Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by innocentoldguy | Hacker News Reader

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I agree. The problem isn't just cherry-picked truths either. It is the use of non-sequitur arguments by "fact-checkers" like Politifact, WT.Social, Snopes, etc. to draw false conclusions from various things that are indeed true.

For example, WT.Social had a big list of accomplishments that "the right" claimed Trump had done while in office. The entire point of the list, put up by one of the employees at WT.Social, was to crowd-source arguments they could use to claim each of the items on this list was either false or mostly false. One of the items, I remember, was regarding Trump giving money to HBCUs. Trump definitely did provide them the funding. That fact is well-documented and easy to confirm; however, WT.Social marked it as "false" because, "Obama gave HBCUs a lot of money too, but the media didn't cover it as much."

Trump did give a lot of funding to HCBUs and so did Obama, but let's say the media covered Trump in 100 articles and only covered Obama in 1. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that scenario is that the media didn't cover Obama's funding as much. It does nothing to negate Trump's funding, as WT.Social was trying to claim. Their entire conclusion was false.

This same sort of illogical nonsense is used by fact-checkers all the time and it is extremely annoying. I want facts, not opinion/propaganda, but they're hard to get nowadays. What's worse is that you see these types of arguments being parroted back on social media platforms by consumers of such propaganda too. It's a problem on both sides of the political fence and is causing a huge division in America (and elsewhere) that doesn't need to exist.

I have a friend who used to work for Snopes. The organization absolutely engages in what you describe. The sad thing is, it’s not some big conspiracy, it’s what humans do naturally and subconsciously to shore up their cognitive dissonance… particularly when faced with uncomfortable facts pertaining to establishment systems, organizations and identity politicians they supported.

The Snopes article that made me take notice of this bias was the one letting Clinton off the hook for equating millennials to "basement dwellers" while speaking to wealthy donors during the 2016 election.

Clinton never used the exact sequence of words “basement dwellers”. Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision. The cherry picked position of asserting that "basement dweller" specifically wasn't used... is fundamentally meaningless, and is exactly the same sort of straw-man you were describing above.

She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):

“And on the other side, there’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free healthcare, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”

There is no way to read that statement without it dripping with condescension. Without full context, what Snopes advanced was patent misrepresentation… and then on top of that to call the “basement dweller” accusation untrue…? Bullshit. It’s “mixed” at best. Any intellectually honest person with full context would recognize her statements for what they were.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/hillary-clintons-basement-dwellers/

Yes, exactly! I read that article on Snopes and know exactly what you're talking about. Thanks for offering another example of it.

My hope is that we'll all wake up to these tactics and stop letting politicians and media organizations lie and manipulate us for their own gain. It has gotten to the point that I don't believe anything anymore, regardless of who says it, unless I see a full, in-context video of the event. Even then it can be iffy due to editing that isn't obvious.

>Clinton absolutely, 100%, used the exact phrase “they are living in their parents’ basement” to describe Sanders supports. If you actually find the text of what she said in that meeting, putting the basements statement in context, it was absolutely dripping with derision.

I personally find this a fairly gross mischaracterization. Having gone through the recording it sounds like to me that she is being sympathetic. She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be, but I wouldn't say that it was "dripping with derision". Even Bernie Sanders said he agreed with her (granted, he was in full anti-trump mode).

https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2016/10/02/sanders-agrees...

>She also said in the very same leak (but curiously not included by Snopes in their article):

Why should it be? That was part of an answer to a separate question.

IMO, this obsession over minutiae in politicians' impromptu speech is why we end up with a bunch of demogogues that don't get anything done. Anyone with thousands of hours of speech recorded is bound to say some questionable things.

> She's about as subconsciously condescending as I'd expect a political elite to be

That was the point. Nobody was saying she was a moustache-twirling tie-a-person-to-train-tracks villain in this. The problem is she was angling to pick up enough Sanders primary supporters while being a casually derisive, out-of-touch, faux-sympathetic talking-out-of-both-sides-of-her-mouth liberal capitalist tool who was sucking up to monied interests. This was at the crux of her weakness as a candidate... and a key reason how we ended up with Trump. Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.

Snopes cherry picked a position to defend, and willfully excluded the context of Clinton's statements to make it seem less bad than it was.

CNN included the entire text, along with a bunch of apologism. Even fucking Newsweek posted the audio of it even if they didn't put the most incendiary bits in text. Snopes though? They crafted the context to explicitly exclude the most salient parts that the targets of her derision found fault with, and solely focused on a specific phrasing so they could "debunk" it.

> Why should it be?

Because the sum of her words, and the context, matter. Because the most popular fact-checking site on the internet shouldn't be cherry picking its framing in order to push a narrative contrary to the spirit of what happened. Because even if you are probably not offended by her treating young progressives as naive, unrealistic basement-dwellers ("subconsciously" or not), I guarantee the young progressives she was talking about were... and they deserve not to be gaslighted.

And... there was a candidate who everyone agrees, even his detractors, that he never would have said something like this behind closed doors.

>Anyone with any sense who was actually truly on the left, didn't believe a damned thing she said.

So that includes Bernie then? I think your disdain for Clinton does not make you a fair judge of the quality of this fact check. Snopes isn't a news website, so they wouldn't cover the entire Q&A session. Also, the question wasn't whether Clinton thinks of Bernie supporters as basement dwellers. It's whether she called them that, which is unequivocally no.

Bernie's support of Clinton is something that a non-trivial number of his supporters did not agree with him on, I include myself in that number. Regardless, droves of Bernie supporters showed up at the polls to vote for Clinton, at a rate greater than prior Obama voters.

Snopes isn't a news site, they are fact-checking site... which means their politicization should be less, and their need for full fair context should be greater, as compared to the likes of CNN.

You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.

Regardless of where my passion might be on this matter, I'm not wrong that cherry-picked framing and the removal of context gives the reader a significantly less accurate view.

>You're effectively arguing that stripping context, denying readers salient details to the story, is magically making it more more factual.

It's not contextual. It was an entirely separate answer to another question on a matter that has nothing to do with whether Hilary called Bernie supporters basement dwellers. At this rate, you might as well include the entire corpus of everything Hilary ever said.

No matter how you put it, this is a cut and dry fact. Again, the question wasn't whether Hilary is condescending. It was whether she used those particular words which she did not.

That's a good one, but my all-time favorite is this one: Hillary Clinton used a hammer to smash her mobile phone during an FBI investigation.

Mixture: It was not just one phone, but many, and it was one of her aides, not Hillary herself, who did the smashing.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

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