Only distributed fact-checking can keep up with democratized distribution

https://abe-winter.github.io/only/fans/2020/11/29/everything-in-moderation.html

by awinter-py • 6 years ago

132 179 6 years ago

abe-winter.github.io

DiggyJohnson• 6 years ago

That’s a very compelling thesis statement. I’m looking forward to the discussion here.

What criticisms of your argument are you anticipating, if any?

awinter-py5• 6 years ago

"Obviously nobody should be allowed to write online and moderation just postpones that desirable end state"

would be a valid counterargument I think

feralimal2• 6 years ago

Who arbitrates?

Is it whoever owns big corporations? Is it the mainstream media? Are they trustworthy? Is it the government? Scientists? Which one of us holds the truth?

One man's facts are another man's lies. And this is fine. We should be able to tolerate multiple opinions. Labelling things as 'hate speech' and denying people the right to speech doesn't help!

I think C S Lewis said it best:

"those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"

vdnkh• 6 years ago

One man's facts are another man's lies

This is pretty absurd. We should be fighting disinformation instead of legitimizing it. Not all “facts” are based in a healthy reality. See: 2020 election “fraud”

throwaway2011038• 6 years ago

See also: 2016 Russian collusion.

umvi• 6 years ago

This comment has been hidden because it was fact checked and determined to be partially false.

Reason: facts don't have to be based in a "healthy reality" to be true since perception of reality is subjective.

Click [here] to see original comment.

mythrwy• 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA

This looks pretty factual to me. It's fraud of some kind.

electrondood2• 6 years ago

Facts aren't lies, and facts are definitely not opinions.

Hate speech absolutely exists. Rights end when they infringe on the rights of others.

smsm428• 6 years ago

Hate speech definitely exists. A lot of people, regrettably, hate other people for a variety of reasons, and speak about it. But there's no "right" to be loved, so neither speaking nor hating violates any rights.

PeterisP• 6 years ago

You can easily do hate speech without telling any lies, just presenting [a specific subset of] verifiably true facts.

pavlov3• 6 years ago

Why not jump off a bridge? After all, Newton's theory of gravitation is just a theory, and besides Einstein proved it's incomplete. The elite still pretends their disproven theory is truth because they want to control your life. Show the power of positive thinking and faith, make the leap!

But seriously, equating fact-checking with torment is probably not what C. S. Lewis had in mind. It has historically been the case that when opinions and ideology replace facts, it opens the door to tormentors who won't hesitate to hurt you to impose their version of reality.

feralimal2• 6 years ago

Here is the full quote. I think its even better:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."

throwaway2011038• 6 years ago

The difference is that Newton's theory of gravity comports with what every single person experiences in real life, in the same way. So nobody's really prone to believe it's some sort of hoax.

smsm428• 6 years ago

It also has been the case that when somebody is going to subjugate you, one of the first things they'd try to do is to control your information intake. If they can define what is "fact" for you, the rest goes much easier - after all, if somebody resists accepting "facts", it is ok to force them to do what "factually" needs to be done, it's only for their own good - it's literally like saving somebody from jumping off a bridge. So if you put a couple of bruises on him or break an arm or a leg, it's still a good deed - after all, he was going to jump off a bridge, so he's better off alive, even with broken leg. As soon as you've given yourself an exclusive license to facts, violence against and subjugation of whoever disagrees with you happens very easily and very naturally.

geofft2• 6 years ago

And this is why we are tormented with free-speech absolutists - their conscience says they're doing a good thing for the world.

an_opabinia• 6 years ago

If Donald Trump had just spent 30 minutes more a day reading books or briefings, we wouldn’t be litigating misinformation, disinformation, flat earthers, fact checking, conspiracies, boomers, etc.

Thousands of rants never written, tens of thousands of podcast episodes would have never been recorded, millions of tweets never tweeted.

You actually only needed to improve the literacy of one man to make irrelevant 99.99% of the problems described here. Under the Biden presidency all this shit will still exist, it won’t disappear on noon Jan 20 2021, but it will stop mattering. Treating Trump as a constant while blaming everyone else (like this does) is the trap.

freewilly1040• 6 years ago

This (extremely dubiously) assumes a sincere effort to tell the truth on Trump’s part

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

You assume that Trump is not just deliberately lying. While Trump might or might not be smart, he is surrounded by people like Pompeo and Cotton who certainly are.

They lie and mislead too.

throwaway2011038• 6 years ago

Under the Biden presidency all this shit will still exist ... but it will stop mattering.

Why is that? Because Biden is truthful? Because he won't be tweeting 10 times a day? Because the media will (effectively) do the tweeting for him? Because the media will simply not challenge him, and ignore his critics?

All politicians lie, or perhaps to put it more charitably, they promote a very one-sided point of view. It's almost the definition of politics. The only reason anything will change under Biden is that many of the people with the biggest megaphones support him.

therouwboat• 6 years ago

News has been trump trump trump for the past 4 years and you say he doesnt get his voice heard?

rootusrootus• 6 years ago

I don't think it'll go away, it's still going to be a huge problem. But Trump was definitely a super-spreader.

arrosenberg• 6 years ago

If Donald Trump had just spent 30 minutes more a day reading books or briefings, we wouldn’t be litigating misinformation, disinformation, flat earthers, fact checking, conspiracies, boomers, etc.

He was elected to lead, not to read!

_y5hn8• 6 years ago

He's following the sociopath rulebook. He knows what he's saying and doing. First step is the charm stage. Hell, he's the top boss and complained about election fraud months before election even started. He did nothing about it other than sabotaging US Post. Later he latches unto his anchor to defraud half the population, to spread FUD and lies.

The fact people can state this without reprecussion, makes him a weak liar. Everyone knows this, and this is how he speaks first, in order to disarm allegations about what he's doing. Just project all his words back to him, and you now have a list of all wrongdoings, ironically.

centimeter• 6 years ago

Ceding "fact-checking" (i.e. narrative construction) to social media companies (directly, or indirectly by letting them choose contractors to do it for them) is a terrible idea. Not only is it unlikely the narrative you receive will track reality in a useful way, but it gives a huge amount of political power to these companies.

A much more sane approach, IMO, is to come up with software frameworks where you choose which research firms or individuals (friends, professors, etc.) you want to follow and how much trust you want to assign to each of them. There is plenty of research on ways to do this well in the context of "web-of-trust" cryptosystems.

gtsop3• 6 years ago

I like the idea, but the author doesn't seem to care enough for the root cause of dissinformation. That is, at it's core, the existence of conflicting interests. Because if literally everyone was on the same page, there wouldn't be a reason to lie about anything (of importance), right? Although distributed fact checking sounds like a good idea (however problematic it could be, even in a world without interest conflicts) how does the author prepare for the inevitable moment when a lie will get the seal of a Fact™ because big players push towards that direction? How would you protect your ecosystem against that? You are back to square 1.

will4274• 6 years ago

There's an angle here of [conflict theory vs mistake theory](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/). Your post seems to take a conflict-theory only perspective - that disinformation is caused only by conflicting interests, and never by incorrect analysis. Is that your opinion or is it enough to say there are some conflict theorists, therefore fact checking can't solve all the problems?

gtsop3• 6 years ago

Interesting article. I think black and white is never a good rule, so although I would side on the conflict-theory perspective it would be very naive of me to claim that incorrect analysis doesn't ever contribute to dissinformation. Same goes with many of the points in the article that the author assigns to "mistake-theorists" but I can see myself subscribing to these.

With those in mind, I'd say that although not the sole cause of dissinformation, conflict of interests is the most important and impactful factor.

Siira2• 6 years ago

Everyone knows different beliefs happen because of mistakes, conflicted interests, and that differing models can still embody one truth (E.g., Newtonian physics vs relativistic), with different tradeoffs. Also, mistakes happen in even recognizing your own interests. A lot of mistakes are also practically unsolvable. Any moderation algorithm that assumes conflict away is hopelessly naive.

smsm428• 6 years ago

That's essentially what already happened to the whole "fact checking site" industry. When journalists committed a mass professional suicide in their desire to help politicians they like, there was a perceivable need for non-propaganda information. Thus, "fact checking" gets into fashion. Big players immediately move in anf fact checkers start first getting subtle bias and then just do the same the press did only a short while before - declare that their mission are "bigger than just checking facts", they should serve the noble causes and help people make the right choices - those choices being their preferred partisan points - and surely attacking your own party with the same vigor as you would the opposing one is not helping people making the right choices... and in a short while we're back to the proverbial sq.1 I don't know how to solve this - I have observed several project that started with a noble goal of delivering just facts, away from propaganda and partisan bias - and in a year or two they become as biased as any MSM they wanted to replace.

gtsop3• 6 years ago

That is very interesting. Can you provide a couple resources?

aphextron• 6 years ago

You assume the average person cares about facts more than validation of their preexisting worldview. Fake news peddlers know this isn't true, and it's why they're winning.

woliveirajr• 6 years ago

I think the biggest problem is that much is said to be fact-check but is, indeed, opinion verification.

People have many degrees in how they express themselves and many times an opinion use words that resemble factual statements. Then others read it as facts and want that someone give a validation or rebuttal of it.

Add some partial fact-check, some political inclined, some strong words, and then everybody has opinion of the credibility of it. Be it centralized or distributed.

amelius• 6 years ago

Children need to be taught about fake news, bias, etc.

hrafn• 6 years ago

May not necessarily have much of an effect, as in this classic example where children who had recently received education on the use of fake sources were unable to spot that an article on the "tree octopus" was made up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_octopus

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

Nah, we're moving towards individual controls and decentralized platforms. Having a tool distribute fact check is just delaying the inevitable.

Just look at tiktok for the HARD repudiation of the ultra-left themes. The young people will always be counter-culture, and let's face it the ultra-left is mainstream today. Facebook, twitter? Those are your wine-aunts/grandpas platforms.

awinter-py5• 6 years ago

'wine aunt platform' is a phrase that will stay with me

electrondood2• 6 years ago

What are you thinking of as "ultra-left"? The only actual radicalization I've seen in the last decade has been "ultra-right," militias, normalization of anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiment, hyper-nationalism, normalization of hate speech, hate crimes and hate speech against minorities, etc.

DHS and FBI both call out rising right wing domestic terrorism as one of the top threats to the US. They don't mention "ultra-left" anything.

forgotmypw177• 6 years ago

I think the key to achieving this is building Web of Trust on top of the fact checker relationships and connect them to the users, so that you can see exactly how you are connected, and whether you can trust the individuals.

Today, the sources of whatever information you read, even from the most credible sources, are obscured. Whether it is CNN or a peer-reviewed journal article, the most information you will get about the author is a name, a picture, and maybe a bit of their publicly available data.

With Web of Trust, the level of trust you should assign to an author, and by extension the information, can be instantaneously computed by adding up your own trust references.

If I assign my trust responsibly, and you assign your trust to me, then everyone I trust is by extension trustworthy, and the information metadata can reflect this.

If you don't think I assign my trust responsibly, then you can remove me from your trust circle, and my assigned trust will become irrelevant.

It's not a perfect system, it's vulnerable to attacks, it requires eternal vigilance, but it's the best we've got going for us today, IMO.

awinter-py5• 6 years ago

have you used a web of trust system you liked, that works well w/ an existing social platform? I'd try one if you have a rec.

fwiw I wrote one of these and mine sucked

jancsika2• 6 years ago

I'm curious-- did you build it as a decentralized/federated/distributed piece of software?

forgotmypw177• 6 years ago

It's still very much a pre-MVP prototype, but try the link in my profile.

Dopameaner• 6 years ago

This system reminds me of a sophisticated Facebook news feed. Though a major problem is the news sources that are biased at the source. We might need a transparency fact checker that compares between sources.

toomim• 6 years ago

I'm working on building this. Email me if interested! toomim@gmail.com

forgotmypw177• 6 years ago

I sent you an email, did you receive it?

zby2• 6 years ago

Here is a design proposal for such a system with an interesting twist: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZdtFBCtixqay5aoWF/design-tho...

AnimalMuppet4• 6 years ago

I'll go further. We need at least two webs of trust.

Would you trust a Democrat to fact-check Trump's claims of election fraud? Would you trust a Republican? In fact, you should trust the Democrat if they say the claims are true, and the Republican if they say the claims are false.

Ideally, we'd get one set of fact-checkers that both sides trust. In practice, that may not be possible. But at least, if we have separate fact-checkers for each side, if they agree, then we have a fairly good basis for suspecting that they're right.

_y5hn8• 6 years ago

For most people outside US, like over 7 billion people, both of these would be invalid webs of trust.

forgotmypw177• 6 years ago

That's a good point. I think more than one Web is a great idea and desirable.

As far as your questions:

I would trust some people who identify as Republican, but not others. I would trust some people who identify as Democrat, but not others. Out of the two sets, I would trust the ones whom I personally know, and not anyone else, no matter who they say they are.

In the following scenario, I would trust both a Democrat and a Republican fact-checking Trump's claims of election fraud;

[Me] #trust [My friend Alice, whom I trust to assign trust responsibly] #trust [Alices's friend Bob, whom Alice trusts] #trust [...] #trust [Democrat fact-checker] #approve fact-checking report.

Depending on the Bacon number and how many other similar connections there are, I would trust them more or less.

If there are no connections, then I wouldn't trust them beyond the distance I can propel their supposedly human body under my own power in Earth's gravity.

bleepblorp6• 6 years ago

What do you do when the Republican fact checker repeats what the leader of his party tells him to say even though it is fact-free?

A majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election (!) because that's what Trump is saying. There is little reason to think a Republican fact checker would contradict Trump. Indeed, any fact checker who did would be ostracized as a RINO, much as has happened with Fox News since they acknowledged the outcome of the vote.

Partisan fact checkers would only give the Republican party a safe space to continue to lie about matters of objective fact, such as who won the last election.

Frankly, the fact that 'what is truth' can be framed as a partisan issue in America speaks to much, much deeper societal problems than organized fact checking can fix. This is an attitude that is much more in keeping with that found in countries like Albania or North Korea rather than in another advanced democracy.

alexisread• 6 years ago

I'll drop https://spritelyproject.org/ here.

Having said that, there is likely to be an issue of influencers ie. Those celebrities that you follow as they're interesting / exciting etc but may be completely uninformed on say green issues, which then have an undue influence on their followers. Worse, many of them are sponsored and corruptible that way - we're talking about boiling frogs both for the influencer and followers basically.

The other issue is that a Web of trust has a tendency to echo chamber. I think the actual hardest thing to do is to cross-polinate networks in a voluntary way, that I don't know how to do yet.

ve55• 6 years ago

I agree with the author that optimizing for virality as the bottom line is a disaster than can only go on for so long. Its consequences are obvious at this point, and it's not leading to good places anywhere it is applied en masse. (For those unconvinced, I encourage to read about how the most viral and captivating content is often content that purposefully instills anger, fear, outgroup-hatred, schadenfreude, etc)

But deciding that we 'just need to fact-check' things more seems to be a very incomplete solution. Much is said about "who gets to fact-check?" but I think even if we assume the people fact-checking are good (morally) and mostly very correct (veridically), this solution will still fall extremely short.

Even if you perform good fact-checking, there is little evidence that this will achieve your goal, which is not actually correcting text on the Internet, but correcting peoples’ beliefs in their own minds, which turns out to be pretty difficult (telling people they are wrong while removing content they want to read is likely not the best way, even so).

Remember that many rights that you take for granted were only gained thanks to the failures of past powers to control the narrative as strictly as they wanted to. While I don't think that anyone can control 'the narrative' so to speak, especially not a single company or government (that currently exists), we will still see ceaseless attempts at such; the temptation to correct everyone is just too great (https://xkcd.com/386/, anyone?), especially if you believe you're on the side of Virtue (which it turns out, almost everyone believes).

bilbo0s• 6 years ago

This.

These outright falsehoods that people take for truths are not taken for truth in a vacuum. As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them.

I was reading somewhere that people tend to readily assimilate information conforming to their own world view, and have a tendency to block out information that does not conform to their world view. It's claimed that these tendencies pre-date the internet.

If that's true, the negative effects of virality were inevitable.

jl62• 6 years ago

Tribalism is as old as humans, and previous successful attempts at “defeating” it have typically involved warring tribes being wholesale eradicated by, or assimilated into, larger tribes, then states, then blocs. Now we have global tribes and nobody bigger left to defeat or assimilate them.

The only way out I see is to try to grow the “sensible majority” into a dominant majority that can robustly eject extremists - make a bigger tribe, essentially. But what cluster of issues unites enough people to form a dominant political force, while also rejecting the dark patterns that consume the current political tribes?

XorNot4• 6 years ago

This is also ignoring the other dimension of lying: it's a way to assert dominance. The lie is the point.

You saw this when Russia invaded Ukraine: Vladimir Putin and other Russian propaganda efforts spout easily disprovable lies about what's happening, about what was plainly visible in the news (Russian soliders and vehicles crossing the border).

Russia wasn't trying to hide the lie, the point of the lie was to make you waste time fact-checking it, and then do the thing they needed anyway - which was you had to repeat the lie and then expend disproportionate rhetorical resources disputing it. And then they can simply turn around and tell another lie.

The idea that better fact-checking somehow will solve any problem is ignoring what the point of modern propaganda is - it's about dominance and power.

AnimalMuppet4• 6 years ago

As cliché as this may sound, people want to believe these things. So they believe them.

Right, and there we also see the answer. We need to move people to no longer want to believe the lies.

For example, if I believe that it's all a conspiracy by "them", then it's not my fault that I'm a failure. That's comforting. But it also follows that I'm helpless, and that things are never going to get better. That's... not so comforting. If someone shows me that, I may not want to believe that any more.

Now, that's a very slow process, and almost requires one-on-one interaction with lots of time. You can't do it in a drive-by post on the internet. Worse, even if you put in the time and effort, it still may not work. But I don't know of anything else that will, and this might work at least some of the time.

Roritharr3• 6 years ago

I have been toying with the idea to create a Wikipedia Cloning Platform that would allow people to basically host their worldview on a subdomain, so they can change and edit wikipedia along their perceived worldview without external edits, and even import "truths" from other fringe worldviews, while maintaining links to the base Wikipedia where they see fit.

At first this sounds like the worst idea ever as it would allow even more bifurcation of the global consensus narrative, but I believe having all this in a structured manner would allow for a better discussability of the topics in question and allow for a place to store arguments on topics in a structured long form instead of asinine twitter discussions or spats blogs or comment sections of newspapers.

Lawful content moderation while trying to keep an unbiased reputation would probably be a nightmare though.

weaksauce2• 6 years ago

allow for a better discussability of the topics

or give nut jobs more validity than they deserve. it used to be one guy in the corner of a bar spouting off his mouth and that was his sphere of influence... now that guy has a megaphone and the smarter people are mostly doing things and don't have the time or the inclination to say "no that's obvious bullshit because x y z" so the crap rises to the top.

numpad0• 6 years ago

I agree on a basic level...some sort of a hierarchical system, a compartmentalized partial context system is definitely in need. The “full truth” is often too much for an average joe to handle.

I’ve seen “so that’s what those corrupt reporters from that whatever Lancet magazine want us to believe” wrt COVID...you can start from anywhere but no chance loading necessary contexts in full into a wonders of the world like that.

webnrrd2k• 6 years ago

One example of what you're talking about is the conservapedia: https://conservapedia.com/Main_Page. Although it doesn't allow tracking edits like you mentioned.

schoen3• 6 years ago

I think that would be great, though I've been thinking of problems that would make it likely not to work that well.

There was one fork called "Conservapedia" which aimed to be a conservative POV version of Wikipedia. But they did a bad job in terms of quality and engagement, and it's moved more and more in the direction of political advocacy until all that anyone edits or that appears there is political advocacy content. You could contrast this with the old Catholic Encyclopedia (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/) which is more like an actual encyclopedia that someone, including a non-Catholic, would actually want to use to get the Catholic perspective on a topic.

Wikipedia's NPOV policy is impressive and the community's efforts to apply it are impressive, but it's ultimately very difficult to find an objective NPOV account of things, and one that's satisfactory to everyone. One difficulty here is the Undue Weight policy (which, to be clear, is probably necessary to make NPOV workable). This says, in effect, that it's considered NPOV to mention something at greater length than its relevance to the topic at hand warrants, or in a context where it's not particularly important. Unfortunately judgments of relevance, salience, or importance are themselves quite POV and Wikipedia's solution is mostly to rely on "reliable sources" -- typically published journalistic and academic writing. But journalistic and academic writing itself contains all sorts of biases (many of which Wikipedians are extremely aware of and have discussed at some length), including the likelihood that nobody will have actually written a journalistic analysis of the Mormon/vegan/Russian government/left-anarchist/Hindu nationalist/Reformed Christian/Maoist/gender-critical/Extinction Rebellion take on specific person or topic X. Which could very likely, if it existed, place much more weight on some aspect or issue than would be considered "due" in most other published analyses.

You can also read many Wikipedia articles and see that, to the extent they relied on sources, the sources all held the view that the subject of the article was good/legitimate/appropriate/normal, or was bad/illegitimate/sketchy/questionable, and it is in principle "NPOV" to not report on any other views (if they don't have reliable sources mentioning them). However there must be people who have substantive reasons to take another perspective but don't have the ability, resources, motivation, or desire to produce reliable sources reflecting that perspective. In the absence of that, those views can be described in their own article but can't be used to color any other article.

I think forks always have a huge network effects problem. There was a famous Wikipedia fork called Enciclopedia Libre y Universal en Español, which started as a result of ideological disagreements with or concerns about Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre_Universal_e...

The Enciclopedia Libre was bigger than Wikipedia for two years but ended up getting surpassed by Wikipedia, I think largely due to network effects.

Even now if you wanted to make a fork based on an ideological disagreement, or in order to be consciously and avowedly POV in some way, you would have to find people who wanted to actively edit and maintain a whole encyclopedia with high quality standards -- which is probably tough because Wikipedia has, by default, the mindshare, brand, infrastructure, and community to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date.

I don't see an obvious way out of this quandary, even though I would love for there to be more thorough, high-quality POV encyclopedias.

john4532452• 6 years ago

I don't know if this will work or not, definitely worth experimentation. This is a true original idea. Hearing for the first time.

jseliger• 6 years ago

Very few people are really interested in epistemology: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/11/10/personal-epistemology-fre...

johnchristopher• 6 years ago

(For those unconvinced, I encourage to read about how the most viral and captivating content is often content that purposefully instills anger, fear, outgroup-hatred, schadenfreude, etc)

I call this "outrage porn" (not from me).

yorwba• 6 years ago

the most viral and captivating content is often content that purposefully instills anger, fear, outgroup-hatred, schadenfreude, etc

Another aspect is that on social media, virality isn't just based on people actively sharing stuff, but also content being so captivating that the platform amplifies it into virality based on user interaction statistics. (E.g. high click-through rates being used as a feedback signal to show content to more people, thus amplifying clickbait.)

I experienced that first-hand with a YouTube channel I started recently: one day I noticed the impression count (i.e. the number of times YouTube showed a video thumbnail to someone) growing exponentially. But view counts didn't grow nearly as much. So my content didn't suddenly get more popular, it had just randomly gotten a boost in the recommendation algorithm, showing it to many more people, most of whom weren't interested. (The boost subsequently disappeared.)

I think if social media were just people talking to each other, we'd be mostly fine. But imagine how little time you'd spend e.g. on YouTube if the only way to watch a video were to have someone send you the link. Obviously not enough for the platform.

So the search for virality turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the recommendation algorithm thinks something will go viral, it can make it happen simply by pushing it in front of enough eyeballs.

codegrappler• 6 years ago

Totally agree. The other dimension that folks often overlook is the choice of what to fact-check. Droves of fact checkers that only ever check one side of an argument still present a bias.

totemandtoken2• 6 years ago

The funny thing is the author acknowledges what a real solution would be - distributed fact checking, in which we can't say one institution or panel of experts has a monopoly on arbitration of the Truth™. If it were done in a way that made the consumer feel as though they were a part of the process, they might be more to allow some moderation even if it goes against their prescribed beliefs. I think that's what wikipedia got right.

The deeper issue that the author didn't really address well is how mis-incentivized online engagement is and the opportunities that exist on realigning those incentives. They discussed the marketplace of ideas and linked to how Facebook would lose engagement if they cracked down though, so I can't be too hard on the author.

My own solution is newsbetting. Place a wager on the political bias of the source of a de-titled article. Or a similar extension to whether a fact agrees with some established scientific entity. It puts skin in the game and allows consumers to feel engaged.

whack• 6 years ago

Very long article that buries the lede:

We need a market ecosystem of moderation vendors who provide different kinds of value to different kinds of users. A moderation marketplace is good for platforms because they don’t want to be the arbiter of truth, they just want users to have a good experience
It’s good for users because they’re not forced into anything; they can pick which web they want to dwell on. This may sound like a filter bubble, where ‘everyone has their own truth’, but moderation vendors will still need to maintain their reputation for being right

The author is overly optimistic in thinking that people who fall for blatant misinformation, will not fall for grossly biased or incompetent moderators. Anyone who believes Trump's election-was-stolen conspiracy theory, will also have blind faith in any moderator that Trump and his movement endorses, regardless of the moderator's reputation among mainstream sources.

You may say that doesn't matter because the vast majority of people will never tweak their settings and will simply use the platform's default moderator. Which is a good point, but once again, that brings us back to the status quo where people get upset about the "bias" shown by the platform and its anointed default moderator. I do like the idea of decoupling the platform corporation and the moderator, but it still raises questions about who gets to control the moderator organization.

Call me crazy but these misinformation campaigns have made one thing abundantly clear. Popular voting is inherently susceptible to actively-misinformed voters and there are no palatable solutions to this problem. https://outlookzen.com/2020/10/26/reasons-to-replace-the-pop...

XorNot4• 6 years ago

The real basic failure is the same one which is currently running: how do you limit it to 1 "author" per actual physical human being in the world?

Like set aside other problems like establishing credentials or reputability, disinformation campaigns are based on the reality that it's very easy to create just plausible enough looking accounts, and getting easier (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/).

endymi0n• 6 years ago

I'm completely convinced by now that fact-checking is utterly useless, because it is based on a specific worldview that truth is something important.

While I happen to share that worldview, recent populist politicians didn't just ignore that, but managed to turn this idea on its head — and the left still seems to not get it.

There was really no shortage of scandals, proven disinformation or exposing books. But I saw liberals and progressives stumped over the fact that exposing those lies did absolutely zero to change opinion over the populist administrations. No matter the previous results, all those years they still worked with the mindset that just exposing one more lie would suddenly change everyone's mind.

As Einstein said: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

The thing they don't get is that the average Bolsonaro or Trump supporter simply does not _care_ whether their politician lies, if they simply come out of the argument as stronger. It's not logical at all, it's psycho-logical.

Any facts are pretty simple to get off the table if you're brazen, narcisstic and sociopathic enough: Just accuse the other side of doing it before they do, and if they do, double down on it yourself in order to keep the narrative lead.

It doesn't even have to make the slightest sense, it just needs to make small egos feel good and in the know.

"ABC: I'm lying? Look at XYZ, he lied two times and I can prove it! So nasty!"

Suddenly the distinction between ABC lying every day and XYZ a dozen times in their career does not matter anymore to the casual onlooker. All politicians lie, why would fact-checking matter? In fact, probably even the fact-checkers lie!

And if you don't believe me, just remember that "Fake News" was an invention of the left that was rhetorically completely spun around (extremely successfully so) from meaning creating fake news to meaning that all (mainstream) news are fake.

It took nothing more than repetition and massive confidence. As long as you keep people more scared about China, socialism, gun-robbers and making the next paycheck, it's rather easy to control the narrative, no matter the facts.

Fact-checking is a liberal pipe-dream.

shrimpx• 6 years ago

Fact checking works in a civilized society where the adversaries are “good sports” who acknowledge the rules of the game — e.g., conceding a lost election. The problem today is that we don’t live in such a society. Our political reality has edged closer to pure wrestling for power, where the other guy is seen as bad and any lever is ok to pull to prevent them from expressing.

_y5hn8• 6 years ago

Who is funding those goons?

tacitusarc• 6 years ago

This problem is far deeper and more complex than the author makes it out to be. I have yet to see a single detailed explanation that actually touches on all the intricacies involved: from blog posts to documentaries, they all are incomplete at best or wrong at worst.

So of course, the proposed solutions are necessarily incomplete, as they're not working from a comprehensive understanding of the problem. I don't know how to solve this. The problem isn't recent, it's at least decades old, if not centuries. As far as I can tell, it boils down to a lack of effort to reconcile the experiences of disparate groups, and the need to contextualize their ideologies within those experiences. This fundamentally means that one person's facts can be another person's fiction, and the line between the two should be tread carefully. For a long time, this problem was sidestepped entirely, as groups simply avoided one another or had minimal contact.The problem was exacerbated in the modern world, and has been brought to its most extreme conclusion through the internet.

Institutional authority today speaks with too much unearned certainty. Those who share that certainty will be appeased, and those who do not will be incensed.

I do not know how to solve this problem. Neither does anyone else, though. That includes the author of this article, who doesn't even understand the problem in the first place.

If there is one takeaway, however, that I would like people to have, it is this: just because someone disagrees with you, or refuses to acknowledge facts of which you are certain, does not mean they are stupid. It is entirely possible it is you who are missing something.

Be uncertain.

_y5hn8• 6 years ago

The solution is simple, yet unoptimized entirely but for the smallest union of people: Empathy

The incentive everywhere need to be to empathize and understand our differences, to bridge the gaps. When one looks at the overall business world, which is institutionalized war and injustice, against people and environment, there is much to work with.

All the logic in the world won't right these wrongs.

Siira2• 6 years ago

Most people don’t have that much empathy. Most of them don’t even want it. (I certainly don’t want it.) Your solution is basically adding terms for other people to everyone’s utility function. It would require a super-Orwellian effort to pull that off. The truth is that there is no panacea at all, and we need to design sound game theoretic mechanisms for every single thing we care about.

Anka33• 6 years ago

"fact-checking" is dog whistle for "only leftist allowed"

klyrs2• 6 years ago

What about lefty antivaxers?

bleepblorp6• 6 years ago

The role of fact checking is not to strive for partisan balance but rather to identify public comments that are untrue.

American conservatives would fall afoul of fact checking far less frequently if the conservative worldview wasn't wedded to talking points that are not factually accurate. For example:

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence of ongoing large-scale voter fraud in US elections. There is no evidence that the incoming Biden administration intends to end capitalism. There were no 'convoys' of migrants preparing to violently storm the US-Mexico border prior to the 2018 midterms. Barrack Obama was not ineligible to serve as President. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals. Etc.

A fact checker who does not point out the fact-free basis of these, and other, deeply-held conservative talking points is simply not doing his/her job.

If the weight of fact checking falls primarily against conservatives, then conservatives can fix that problem by lying less frequently.

geofft2• 6 years ago

I think "fact checking" is the wrong framing for the problem at hand - assuming we're talking about the problem of people shooting up pizza shops. (The article also talks about how businesses or hobbyists who are genuinely interested in truth can find the truth more accurately, but I think that's pretty orthogonal to the problem of social-media-fueled conspiracy theories.)

Take the US election, for instance. At this point the "facts," strictly speaking, aren't really in doubt: we have certain reports from the various states following various procedures for verification, and those reports give a certain winner. The argument against that position is not against the checkable fact of the reports - the argument is that, for various reasons, multiple of these states are either deliberately lying or had their procedures tricked. What's left is whether you believe that to be plausible and in fact more plausible than the null hypothesis that the election went roughly as predicted. And that's not checkable, or at least not democratically-checkable. If you believe that voting machines were hacked in a way that left no evidence, or ballots were modified in transit, or the distance of observers left them unable to notice intentional mis-tallying, or whatever, what sort of fact would convince you otherwise?

If you are so inclined to believe that the election was stolen, you can find facts to back you up. It is factually true that there were illegal votes, for instance: in an election with 160 million votes, the chance that not a single person would misunderstand the rules for where they can vote are basically nil. It is factually true that the Georgia secretary of state made this argument, not particularly eloquently, and is on video saying that they expect to find voter fraud. It is factually true that many electronic voting machines lack proper safeguards. It is factually true that there are more avenues of attack on mail-in ballots. And so forth.

What we have is not a lying problem: what we have is a propaganda problem.

And we do. in a sense, have "distributed fact-checking" / a marketplace of fact-checkers: we have different members of the news media with different viewpoints. And it turns out people aren't particularly loyal to any one vendor. When Fox News called the election for Biden, people flipped the channel to Newsmax, which has "an editorial policy of being supportive of the President," according to their CEO. So I don't think that encouraging people to buy into fact-checking builds any bridges for the communities that incubate future pizza-shop shooters to come back to reality. What they will learn is that they can always find facts to fit their beliefs. Sure, there are facts out there that don't fit their beliefs, too, but they lack an interest in changing their beliefs, so it's easy to wave those away. (The flat-earthers mentioned in this article are another good example of this phenomenon.)

User23• 6 years ago

"Fact-checking" has very little to do with facts. It's just a clever rhetorical ploy to promote some viewpoints and disqualify others. Specifically, it's a species of bullshit[1]. If the actual facts support the bullshitter all the better, but if they don't you can rest assured the "fact check" will be "contextualized" to whatever extent is needed to serve the bullshitters' rhetorical ends.

[1] Bullshit defined here as speech intended to persuade without regard for veracity. The liar knows the truth and conceals it, but the bullshitter doesn't care if his statements are true so long as his bullshit is persuasive. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/385.On_Bullshit

rabuse• 6 years ago

This is how I feel about people claiming every dissenting view as "fact checked" or "debunked" in recent times; it just throws out any possibility of debate.

smt88• 6 years ago

So you believe nothing is a fact?

You're obviously not the target audience of fact-checkers. Most people agree on some basic principles of reality that can't be skewed.

For example, when a politician says something in public that millions of people hear and is recorded on video, and then he says he didn't say it, that is a lie. A fact-checker would provide the evidence and context.

Or if a politician says that nothing could be done to reduce Covid deaths in the US, that is less straightforward but also an easy lie to disprove because there are people who died due to lack of available tests for their coworkers, or people who died because of a huge nightclub being allowed to stay open.

throwaway2011038• 6 years ago

I hope you agree that context matters. Anyone can have a sound bite cut out of a larger statement and have that spun to be something that isn't representative, or that he didn't intend, or even the complete opposite. And then for many people, repitition becomes fact. Whatever they've heard most often, from the most sources, becomes their belief.

commandlinefan• 6 years ago

you believe nothing is a fact

No, but I do believe that “fact-checkers” get it wrong often enough to be skeptical about what they say is.

nitwit0053• 6 years ago

Basically, you've decided the fact checkers are somehow malicious actors, without any particular evidence of that actually happening, and vaguely labeled their speech as bullshit.

Seems like nonsense[1] to me.

[1] I mean this as the word is normally used.

textgel2• 6 years ago

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-condemn-white-suprem...

Mixture: During the debate, Trump was repeatedly asked and invited to explicitly and clearly condemn white supremacists, and he did not do that.

He did condemn it; it literally follows up with "Sure, I'm willing to do that."

And for added bs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc

38 Times President Trump Has Condemned Racism and White Supremacy

-------------------------

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-120million-deaths-co...

Mostly False: Biden said "Now we have over 120 million dead from COVID" at the Pennsylvania event in apparent reference to U.S. fatalities.

There is literally a video of him in the article doing it

-------------------------

Took literally a couple of seconds to find evidence.

txmachinery3• 6 years ago

I read it as: self-annointed arbiters of truth demean themselves by their own definition as such.

Trustworthy sources of information accept the limits of their knowledge and recognise their own ability to make mistakes. Who fact-checks the fact-checkers?

"Fact-checking" by definition, implies infinitely-superior, infallible knowledge.

Ie, bullshit.

jberryman2• 6 years ago

Do you have an example of what you're talking about?

treesprite82• 6 years ago

A number of fact checks just amount to "don't say it like that, say it in a way that supports our narrative instead" when there's no factual error. E.G:

https://i.imgur.com/EmalFyS.png https://i.imgur.com/bBCOXzv.png https://i.imgur.com/UZam8qQ.png

In cases of no evidence, they'll usually rule favorably if it's a narrative they like. Such as here with "Unproven, but alludes to a deeper truth":

https://i.imgur.com/heDavN2.png

Compared that to consistently rating Trump's claims as "Pants on fire" for lack of evidence, or "Mostly False" even when they found strong supporting evidence:

https://i.imgur.com/gATj4Kt.png

There's many topics which, even if I agree with the writer, should be in the realm of an article or opinion piece rather than a fact check (E.G: "AP FACT CHECK: Trump distorts record; BLM falsely accused of coordinating violent protests"). Fact checks should ideally stick to debunking falsifiable claims, rather than providing a counterargument for/against a large political issue.

jb775• 6 years ago

I recently noticed truthorfiction.com being prominently displayed on Twitter/Google searches related to the election, so I looked into who's actually managing content there. A few quick Twitter profile searches on the "Our Team" people revealed years of scathing Tweets about Donald Trump.

heimatau• 6 years ago

Democratized fact-checking won't work. The costs are too high. IF you can find a way to reduce the costs of the general public to fact-check, you might be onto something. But until then, we'll see a few places that sometimes provide signal to the general public but mostly provide noise. This problem isn't simple. If you have ideas, pitch them and build.

zby2• 6 years ago

Recycling my comment from a recent discussion: The problem is that we don't want facts - we want confirmations.

"The reality is that the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/

Fact checking is not the right angle to look at it - what we need is curiosity.

crazygringo• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, in the US, fact-checking addresses only the symptom, not the cause, and is unlikely to change anyone's minds [1].

We can see that disinformation isn't a necessary feature of democratic debate today, as it is a tactic used overwhelming by Republicans/conservatives, and very little by Democrats/liberals.

In a two-party system like the US, the structural reasons Republicans adopt this tactic is fundamentally because the structure of the Electoral College makes it rational for Republicans to target polarized extremists (to boost turnout), while Democrats need to target the center (to win swing voters) [2].

The solution isn't fact-checking. The solution is abolishing the electoral college, so that both parties have to appeal equally to centrist swing voters, who are more convinced by reasonable factual appeals than by polarized disinformation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

[2] https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-election-joe-biden-donald-...

chaganated• 6 years ago

Just wait until they start "fact checking" your personal conversations. Yet another unfortunate combination of elitist and philosophical dunce. It is so tiresome.

bleepblorp6• 6 years ago

There is very little evidence that fact checking actually works to reduce the impacts of disinformation. See e.g. this study of the impact of Twitter warnings on belief in disonformation:

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/c/8659/...

The only known-effective way to deal with disinformation is to remove it.

somehnrdr14726• 6 years ago

I wonder if pulling the brakes on what's being called the post-fact era, is futile. Maybe the internet is perfectly capable of maintaining N disjointed realities and there's nothing we can do to resolve them.

It may not be high-resolution virtual reality, but if the only way I interact with other people is through devices, it's virtual reality. We call them bubbles but they're so much more.

I think if we accept this as an invariant we might be able to find solutions by trudging forward. As a thought prompt it certainly gets my thinking cap going.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

The problem is that these coexisting fantasy worlds run into issues when you actually do touch reality, which does not go away simply because one choses not to believe in it.

covid of course being the most recent example. We can all run into whatever bubbles we want, but it won't stop a biological virus. Everyone can spin it into their own virtual narrative, but people will die nonetheless, and underlying the cloud and the internet is good old hardware and infrastructure, which is very real and very decaying. Fleeing into digital worlds is only a temporary solution.

oh_sigh2• 6 years ago

I'd like to know how distributed fact checking could deal with this example: trump's infamous comments about mexican border crossers including rapists and criminals.

From the quote, it is clear that the context is people crossing the border are frequently criminal elements, rapists being some of them. But every time I hear reference to this quote(except from overt trump supporters, who have their own issues interpreting events ), it is characterized as trump saying that all Mexicans are rapists. Literally every time I've ever heard it referenced, even from mainstream news articles.

How does one do distributed fact checking if there is a mass public delusion? At best, distributed fact checking can give you th concensus of fact checkers, which is not always the truth.

weswpg• 6 years ago

what percentage of immigrants - of any origin - are criminals and rapists?

the quote:

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said in the same speech. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

you can assume he meant something other than what he said, but his words were in reference to "When Mexico send its people", so it is not "delusion" to say he referred to "people from Mexico".

he so generously acknowledges that only "some" of them might be good people.

what do you think he meant when he said "they're not sending you"?

what do you think he meant by saying Mexico "sends" people to the US?

the media was right to treat that comment as indefensible.

oh_sigh2• 6 years ago

It being indefensible is a different point than characterizing the statement as "trump called mexicans rapists".

You're doing the exact thing I was saying that everyone does with regards to this comment.

Cyberthal• 6 years ago

The only ones who need agonize over the moral quandaries are the ones setting censorship policy. For the rest of us, it's helpful to stop worrying about ought and focus on what is. In the long run, an audience will leave a platform that discriminates against them. This means the big platforms will fragment. The more they discriminate, the faster this will occur. This is a financial and social benefit for their opponents, who should therefore expose but not oppose it.

Monolithic institutions such as Big Platform are vulnerable to the same ideological convergence that captured the big universities, but this problem is self-solving. Social cycle theory predicts hegemonic collapse due to impractical religion, but now both universities and Big Platform are being replaced piecemeal by the invasive barbarian hordes of the decentralized Internet, who ignore national boundaries.

See Parler and Gab for Twitter; DDG, Bing and Dogpile for Google. Facebook's challengers are VK, Minds and Diaspora, although Facebook is more loathe to offend its conservative lucrative userbase. Google's manipulations are subtle enough that anti-trust, section 230 and the like are probably greater threats; personalized search results still usually deliver a superior product despite biased results manipulation.

A divided society that increasingly refuses to do business with each other cannot have united platforms. For every leftist who discriminates against the right, there is a rightist who is legally barred from openly practicing his discrimination against a protected category on the left. Which isn't the same as saying this discrimination doesn't occur.

Already hordes of Republican Boomers have rejected Twitter's heavy-handed censorship, driving record competitor growth. Regardless of whether one believes Trump will overturn the MSM-declared electoral outcome, it's obvious that IF he does, Twitter's losses will accelerate. This will increase popular skepticism towards the other big platforms, to say nothing of increased governmental scrutiny.

Hillary's loss proved certainty an illusion. It's a bold bet; we'll see what happens.

Only distributed fact-checking can keep up with democratized distribution

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