What’s important is that the fact checkers accept corrections and recognize that they are fallible too.
It’s ok that I ran over your dog while driving blindfolded - I owned up to it after all.
Fact checking has no benefits other than imposing the biases of the fact checkers. Sometimes imposing those biases is “good”, sometimes it’s “bad”. But let’s call a spade a spade - this isn’t fact checking. This is bias imposition.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
If what is being spread can’t stand up to questioning, then it’s merits need to be questioned even further.
Have you read 1984 or alike? Maybe do so at times.
The BS online surely is bad, but did you know, that you can just buy a MD in certain parts of the world?
So, we are in the middle of a question: which countries MD's do we recognize to speak censor free?
(and who are "we" btw.)
And well, governemnts do have some record of power abuse and missinformation, too. Even the democratic ones. And they take ages to get along and make contracts.
So lots of golden firewalled nations then, but less vaxxer bs online? I am not sure, if this is a good trade.
But considering medical boards can strip them of their MD, maybe there is a chilling effect that prevents false statements.
Or a chilling effect of unpopular opinions and facts.
And a much harder climate to find out, what is a fact at all, if you have to be scared, that some government commitee strips you of your right to publish, if they do not like your results.
If I've learned anything in the past 2 years it's that sometimes even random information (Twitter shitposters) is better than deliberately misleading fake information (e.g. early-pandemic WHO announcements).
I've much more confidence in myself (and my own ability to evaluate information) than in any member of any government (or any "expert" credentialed by said government).
Anyways this is severely flawed and mistaken because what they're doing today is censoring everyone with or without an MD that their "black box algorithm" disagrees with. You propose keeping up stale information (which IMO amounts to killing people through misinformation not the reverse) and those with the stance to dumb down all information to the safest common denominator are making the social media experience worse for everyone else.
And no, responding to an article's facts and questioning those facts is NOT censorship. We see that claim all too often these days, and it's absurd.
In the pandemic, speech about public health was censored less than treatment advice or drug facts would have been. Tens of thousands died as a result. A disastrous experiment in granting a freedom that no one responsible needs or wants.
Instead of censorship like you're advocating for (an approach that absolutely will not work within the framework of the US constitution), we usually solve this by exclusively allowing the organized medical societies to have and show medical credentials. Those who fraudulently claim to have these credentials are viciously prosecuted. The fraudsters are free to push whatever medical advice they like, provided that they do not mislead others into thinking that they are credentialed.
Disclaimer: I'm fully vaxxed and am happy with the way the FDA is run. My only dog in this conversation is censorship.
Of course Facebook has a legal right to censor anything they want for any reason, or no reason at all.
Everybody talks about snake oil salesmen in the 19th century, but do you know what doctors were hawking back then? You can find plenty of examples of garbage products not because of the lack of regulation but because of the lack of contemporary science. Even medical professionals at the time didn't know any better -- or else anyone could have asked their doctor about Snake Oil(TM) and known not to try it.
Today nobody is going to believe that you can cure a disease with "Indian blood" or any of that nonsense, because the information on its harms or ineffectiveness is widely available and not seriously in contention.
The problem comes when you get to the medical information which is still in contention today. That's when censorship is the most harmful because when something is still actively unfolding and it's poorly understood with limited data, there is no basis for anyone to authoritatively declare something to be definitively true. And if the thing authorities are telling everyone is false, censoring the people challenging them is the harm.
Until the "fact check" gets used by platforms to declare a possibly-true statement "misinformation" and censor it, which has happened repeatedly.
Nice username :)
I’m not a right winger, conservative, or whatever. I’m more “leftist” than the average person, so I’m assuming I’m more “leftist” than the average fact checker. That doesn’t mean I’m absent of biases towards things that are not true.
The fact checkers are not using the scientific method or any sort of standard based one evidence to make their determinations. They’re using politically aligned news sources and their own opinions.
I’ve not yet seen any news by CNN or MSNBC or any other “reputable” news source be fact checked even though I know they regularly mislead and lie (maybe they have been and I’ve missed it - would love to see that). I’ve seen obvious bullshit by conservative media outlets be fact checked. And I’ve seen cases like this article where actual facts are superseded by political opinion.
I’m not advocating for avoiding a truth bias, but that’s not what’s present. We can act all high and mighty and pretend like the left is guided by science, but it isn’t. We’re guided by what our side says is true and don’t question it and don’t look at the science. When someone actually looks at the science and negates what our side says, we fact-check it and say it’s misinformation.
I wish I had an alternative to social media.
That's like a drug addict saying, "I wish I had an alternative to heroin."
The cure is to detox and move on. Nobody "needs" social media.
This is usually the place where the pedant HN crowd (many employed by social media companies) like to imagine a bunch of hypothetical edge cases and pretend that the .0001% situations where social media is useful somehow outweighs the massive harm that social media has done over the last decade plus.
This is your brain. This is your brain on social media. Any questions?
> I wish I had an alternative to social media.
Imposing your biases is a neutral action that can have good or bad results. But it’s not in defense of the truth.
I don't see how you can just say it's "imposing your biases" to fact check things. The fact checking may be influenced by your biases, but "vaccines are safe and effective" isn't a bias. It's the truth.
Also note that the fact checker errors are not random uncorrelated errors. Fact checks are performed through a political lens. The subconscious question is asked, how will this affect <policy agenda>? If something is factually correct but could lead to <bad outcome> then the fact checkers will consider that when choosing how to check the claim.
For instance, in the article that was censored was about faults in the study that convinced the CDC to support mask mandates in schools. The fact checkers read that as a claim that masking does not help limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in schools, which is not what the article was about.
Maybe we shouldn't have ran this experiment instead?
Fact checking can certainly only be done in a transparent process with democratic legitimization.
Anyway the idea to take on the responsibility for fact-checking seems kinda awful if I were a corporation I'd try to hand that over to someone else, there is going to be a lot of trouble in that area in the future.