors's office, a wikipedia discussion page or FB's version of mechanical turk for moderators.... you will need a different method.

> To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system.

I don't see how that conclusion is drawn at all. The legal system is run by highly trained individuals in as public a way as possible, bounded by its own set of standard laws and procedures, to very specific sets of issues, often times throwing out cases because they are not "resolvable" by the narrow capabilities of the system.

To compare a random anonymous person behind closed doors spitting out a "fact check" on their laptop to judges is an insult to judges and the legal system.

> Most people would agree an imperfect attempt with lots of transparency is better than no attempt at all.

This is what Facebook fact checkers are??

They have hearings that go on public record and can be appealed up to a federal level?

Judges interpret the law, not current events. This comparison seems pretty meaningless.

> To use that logic, we should also not have judges or a legal system

Nobody wants or needs the media - even less social media - as proxy-judges of the information. Everbody just wants the information and judge it for themselves.

That is because most of the time, fact-control becomes opinion-control and we see exactly this happening just before our eyes.

Thus people on either side of the political spectrum will support the suppressing of the opinion of their political opposition.

At the moment this is happening with the evidently unholy coalition between the left and big tech as well as big media. Another unholy coalition is big pharma + governance and big media where anything slightly critical of certain vaccines will get insta-banned on Youtube for example.

May I suggest that you only support this behaviour as it currently happens to align with your views?

>Nobody wants or needs the media - even less social media - as proxy-judges of the information. Everbody just wants the information and judge it for themselves.

This seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of journalism. The primary job of journalists is to filter through the events and facts of the day and tell you what is important. Judgement of information is inherent to the job. The top story on the front page of the newspaper is chosen by editors not by random draw. They put it there because they think it is the most important bit of news in the entire paper. There is no way to make that kind of qualitative judgements on the relative importance of different pieces of news without inserting potential bias.

> Everbody just wants the information and judge it for themselves

People may say they want this, but manifestly do not. There is too much information.

To illustrate: many people I know cared a great deal about whether the country was lied to about WMDs when we went to Iraq. As far as I know, zero of them have read the report by the Senate Intelligence Committee[0] but all were very glad to have the report summarized for them by the news media.

That act of summarizing, of picking out which information is and is not important, is itself an act of journalism. It is the curation of the set of shared facts, shared reality, in the public discourse.

[0]https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publ...

> That act of summarizing, of picking out which information is and is not important, is itself an act of journalism.

Exactly, I'm totally with you. That is the essence of journalism I would even say. But that is where the job of the journalist ends, no sprinkling in of their own presuppositions.

It's not as clear-cut as you make it out to be. Sometimes, summarizing will change the whole meaning of the text. Journalists are not always equipped to determine what is important and what isn't (because they're not always subject matter experts, and don't have the budget to consult with one every time), and sometimes what's important to summarize will change based on your pre-disposed opinion.

It's impossible for presuppositions not to seep into journalism, especially in a capitalist system where clickbait, outrage news etc. sells better than plain retelling of facts.

> especially in a capitalist system where clickbait, outrage news etc. sells better than plain retelling of facts.

Government run news organizations with no profit motive have a very sorry record.

It's hard or maybe impossible to do a perfect job here, but it often seems like the vast majority don't even try! A huge proportion of news stories are horribly and deliberately misleading on everything from the local to national level and on every topic from science to celebrities.

I'd like to be more specific than "a huge proportion" but it's hard because I've mostly read the more widely shared and thus sensationalist stories, which will have much bigger distortions on average.

Note that some citizens genuinely do read at least parts of those reports and we would quite appreciate them being cited (with section headings etc) in news reports.

We have judges and legal systems because we need to resolve disputes. But what is the problem that fact-checkers exist to solve? Their brief is essentially the same as any other journalist, and I've generally found that the high end of newspapers/magazines are more credible than the majority of fact-checking sites.

The problem fact checkers are trying to solve is that most people don't have the resources to do the fact checking themselves, so that malicious actors can sway public opinion with wrong or misleading information. That is extremely dangerous in democracies.

You don't solve the problem, you just defer it to the fact-checkers. Who fact-checks the fact-checkers and ensures they are not themselves used to sway public opinion?

what's stopping anyone from fact-checking the fact-checkers? Also, it would be great if fact checking was presented in an argdown form, or someway to distill the bases of disagreement

Right, but fact checkers can't help with that problem unless there's some countermeasure that prevents the fact checkers themselves from being malicious actors. (I don't think many fact checkers are malicious in the sense of being cacklingly evil, but they are usually highly partisan, which ends up having much the same effect). And if you do have such a measure, it would probably be more effective to apply it directly to the news sources themselves rather than to the fact checkers.

Wouldn't it be extremely dangerous to democracy if malicious actors were to take over fact-checkers? How would you know they already haven't?

You reduced the problem of keeping an eye of everything posted to keeping an eye on the fact checkers. That seems easier to me.

> But what is the problem that fact-checkers exist to solve? Their brief is essentially the same as any other journalist, and I've generally found that the high end of newspapers/magazines are more credible than the majority of fact-checking sites.

First, fact-checkers don't just publish fact-checks. They also work behind the scenes at the "high end" newspapers that you mention.

Second, websites like Snopes originally appeared to fact-check things like chain emails, memes, and other rumors. Mainstream news sites now do this to some extent, but there's still not a 100% overlap.

Also, sometimes there just isn't a story to a fact-check. The reader just wants to see a check of all the facts in a political speech or a debate. A series of 100 bullet points is not a compelling article, but it might be a perfectly fine fact-check.

> Also, sometimes there just isn't a story to a fact-check. The reader just wants to see a check of all the facts in a political speech or a debate. A series of 100 bullet points is not a compelling article, but it might be a perfectly fine fact-check.

Why? What's the difference? Analysis of a political speech or debate is definitely the kind of thing I expect from newspapers or equivalent, and it's not like changing the name makes it easier to read.

> Their brief is essentially the same as any other journalist, and I've generally found that the high end of newspapers/magazines are more credible than the majority of fact-checking sites.

Not sure I would trust high end newspapers either, in Germany we had a small scandal with Claas Relotius who received over a dozen awards for outstanding journalism. Most of his articles where more fiction than fact. The newspapers publishing his articles outright ignored any complaints by his victims and even the papers claiming to have "world class" fact checkers didn't bother to review the output of high profile authors. It seems that to journalists anything is fine as long as it captures the attention of their target audience.