Fact checks work, even on Facebook. But not enough people see them

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/10/facebook-fact-checks-effective-research/

5 6 5 years ago

yosito• 5 years ago

I have an automatic negative reaction to fact checks. As soon as I see one, I feel defensive against Facebook telling me what to believe.

I try to be a reasonable person, and not let what Facebook says or doesn't say affect what I believe. But not everyone is reasonable or has critical thinking abilities.

Facebook isn't exactly an entity that people trust. I think for many people, their fact checks could backfire.

giuliomagnifico• 5 years ago

I think that act in this way is a normal behaviour of a smart guy who is asking itself "Yes, but who fact check the fact checkers?"

native_samples• 5 years ago

Ironically this Washington Post article about people not seeing fact checks is paywalled.

Fact checkers have a big problem: people saying things that are outright and obviously untrue is relatively rare. Thus taken literally fact checking is not a very satisfying profession, as it would end up being dominated by trivial low impact, low status stuff like memes. As a consequence their staff leave their swimlane far too often and end up writing "fact checks" that wade into complex in-flight debates, usually by trying to claim missing context or that the wrong spin was put on something. These articles are no different to regular journalism and no more reliable.

Fact checkers also have a hard time understanding that they can make mistakes. People who fact check them back are invariably ignored. They're staffed by journalists, usually from left wing outlets, and their whole take on the process is basically just normal journalism in which the stories have a false/true/partly true label underneath the headline. There's no rigorous attempt to engineer trustworthy processes, even though the process of determining what's true or not is an extremely difficult and complicated one. Indeed that's basically the idealized version of the scientific process.

The canonization of these people via policies at tech firms makes all this 1000x worse. Because fact checkers are just lefty journalists in disguise, tech firms have effectively handed censorship control over to people with wildly ideological takes on things, and thus their so-called fact checking usually degrades into "whatever left wing authority figures say is true, is true". The result has been an orgasm of censorship in which 25 year old journalism interns have ended up blocking the views of highly credentialed experts, usually of the very same kind that are supplying them with their own counter "facts". They are so bad at this they can even end up making claims like "Health authorities disagree with this claim" about claims health authorities are themselves making!

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/kitten-corner-are-the-cdc...

As a profession fact checking is by now totally discredited. I don't know anyone who takes these claims of people being "fact checked" seriously. It's just an annoying and overt form of ideological censorship fraudulently posing as some kind of intellectualism.

beardyw• 5 years ago

I miss out on a lot of misinformation because try to read only reliable sources. I use RSS to get a feed from a fact checking site just to know what I am missing out on.

chuckee• 5 years ago

to know what I am missing out on.

You mean to know which stories they choose to fact check. Just like media (necessarily) choosing which stories to report and which to ignore or downplay, it's all too easy to turn fact checking itself into propaganda, despite treating each individual story with full even-handed honesty.

StanislavPetrov• 5 years ago

An effective Ministry of Truth will always "work", but not in a way that leaves people better informed.

Fact checks work, even on Facebook. But not enough people see them

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