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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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