Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95

by dberhane • 5 years ago

296 282 5 years ago

jamessb• 5 years ago

A previous discussion on the"Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg" mentioned in this article had 677 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595598

nickelpro6• 5 years ago

From the last discussion: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-t...

The BMJ is not the shining city on the hill here. You can have problems with Facebook policing information, but Thacker is unquestionably an anti-vax conspiracy theorist and the BMJ is allowing him to use their reputation to push that narrative.

NoPie5• 5 years ago

It states that Thacker has been double vaccinated with Pfizer vaccine. Anti-vax conspiracy theorist? That is clearly nonsense.

Avamander• 5 years ago

Plenty of quacks follow the principle of "do as I say, not as I do." It's a very common behaviour amongst populist politicians to talk shit about vaccines and then being fully vaccinated.

jjgreen• 5 years ago

Then there will be response articles which expose those errors as such, a consensus will be reached and we will move on to other issues. That is the nature of scientific discourse. Expecting everyone to shut up just because you shout "ANTIVAX" is not.

sascha_sl3• 5 years ago

We all know it this ideal of "just debunk it" doesn't work. Not just because a correction doesn't have the same reach, but because one audience will actively reject and ignore the evidence and then continue using the article on social media as "evidence" itself.

nickelpro6• 5 years ago

I posted exactly such a response. I don't expect everyone to shut up. The response addresses both the inaccuracies of the BMJ opinion piece and, more interestingly, explores how such a piece came to be put out by the BMJ in the first place.

Ardren• 5 years ago

Statements from the company that did the fact checking

- https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis...

- https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...

kgwgk2• 5 years ago

From article:

"[the company that did the fact checking] said Jackson was not a “lab-coated scientist” and that her qualifications amounted to a “30-hour certification in auditing techniques.” Jackson has more than 15 years’ experience in clinical research coordination and management and previously held a position as director of operations."

Talk about missing context and misleading statements...

undecisive3• 5 years ago

Have you actually read that article? It's expecting a whole lot of detailed evidence from an article. And maybe they're right? Maybe the article should have provided more excruciating details. But the details it does provide - just from the bits quoted here - seem enough to justify a stance of "We need to do better than this", at least.

It smacks of "Yes, some sloppy science was done here, but you can't prove it changed the results? Can you? Can you prove it? Huh? No? Well then shut your dirty mouth!"

Yes, this was supposed to be a blind study but participants had pages detailing whether they had the placebo or not in their notes. Did anyone actually read those pages? Nobody knows. Did you read those pages? Did you? I bet they didn't! I bet NOBODY reads the participants notes! Nobody ready them, it's all fine, and they yanked those pages out within a few somethings (We'll gloss over how someone might have found this out, and whether they were likely to be privy to the information already)

Yes, there were a bunch of used needles discarded in normal binbags rather than in a sharps box, but that doesn't PROVE that they were poorly trained! Oh no. It was probably just a bad day. Did it change the outcome? You can't prove it did! Don't tell me about it unless you're sure!

No, there's no evidence that THESE issues were reported, but look! Other issues were reported! The management had previously discussed how bad they were at the science! If they knew they were bad, they wouldn't continue to be bad would they! And if things were reported, and other things weren't, that's not likely is it... that's just confusing... CONFUUUUUUSSIIIIINNNGG

Yes, they had to take corrective action, but at least they took corrective action! There couldn't have been THAT many people affected, could there? Do you know? I don't know. I bet there weren't many. A handful maybe. Probably just an old couple who were discarded early on for licking the other participants faces. It's inconsequential. Definitely not a problem. No problems here! Move on!

It's almost comical.

It also really bugs me that rather than saying "The article says", throughout they say "Thacker says". They've made it a personal vendetta against an evil person making things up, like they're not even trying to be balanced about it.

That said, I love the summary: "In the end, we’re left with a lot of smoke, but no clear fire." Hmm.. if only there was a well known saying about this. No ... something ... without ... oh, I don't know. Seems legit.

nickelpro6• 5 years ago

I've read the article, Facebook's "fact checker" page, the BMJ's response, and the fact checker's response, as well as the posted response from Science Based Medicine. None of it "smacks of" anything, the series of events is clearly laid out.

A former Ventavia regional director provided internal company documents to Thacker that laid out potential flaws in clinical trials run by the company for Pfizer's vaccine candidate. Thacker's reporting on these documents places noticeable spin towards anti-vax sympathies for example:

Thacker writes in the introduction, in which he claims that Ventavia unblinded patients, not that “inadvertent unblinding may have occurred”. There’s a huge difference between the two.

Even without Thacker's spin, this is concerning and deserves investigation. However, for the overall safety of the Pfizer vaccine it's not a significant factor. Ventavia ran 3 out of 153 clinical sites, and signed up about 1000 of 44000 subjects who participated in the trial. Even completely disregarding any data that came from Ventavia, there would be overwhelming evidence of the vaccine's efficacy and safety.

The obvious framing here should be that Ventavia is potentially an irresponsible steward of pharmaceutical trials and Pfizer needs to have greater level of oversight over such contractors. The framing Thacker went with is that the Pfizer vaccine's safety and efficacy are in question due to falsified trials. The latter is simply untrue, and reveals an agenda that is concerning from an editor at the BMJ.

twic2• 5 years ago

Science Based Medicine isn't exactly squeaky clean either:

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/science-based-medicines-c...

Now, someone post a takedown of Singal so we can keep the chain going ...

nickelpro6• 5 years ago

If the BMJ issued a retraction and explanation in the same way that SBM did over that review we wouldn't be having this discussion. Hell if the BMJ didn't actively protest the fact checker's representation of the article as "missing context" we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Publishing missteps are inevitable. The BMJ is claiming authorial supremacy above its critics, that's the root of the controversy.

azalemeth• 5 years ago

Frankly, if I were the BMJ I would start contacting lawyers and issuing writs. I'm unsure of exactly what or where or how, but the principle that peer-reviewed scientific articles are being shadowbanned as "false" and unshareable by a for-profit, unqualified US organisation is...deeply offensive. A large lawsuit by an organisation such as the BMJ (an impact factor 40 journal first published in its current form in about 1840) would, at the very least, highlight how Facebook rapidly has become a publisher and its algorithms shape what people see.

It's like making a collage. If you put newspapers in a shop window, and sell them, you're a shop. You don't write the newspapers. If you cut out individual letters from newspapers and give them to people, you're not a shop, and you've made the message you create. Facebook is cutting out alternate sentences-to-paragraphs from the tabloids and selling a set of stories it thinks its users like, interspersed with ads. That question of degree is very much the sort of thing that legal brains like to get involved in.

frereubu• 5 years ago

Deeply offensive doesn't mean illegal. Unless there's a law that you can point at which bans this, there's no point in hiring lawyers because any challenge will be immediately thrown out. The real issue here in my view is that Facebook - a private company with no legal requirement to keep publishing anything that people post - is becoming the de facto news source for vast numbers of people. And, God help me, I have some sympathy for Facebook here if, as another commenter says, this study is being taken out of context and being used to push anti-vax conspiracy theories. It's such a complex issue.

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

If they are actually being labelled as false as part of the justification , there is at least an arguable case of defamation, stronger in a jurisdiction like Britain where truth of the damaging published characterization is a defense that the defendant must prove rather than falsity of the claim being an element that the plaintiff must prove.

lanerobertlane• 5 years ago

in the UK, where the journal is based, I think the libel laws would more than cover 'a law which bans this'.

English libel law permits individuals and companies to go to court to defend their reputations against the harms caused by false and defamatory publications made by others.

Since the statement that this is misleading, and a 'HOAX CLAIM', it would fall into "A statement is defamatory if its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant."[1]

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/26

ezconnect• 5 years ago

Facebook is working as intended, a weapon to capture the audience and control the narrative and overthrow governments. No one would want Facebook to change.

fabian2k4• 5 years ago

Just to clarify, the article in question is not a scientific paper in BMJ. It's a feature, so pretty much like a regular news article.

undecisive3• 5 years ago

On the article in question:

Footnotes
Provenance and peer review: commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

While it is an article, it has (in theory) been peer reviewed.

Compare that to this article:

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally reviewed.

denton-scratch• 5 years ago

pretty much like a regular news article.

...but not a "news blog", as claimed by Lead Stories.

rimliu• 5 years ago

"If you mix science and politics, you get politics"

GameOfFrowns3• 5 years ago

In the same vein:

"If you mix art and politics, you get propaganda"

roenxi• 5 years ago

That seems excessively litigious. And very questionable on a fundamentals level - nobody except Facebook and idiots will believe that Facebook's fact checkers have a better grasp of reasonable medical opinion than the BMJ editorial team.

The real story here is that we have one more item of evidence that Facebook doesn't have an algorithm to deduce truth from the cacophony of opinion. I'm not sure why we need evidence of this, but hopefully the people who thought the censorship teams were a good idea will eventually be persuaded that banning ideas outside the political mainstream leads to stupid results. And persuaded that Facebook should stop attempting the impossible and embarrassing themselves in the attempt.

jtbayly• 5 years ago

I’d personally like to see FB sued for this, as it is clear that your proposed solution has been tried and is not working. FB is not stopping this, but getting worse, as we see here.

I don’t know which way the lawsuit would go, but I’d like to see it happen.

paganel• 5 years ago

highlight how Facebook rapidly has become a publisher and its algorithms shape what people see.

Hopefully it will also highlight how this is a political thing, how it has been a political thing since the very beginning. When it comes to politics being a "peer-reviewed scientific article" doesn't count for much if it doesn't serve the purposes of the powers involved.

throw8932894• 5 years ago

Facts are facts! If the fact checking does not match reality, it is the reality that needs to be fixes!

sascha_sl3• 5 years ago

"Facts are facts", the favorite phrase amongst people who want to hide framing is almost equally important.

rahoulb• 5 years ago

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

Facts may be facts. But conclusions vary.

alignItems3• 5 years ago

The BMJ itself tightly controls who can say what on its platform, and that is precisely why it gained its reputation.

Granted, Facebook is supposed to be more open for everyone, but it’s still their platform, their reputation, and they can decide what to filter - and people can decide to take their discussions somewhere else.

differentView• 5 years ago

But when the largest font describes it as "Partly False Information", it's more than just excluding information, it's making an accusation.

Veen• 5 years ago

The issue is not whether Facebook, as a private company, can filter whatever it likes, but whether it does so reliably and truthfully in a way its users can trust.

Facebook can indeed decide what to filter, but its also permissible for other organizations to make users aware that Facebook may filter and display misleading messages based on inaccurate fact checking and that the fact-checking organization that caused the filtering defamed a reputable publication by falsely alleging that their content is a hoax.

largbae• 5 years ago

The BMJ does not claim protections as a platform, whether you call it one or not. BMJ is a publisher, and takes responsibility for the content that it publishes. The argument here is that FaceBook is now also a publisher.

alignItems3• 5 years ago

This is political/legal distinction.

Perhaps Facebook now is a publisher and needs to increase censorship even more.

Or the law can be changed to differentiate based on the scale of contributions and the corresponding complexity of moderation.

300bps2• 5 years ago

Lead Stories falsely defamed The BMJ by referring to their story as a hoax and creating a headline that says they were wrong without actually refuting anything. They then hide behind the “missing context” label which sounds innocent enough but they did far more than that.

There is something very dangerous about wanting to discuss a serious issue seriously and being squelched because it doesn’t fit some narrative.

I’ve personally had three shots from Pfizer, I’ve had them administered to my children and I want to hear if there are possible issues with them from reputable sources without those reputable sources being shut down by self-appointed information police.

bobcostas55• 5 years ago

The entire idea of "fact checking" on social media is premised on the notion that fact checkers have some kind of superior epistemic merit compared to the checkees. When you're fact checking random people or journalists that may or may not be true, but why does Zucc think facebook's checkers are superior to the BMJ? What are the fact checker's credentials, and most importantly what is their track record? The extreme opaqueness of the process is certainly not an encouraging signal.

gadders2• 5 years ago

I think they are mostly journalists that couldn't get hired on at a major newspaper.

GameOfFrowns3• 5 years ago

I think they are mostly journalists that couldn't get hired on at a major newspaper.

Brutal.

syshum• 5 years ago

So this would imply they are trustworthy and dedicated to the truth, because we know major newspapers are neither trustworthy nor have any connection with the truth these days

octoberfranklin• 5 years ago

We could use more reporters and fewer journalists.

CoastalCoder• 5 years ago

Why do you think that?

wolframhempel• 5 years ago

It's true, there are fundamental problems with the concept of "fact-checking". Often the "fact" is just the majority consent, as e.g., demonstrated by the banning of the Wuhan lab leak theory prior to it becoming mainstream. But more broadly, there is a stark imbalance between the resources of the fact-checker (a few minutes or hours to decide) and the author who (e.g. in this case) conducted a month-long, in-depth investigation. The same is true for the author who can be highly specialized in a given topic and the fact-checker who necessarily has to check a wide range of content.

Given that, "fact-checking" necessarily has to be overly broad and erring on the side of censorship.

jakobnissen• 5 years ago

Did Facebook really censor the lab leak idea? Last I checked, Facebook only censored the idea that the virus was manufactured, not that it merely leaked - and that theory is still fringe.

SilasX3• 5 years ago

Be careful not to jump the gun here. The vast majority of fact checking exists to call out stuff that's demonstrably false, and it's to their credit that social media platforms link a refutation.

But when you have a huge number of stories, there are going to be edge cases, and BMJ got snared by one here. As I understand it:

BMJ found legit problems with one vaccine's clinical trial. But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. Facebook's approach is to label it with the least-significant category, "needs context", i.e. please don't go overboard with drawing conclusions from this. But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed".

Facebook claims that this category doesn't result in the story or poster being penalized, but I'm not inclined to believe that since the users were reporting that they got nasty messages saying their posting in general would get de-prioritized and show up less if they kept reposting such stories.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

I’m really uncomfortable with Fact Checking on the Internet, particularly because we don’t know who we are anointing as the checkers. But I have yet to see a better alternative. The status quo of just giving everyone in the world a megaphone is clearly worse and not working.

It would be better if, instead of trying to claim that they were some kind of authority on what is a fact and what isn’t, they just said “this content is not the kind of content we want to host” and got rid of it that way. There’s no need to justify it as some search for the True Truth.

At the end of the day, Company X hosts the servers and decides what they host and if Company X don’t want to host some kind of content they won’t. If I started posting the n word all over HN, they have the right to get rid of it/me. They don’t want that content here and they have the justification to ban it.

igorkraw• 5 years ago

I love how people think fact checking is censorship, but banning nipples and other "not advertiser friendly" content is A-O-K.

One thing which annoys me about this is that internet corps have gotten with avoiding the framing of "editorial control". Facebook (and others) would like to pick and choose out of the following

1. We have things like the internet, which are utilities and only exist to convey their users intent. They are regulated (at least in europe strongly, in the US to some degree), and your ISP is simply not liable for what you say using them. Facebook doesn't want this because they don't want the commoditization and regulatory control 2. We have media which has editorial control: you have control on what is published on your platform, you can pick and choose for monetization, but you are liable in the end. Of course none of the big corps want this 3. And then there is the sad attempt of a middle ground carved out by the DMCA and similar laws which try to do something in between, but fail to meaningfully specify the amount of legal liability for non-copyrighted material. Who is responsible for publishing this? The platform isn't AFAIK, they only have to worry about brand impact.

Let's clear this up, either put some of the legal responsibilities and liabilities that newspapers and publishers face on the platform and see the problem of fake news vanish as facebook shuts down hard on what they allow on their platform OR classify them as something like a utility and demand openness OR something else, but let's stop the doublethink of "spreading propaganda is okay, but anything that hurts us making money is ok to censor". People might even migrate to new platforms based on their editorial style then

mint2• 5 years ago

That is a whitewash of what the early wuhan lab leak proponents were doing. At a time when very little was known about the origins, lab leakers latched on to the hypothesis not due to facts, because there were none, but because they acted as if they could absolve themselves of pandemic measures and our own poor preparation.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

The idea behind "fact checking" is that facebook wants to push the burden for the crap they broadcast to someone else, and it works, lawmakers go along with it.

emmelaich• 5 years ago

This what gets me. Zuck is a well educated fella. He must know this is wrong. Why is this happening? Has he lost control of Facebook? Is he not interested?

ceejayoz4• 5 years ago

He must know this is wrong.

It's entirely possible to be well educated and amoral, either via genuine inability to comprehend or simply not caring.

simiones• 5 years ago

Educated people do morally wrong things all the time. The two have no relationship to each other.

commandlinefan2• 5 years ago

He must know this is wrong.

From his perspective, it's not wrong, as long as the "fact-checking" goes his way.

b112• 5 years ago

What really bugs me here is, everyone yells at facebook, saying it is spreading propaganda, lies, societal harm, etc.

Then, fact checking is attempted, and people claim censorship, an imperfect job, and the idea that "How dare they!"

I literally loath, hate, and despise facebook. But come on, they're only doing this because everyone piled on them, claiming they must fact check and validate things.

If I was facebook, twitter, or google seeking this, I'd rightly think that listening to people is dumb, and they should just ignore them.

etherael4• 5 years ago

They should indeed just ignore them, free speech wasn't arrived at as an optimal path by accident. Nothing changed to make it not-optimal.

People need to adapt to not believing every stupid thing they read on the internet and actually thinking critically about things. The information streams of the world should not be tailored to the critical thinking ability of complete morons.

It blows my mind we went from "trying to censor cop killer is a bridge too far no matter the merits of doing so" to "you can't say things that compromise the interests of powerful individuals, offend the chronically sheltered, or that might confuse the braindead under any circumstances" just in my lifetime. Free speech seemed absolutely unassailable in my youth and has been completely destroyed relative to that in present day.

What the fuck happened?

Kye• 5 years ago

The people who want Facebook to not half-ass being a publisher and the people who want Facebook to stay neutral are different crowds.

aww_dang2• 5 years ago

Perhaps these walled gardens erected walls because they wanted to become gatekeepers. Those demanding censorship were largely the same partisans who set the tone for the fact check narrative.

I don't see them as victims of demands for truthiness, but as actors participating in a deliberate charade.

commandlinefan2• 5 years ago

everyone yells at facebook, saying it is spreading propaganda, lies, societal harm, etc.

Well, no, not everyone - the half of the people that wanted to silence the other half accused facebook of spreading propaganda to justify censorship. Now that they've won, the half that's being censored are pointing out that it's as bad as they said it was going to be.

Spooky23• 5 years ago

It’s not fact checking… it’s a spam filter style that slaps a warning label on things that could allows Facebook to say they did something.

No different than warning labels on cigarettes or really boring commercials from the NFL urging you to not gamble too much.

aa-jv• 5 years ago

Fact checking is better referred to as "authority enforcement" or "mainstream validation".

Here's how you know the fact checkers are actually propagandists: you can't find their name or their credentials, or who they work for/paid them.

ewidar• 5 years ago

It might be true for the fact checking groups described here, but to state that as a general case is incorrect.

Fact checking is better referred to as "authority enforcement" or "mainstream validation".

Fact checking at its core is about analysing assertions that can be objectively verified.

Fact checking must bring forth strong references/sources or proofs to either go in or against the initial assertions.

Here's how you know the fact checkers are actually propagandists: you can't find their name or their credentials, or who they work for/paid them.

If a fact checker does not provide this kind of info, then yes, it does not seem very trustworthy. Although you could still evaluate them based on the sources they are using for their fact checking.

But, obviously, it does not have to be the case. Fact checkers can and will provide info about their funding, affiliations, composition, etc...

As an example, you can take a look at the FAQ of this fact checker that was active during the French presidential election of 2017 https://crosscheck.firstdraftnews.org/france-en/faq/ :

As you can see, they clearly state that they received funds from Google News to set things up. They also share details about their partners, members, etc.

steelstraw• 5 years ago

The year is 1633.

Galileo: "Earth and all other planets revolve around the Sun."

Fact Check: Experts say Earth is the center of the universe. Galileo's claim is false and harmful.

secondaryacct• 5 years ago

It's like if you were bemoaning children were taught by teachers rather than figure it out on their own.

A bad teacher is better than no teacher, a bad censor is better than your grandma telling my kid virii dont exist :p

causalmodels• 5 years ago

Is a bad teacher better than no teacher? My parents had to pull my brother out of third grade because his teacher routinely picked on and harassed him, even going so far as to give him an in school suspension for talking back because they refused to believe "sphere" was a word even after being shown numerous dictionary entries.

intended3• 5 years ago

From What I know - Meta added fact checkers because historically they were being used to host conspiracy and worse.

BitwiseFool7• 5 years ago

I remember when Jeffry Epstein's sex trafficking was just a conspiracy. Good times.

cplusplusfellow• 5 years ago

I have some small trouble believing that the fact checking is in fact, checking facts. They are checking narrative.

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

Narrative Enforcement

raxxorrax3• 5 years ago

but why does Zucc think facebook's checkers are superior to the BMJ

Because they are his fact checkers. It isn't an argument against Zuckerberg or a condemnation, this is just the obvious explanation.

Whoever came up with the concept of fact checkers plainly wanted to establish some form of authoritative voice or judge. I believe the concept is futile and the motives often dishonest. It will not work for whatever reason though.

throwaway24744• 5 years ago

I hope that at some point we get to see an in-depth business case study of Pfizer and how they’ve been so successful out of the pandemic. They seem to have an unbelievable grasp of the science-marketing game and how to navigate it successfully at scale.

Without getting too far into controversial territory, I’ve observed that

- Out of many competing vaccines, Pfizer was always the “cool” one, in both scientific and lay circles

- The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug

- It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way

And yet

- You still won’t read this in most mainstream media, and still can’t mention these things in many social contexts

- Governments around the world are still pushing Pfizer/Moderna over all other vaccines (hear about AZ recently?)

This article is another example of how their marketing machine is working for them.

If I ran a multimillion dollar company in a highly regulated industry, I’d be taking very careful notes of him how Pfizer is playing this one.

fabian2k4• 5 years ago

Myocarditis is a very rare side effect, you generally can't see those in phase 3 trials. You need a lot of people for these to show up, simply because they are so rare. That's nothing new here, this applies to every new drug or vaccine. And Biontech/Pfizer doesn't have the highest myocarditis rate, that is for Moderna.

The vaccines also simply work. They worked very well against the wild type where they also prevented infection, and not only drastically reduced death and hospitalisation. They still reduce death and hospitalisation against Omicron. We figured out now that you really want a third dose for best protection, but that is simply something that you can't know if you have to develop a vaccine on such a compressed timescale.

The mRNA vaccines are the best ones against COVID. AZ and J&J have more serious rare side effects, and they are simply less effective. They're still dramatically better than no vaccine, but once the vaccines were not scarce anymore in the developed world, it made sense to focus on the better ones.

throwaway24744• 5 years ago

As a disclaimer, I have ongoing cardiac side effects. Several doctors from general practice and in cardiology have separately told me that they all generally accept the published numbers much lower than what they see first hand. In a previous comment I hypothesised this is because the reporting systems are not good.

bambax• 5 years ago

It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way

This isn't true, and makes one question the rest of your message. What is true is that the vaccine doesn't really stop people from contracting Covid. But it prevents them from being sick, which is what matters. This is verifiable.

dataflow• 5 years ago

My understanding is Pfizer was the "cool one" because it was a well established pharmaceutical company that created a vaccine on a compressed timeline that drastically cut the rate of severe illness and death, with performance better than much of its competition. i.e. it was to a great extent based on merit (both in the past and present).

The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug

Links with actual numbers to illustrate the scale of the alleged issue are pretty necessary with this kind of accusation.

locuscoeruleus• 5 years ago

- It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way

One of the nordic countries has 10x more infections than the first wave and 0.5x people in intensive care. While the vaccines have failed to stop the pandemic, I disagree that the contribution is not meaningful.

throwaway24744• 5 years ago

I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. I think the vaccine helped against past strains, and maybe a bit against omicron, but it was vastly oversold.

InsomniacL4• 5 years ago

"Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong"

Where has it gone wrong?

“We did not call into question the integrity of The BMJ’s story, only the comprehensiveness of it. That’s the point of a ‘Missing Context’ rating.

The BMJ article is being used as evidence of Vaccine Conspiracy theories, it's not like the warning is on the Article, it's where it's shared on Facebook and the missing context label is relevant in that context. A context where the vast majority of people viewing the facebook posts will not understand the BMJ may cover a sub-topic where the results do not reflect on the outcome of the parent topic...

Hnrobert42• 5 years ago

Indeed, the very controversy around the label is evidence that the article needs more context.

josephcsible• 5 years ago

This really seems like a Kafka trap.

cool_dude852• 5 years ago

The BMJ article is being used as evidence of Vaccine Conspiracy theories

Where does this logic end? If I screenshotted your post and put it on my blog about how FB can do no wrong, that Zuck should be president, that the government is just out to get FB for being successful, etc. does that mean your post should have included context that clarified that none of this is true?

InsomniacL4• 5 years ago

A warning alongside links on Social Media for 'missing context', where the Article is being used as evidence if something it's not seems like a good logical end.

ErikVandeWater• 5 years ago

1. The screenshot shows Facebook is telling owners groups of group that the information is "partly false." "Partly false" is obviously a distinct claim, and one that does not appear to be supported.

2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness.

InsomniacL4• 5 years ago

1. The screenshot shows Facebook is telling owners groups of group that the information is "partly false." "Partly false" is obviously a distinct claim, and one that does not appear to be supported.

This is only shown to Group Admins, you're correct that it's wrong however it's clearly a simple wording mistake with limited impact.

2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness.

That's a big stretch, 4,000 - 8,000 thousand articles are published to the BMJ each year, one of them having a label on social media with 'missing context' is not censoring quality reporting.

whywhywhywhy2• 5 years ago

Did the people who pushed the “Fact Checking” system ever consider what the people reading the misinformation the fact check would appear under would think when they saw the fact check?

Because I really doubt the thing going through their head is “wow this might be wrong”. Trust in any government, media or institution has already been completely burned for those people and things like “Fact Checks” to them only makes the misinformation seem more legit.

I’d bet if you actually engaged with those people you’d discover this system accelerated misinformation not curbed it.

rdtsc3• 5 years ago

Very good point. That’s exactly what was happening in the Soviet Union. People craved banned things. Books, ideas, articles, authors, items from the West, etc. Being banned automatically increased their appeal.

mandmandam4• 5 years ago

That's a nice idea, but not actually true.

“When people saw those warning labels, 95% of the time they did not go on to view the original content,” the company says. Moreover, if an article is rated “false” by their “fact checkers”, the network will “reduce its distribution”. This means that, while an author or poster is not aware that censorship is taking place, the network could be hiding their content so it is not widely disseminated.

The piece above was censored by FB as misinformation, before they apologised for the error. - https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-lea...

whywhywhywhy2• 5 years ago

the network will “reduce its distribution”

That's a different subject, I'm talking about what's happening in the persons head when they see it. Not about if the network actually just shadow-censors it so they never see it in the first place.

germandiago• 5 years ago

In my country there is no media I believe less than the fact-checking one, officially given to friends of my current government to the wife of one of the most well-known people in Spain, for its channel "La Sexta", her name is Ana Pastor, wife of Ferreras.

Besides controlling the media nearly as a monopoly, they receive favors from government like public money, when they are supposed to be private media. Same for Cadena Ser, for which there are jokes as "the most public private radio ever".

All this, at least in Spain, are the same people and I consider it basically a layer of corruption with the tax payer money. Also, they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true (there is a video in Internet from Joan Planas where he requested to correct information), they did not correct the information giving excuses about the inability to do it (so they were aware of the "error").

That is the level of confidence I have in fact checking in Spain. In other countries, I do not know, but I see it as a fight for the monopoly of the truth and to control and censor with the excuse of better quality of information, which is not true here. Besides that, fact-checking should not be even a thing, because things are not so clear sometimes. In fact, I have seen some articles from those fact-checking agents with extreme bias loads with the only purpose of shifting people opinions.

Those were not facts, they were merely perspectives and why you should think what they say and why it is not correct according to them to use one term or another. All in all, propaganda.

kgwgk2• 5 years ago

they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true

I loved the time there was a claim that you could spend three days in jail for such and such and they 'fact-checked' it as false because you could be detained for a maximum of 72 hours.

[Edit: I misremembered slightly. It was "a few days" but the point stands. Three days qualify as "a few".]

alignItems3• 5 years ago

From Lead Stories' Response [1]:

The "Missing Context" label applies to content that (while true or real) might still be misleading because crucial information is missing. Given the enormous engagement the article received and the kinds of reactions it elicited that certainly seems to have been the case here.

“Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial”

The BMJ.com headline, shown above, fails to make two important distinctions:
The allegation concerns just three of the 153 sites at which the vaccine was tested on 44,000 participants. It would have been less misleading to say "data integrity issues at 3 of 153 Pfizer trial sites."

Given how many of the social media audience would read just the title, perhaps the missing context label is accurate.

[1] https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...

Semaphor• 5 years ago

I agree with you, but if that is their standard, I’m expecting to see "Missing context" labels on almost every news article being shared on facebook, as headlines are almost exclusively clickbait to some degree.

MauranKilom2• 5 years ago

I didn't walk away with a clear picture: Was it "data integrity issues at 3 out of 153 sites [no idea about the remaining 150]" or was it "... [the others were fine]"?

The FDA audits were at some other sites of those 153 and reportedly did not find any incongruences. Which need not mean there were no issues, but it's certainly a prior.

d23• 5 years ago

I'm coming to the same conclusion. Judging by just how far down I had to come to find this comment even on a site like HN, it's pretty clear people are uninterested or unable to read, put things into context, and think critically.

I'm surprised people can't even recognize the smell of something wrong, even when it's out in the open:

The BMJ has locked horns with Facebook and the gatekeepers of international fact checking after one of its investigations was wrongly labelled with “missing context” and censored on the world’s largest social network.

The tone of the very first sentence is off. This is the publication describing itself.

dogleash• 5 years ago

Given how many of the social media audience would read just the title, perhaps the missing context label is accurate.

If that's the standard we're going with, 95% of content and 100% of ads on social media should also have big factcheck warnings on them.

rdtsc3• 5 years ago

Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.”

Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing the party? Not so fast! In order to get past them you have to use euphemisms hoping they won’t catch them. Or, profusely praise the ideology hoping to appease them so they’d let your article through, hoping they would be flattered and let your one slightly controversial idea at the end through.

No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.

d35007• 5 years ago

No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.

If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.

madeofpalk2• 5 years ago

Reminds me of John Mulaney

If we're comparing the badness of two words and you won't even say one of them... That's the worst word.

rdtsc3• 5 years ago

If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.

I didn't say they are _exactly_ the same, that's pretty obvious. Especially that one is a country and the other is a company. So it's a bit of straw man, isn't it?

Not every single person who criticized the government or published anything that was censored was sent a labor camp. Those had been eliminated by the 60s. However people didn't get promoted, lost their jobs (is a journalist losing their job and not being able to be hired because they pointed out something controversial that different?), added to blacklist. The response to that was the people auto-censored themselves. They didn't want to get in trouble so they didn't talk about certain things. Those that tried used a few trick to get around the censors, and I outlined those already.

aww_dang2• 5 years ago

No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54007824

"The arrest of a woman in Australia for promoting an anti-lockdown protest online has drawn criticism, after video of the incident went viral.

Footage shows officers handcuffing pregnant woman Zoe-Lee Buhler, 28, in her home in Victoria on Wednesday in front of her partner and children."

And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.

"MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern, information that might be useful, information that may or may not be interesting to your viewers.

You all make decisions, just like the social media platforms make decisions, even though they’re a private-sector company and different, but just as an example.

So we are ma- — regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans seeing — are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#As_metaphor

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

Facebook should be banned from allowing any content about COVID in its network, for public health reasons. They are a shit company that leeches on the free content of their users, who would expect any kind of good to come out of this. No need to sue them , investigate them etc, just ban anything that mentions covid on their network

kryogen1c2• 5 years ago

the idea of "fact checking" has a false premise - its begging the question[0]. we need to disabuse ourselves of this notion that we can know the Truth or the "facts" if we just checked enough. there is no such thing as contextless infromation.

is the sky blue? depends. maybe it emits a certain spectrum based on gas content on our planet, but color is a perceptual experience.

did trump\biden say X? maybe; is that the whole question - that their mouth made a set of sounds? did they say it, or did they mean it? could they have changed their mind? did they mean it but only tried halfheartedly?

this can be true of hard sciences too. aspects of newtonian physics were known to be true, verifiably by all experimental data, until one day they were proven false. not that physics are so dogmatic, but if facebook can factcheck the bmj, im sure theyd fact check some patent clerk.

i have been pondering the words of the history enthusiast dan carlin[1]. he thinks the most important person in history was JFK because he chose peace and didnt deploy nukes when everyone around him was forcefully recommending WWIII due to the known motives, the "facts" of russia and cuba. i wonder what the fact checkers would have been saying about that.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

[1] https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/

EDIT: the due dilligence required to learn about a topic and have the gall to report about its "truth" is called journalism, not fact checking. its not called facebook journalism because that would too obviously be a steaming pile of shit.

pdpi2• 5 years ago

You don’t need to have a nuanced perspective on the truth to be able to spot outright lies and nonsense. E.g. Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population.

I’m perfectly OK with fact checkers getting rid of that level of nonsense while letting most of everything else true.

jrd79• 5 years ago

The problem with your reasoning--and it is exhausting that society seems to need to relearn this every generation--is that this is not about what standard you think is reasonable. It is about the granting and exercise of power. Once the power has been granted to determine what is true or false, and to suppress the latter, then absent a carefully constructed system of checks and balances, that power will be abused, as all unchecked power is.

It doesn't even take long. When they took out Infowars a few years back, people kept saying it was ok because they are so terrible, etc. A couple years later and they are brazenly censoring the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in the US, and one with a very large readership, because it posted a completely and obviously true, newsworthy, and timely story about Hunter Biden during a presidential election.

That anybody defends this paradigm of social media censorship shows how deeply rooted tribalism is in human nature, and how it degrades the capacity in otherwise smart people for critical thinking.

If an article has false assertions, is missing context, or is being used by third parties to promote related falsehoods, then the remedy is for critics to write other pieces that correct the record and let the public sort out truth from falsehood. If the critics can't make their case, then that is on them, not an excuse to set up an unaccountable power structure to quash unfavored ideas.

FredPret3• 5 years ago

An example of a fact that can be checked would be the height of a tree or the size of an island.

Whether person X helped group Y do Z is vastly more complex and can be answered on several levels. It’s best left to the public to apply literal common sense. Also, most political debates are on this level of abstraction, making fact-checking a non-starter

BitwiseFool7• 5 years ago

"Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population."

True, but if this is so self-evident do we really need to fact check the likes of this? Why is fact-checking the most obviously false things used as a shield to justify slapping true/false labels on far more nuanced and politically motivated information?

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

I’m going to stick my neck out and say that Facebook made the right call here.

The problem isn’t the content, but rather the audience, and how they react to said content.

People generally don’t read articles - particularly lengthy articles, particularly articles written by academia for academia - they read the headline, perhaps the lead, and then go post and spread their interpretation of the information.

The BMJ have a reputation as being a reputable source of information.

Take these two together, and you have a wavefront of posts claiming that the BMJ agrees that vaccines are dangerous and poorly tested, and the story isn’t what the article holds, it isn’t nuanced, it isn’t moderate, it’s “look, this proves that bill gates wants a microchip in you, and the BMJ confirms it!”.

So, you have a difficult choice. Do you allow a factual article and the reputation of the BMJ to be used as fodder for anti-vaxxer sentiment, or do you try to dampen the squib and decrease the propagation of the distorted interpretations?

If anything, there should perhaps be a middle road, where in order to share or comment on an article, you have to answer a series of questions about what the article says. This would dampen the network effect, and would hopefully ensure that people are actually forced to read the content they’re sharing, rather than relying on a headline and a strapline interpretation added by the sharer.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

I'm an absolute enemy of both "fact checking" and corporate regulation of speech, in coordination with government, on forums as large and general as Facebook. That being said, this supporter of the Facebook action, who is well qualified to speak, offers very good arguments that this was not science but instead guest editorial by a regular woo/conspiracy pitcher, and another specific indictment of recent BMJ editorial decisions.

Didn't convince me that "fact checking" isn't vile, but it convinced me that in this specific case, the content was shit:

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-s...

EDIT - actual link: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...

tpoacher• 5 years ago

I don't think a blogpost full of empty vitriolic arguments is the best rebuttal proving "the content was shit". It just shows this particular blogger had some axe to grind and cannot be taken seriously.

My understanding of the issue is that the content itself was "not shit", but the timing and context in which it was likely to be perceived at the very least, associated it with less palatable implications, which may or may not hold, and are typically borne by counterproductive groups. And there was some evidence that indeed this was how the article was perceived by such groups.

But the article itself, in a completely epistemic sense, was "not shit" at all. It was actually very insightful for anyone interested in the context of the actual science involved.

So this is not as black and white as you suggest, imho, and even if it were in this particular case, the broader issue raised is still important:

If you do science A which is useful for good thing B, but has the potential to be falsely interpreted as bad thing C by bad group D, should we expect an overreaching group E to shadowban/discredit A?

I say no. I would much rather have a proper discussion instead.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Your characterization of the blog post lacks any reference to the blog post.

Here's one:

Thacker’s main source was a “whistleblower” named Brook Jackson, who had worked at Ventavia for only two weeks. As I described, the allegations were either big nothingburgers that wouldn’t have affected the quality of the data (e.g., not appropriately using sharps containers to dispose of sharps) or were mainly insinuated and implied without actual evidence (e.g., unblinding or even falsifying clinical trial data). The article follows a familiar format for disinformation. Very definitive and serious accusations are leveled very early in the article, followed much later in the article by “facts” that do not actually substantiate such definitive and serious allegations.

-----

It might actually help if I include a better link, what I posted was actually a follow-up that was the first to come up in my history: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...

civilized2• 5 years ago

I'm not familiar with the fact checker Lead Stories and was curious what else they publish. I went to their Twitter feed [1] and something caught my eye, a story about the mortality of COVID vs the Spanish Flu [2]. The headline posted on Twitter was "Fact Check: COVID-19 IS Deadlier Than The Spanish Flu And Seasonal Flu" [3].

That headline shocked me, because if you follow the mortality statistics, there is no way COVID's worldwide mortality rate could draw anywhere near the mortality rate of the 1918 flu epidemic, which has been estimated at 1-6% of the entire world population (17-100 million deaths, world pop in 1918 approximately 1.8 billion) [4, 5]. COVID has been estimated at about 7 million deaths so far out of a world population of 7.9 billion [6], for a global mortality rate of around 0.1%. Even looking at total excess deaths, which includes a lot of non-COVID causes, you have 20 million, still at the lower end of the 1918 epidemic's range with a much larger world population [7].

Lead Stories eventually defends their claim by comparing Spanish Flu mortality to peak COVID mortality in New York during the early epidemic - a bizarre case of cherry-picking.

To their credit, Lead Stories did update their headline soon after tweeting that to remove the claim about Spanish Flu, but the lead sentence still reads as follows:

Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading...

This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading.

Considering this and their significant failures in the BMJ incident, I would hesitate in trusting this fact checker to consistently provide high-quality, unbiased checks.

[1] https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom

[2] https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-...

[3] https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/148358521874124800...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

[6] https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-...

[7] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

sertraline• 5 years ago

Entire fact-checking thing is just the media under disguise, so click-baity articles are to be expected. They often try to present their claims as if the subject they write about is entirely false, even when it isn't. Moreover, it's not only that they are not qualified to write on most topics they write about: all fact-checking studios act under guidelines of IFCN, the "International Fact-Checking Network", so it doesn't matter whether cases like these happen on Facebook or Twitter, they are governed by the same entity that is likely to pursue its own political interests and bias.

tremon• 5 years ago

a bizarre case of cherry-picking

One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.

I have no opinion on the merits of the chosen comparison, but if your position is that it is fair to compare the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic that occurred right after a devastating world war with the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic under 21st-century health care and information systems, then I would also accuse you of cherry-picking your statistics: you need to include both the differences in healthcare and the differences in case numbers in your comparison.

civilized2• 5 years ago

I didn't say what is fair, so please don't bother making such insinuations. Let qualified researchers decide that. I simply pointed out the flaws in the comparison made by Lead Stories and how they used it to justify a misleading claim.

The article made an extremely specific comparison - all-time Spanish Flu toll versus COVID toll in a very specific time and place where it was especially bad - did not justify it, and used it to imply a broader claim about the relative deadliness of the pandemics. And the broader claim was explicit before they changed the headline.

I reject the idea that the appropriate comparison is subjective in this context of fact-checking. Lead Stories cannot freely make whatever comparison it feels justified and present the result as a fact about the relative deadliness of the 1918 and COVID pandemics. The most relevant facts prima facie are those presented in my initial post. If someone wishes to argue that COVID is more deadly after controlling for XYZ, the proper forum for that is a peer-reviewed scholarly research article.

msandford• 5 years ago

One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.

Is it though?

I get that if you're talking about how much money something cost in 1918 and how much it cost today you'd want to take inflation into account otherwise everything in 1918 is "free" (or 90%+ discounted) compared to today.

But when you're talking about lives and deaths, well, I mean I don't think a life back then is worth any more or less than a life today. On a population adjusted basis a single death "counts" more insofar as there were fewer people around so a death is a larger percentage of the world population. But it doesn't inherently have less value.

evancoop• 5 years ago

On some level, this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors and vociferous debates.

So, what's preferable? Unfettered venom and lies mixed with the best attempts at rationality or the discourse moderated by unseen arbiters and algorithms?

Ideally, there would be multiple forums. But given how technology scales and how network effects operate, we'd likely wind up with a few enormous entities.

Thus, I refer back to the choice above. Which will it be?

robmccoll2• 5 years ago

Neither. Change the law to make platforms like Facebook accountable for the content published on them. Here's how you do that without damaging speech or making platform companies impossible: make platform protections dependent on revenue stream. If you are paid by the author to publish their work, you are a protected platform and it isn't your content. If you make money by selling advertising alongside the content or by selling a subscription to the content stream, you are exposed to libel lawsuits, incitement, hate speech, false advertising, etc. The rest will sort itself out.

Previously journalism cleaned itself up because it could be held accountable for outright lies. There is incentive to make outrageous claims because outrage sells. The balance is to create civil and criminal repercussions for provable lies. Lies spread on social media like wildfire because outrage sells and more eyeballs means more money for the platform, so the platform and the authors are incentivized to create and spread misinformation. There is no balance against it, so it will continue to grow.

madeofpalk2• 5 years ago

Wait...

If you make money by selling advertising alongside the content [...] you are exposed to libel lawsuits [...] The rest will sort itself out.

By "sort itself out" you mean Facebook would moderate and remove 100x more content? I cannot see how that is not the only outcome if you make platforms liable for the content its users post.

krapp3• 5 years ago

False dichotomy. We can and do already have both, on multiple forums, and even on the big social media platforms. That's the case despite there being a few large entities, just as small restaurants continue to exist despite the existence of MacDonald's. The premise that "centralization" of the internet through FAANG gatekeepers forces people to adopt either one or another model as universal to either accept or reject those gatekeepers is fallacious. Centralization of attention isn't centralization of the network.

If this trend of fact-checking causes too much bad press and hassle for social media platforms, then platforms will simply stop fact checking or people will turn to alternatives. But the internet isn't going to turn into an Orwellian thoughtcrime dystopia nor will it turn entirely into 4chan.

djohnston• 5 years ago

We can and do already have both, on multiple forums, and even on the big social media platform

Give me one example

honkdaddy• 5 years ago

nor will it turn entirely into 4chan.

Sadly, it seems that instead, the internet is turning entirely into Facebook :(

sharkjacobs• 5 years ago

this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors

the classic anecdote of the husband who does a really bad job washing the dishes so his wife won't ask him to do them anymore

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

Who is this clownery even for? Does anyone care about „fact checking“ at all? Personally I have maximum distrust towards those fact checking offers, there always seems to be an agenda behind it.

aceon48• 5 years ago

It was never about fact checking. It was always about narrative control.

TrispusAttucks• 5 years ago

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

addicted• 5 years ago

Fact checking on media is bad.

The BMJ article, however, was horrible. Poorly sourced (based entirely on someone who was fired and didn't have the technical capabilities they had to judge the claims they were making) and the BMJ editors have basically descended into new age woo instead of real science (I am not sure if this affects the journal, but the specific article was BS).

intended3• 5 years ago

Every time these conversations come up on HN - there’s a number of comments saying that fact checkers have to decide things in a rush - contrasted against authors who spend time on an article.

Am I missing something about American fact checkers ?

The sites I know have limited resources so they spend their time on quality work in the few places they can.

How does fact checking work in the states ? Is there something non obvious about fact checking groups?

intended3• 5 years ago

Welcome to the future ?

Stop fact checking sites, and social media becomes even worse than it is.

Use fact checkers, and you love with false positives and false negatives.

Then narratives form around those errors ( because we are pattern recognition machines, even when there are no patterns).

So what’s the out ?

All fact checking will create some amount of False pod/negative. No amount of money, time or resources can avoid that.

bo1024• 5 years ago

There is a different issue with the "fact checking" approach: it allows Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) to deflect blame from their algorithm.

FB's narrative is that the problem is the people who post untrue stuff, and fact checking will fix the problem (actually it won't, but it will show FB tried their best).

But the problem is FB's algorithm which promotes and publishes rampant misinformation. FB should be held accountable for what they decide to show people. Not deflect accountability onto their users.

FredPret3• 5 years ago

The very existence of fact-checking demonstrates a deplorable intellectual arrogance.

Do these people meditate deeple and then receive divine inspiration as to what is really true? Do they have transcendent superbrains that work better than everybody else’s? Do they have access to Secret Wikipedia that contains only true and current facts?

The truth of everything we do will be visible only centuries from now, after all strong political feelings we have shifts somewhere else. (Today we look at Ancient Rome and do not care about the Reds and the Greens.)

Also, most human statements cannot be evaluated for truth, including this one. We communicate mostly feelings, sentiments, our sense of something, and the odd number or two.

fellowniusmonk• 5 years ago

I think individuals like FredPret have never tried to run any kind of forum or publicly editable resource on the internet.

Bad actors telling simple lies for lol's and/or profit do exist and they will ruin communities.

Inline fact checking is a feature of all successful forums, whether the fact checking is done by the institution or the community is immaterial to the true existence of the need.

If computers with all of their precision require checksums and error correction in data transfer protocols it seems arrogant and perhaps willfully ignorant to think humanity does not also require this for the continued propagation of accurate and useful data.

People often conflate "general existential uncertainty" with the "knowability of truth inside a shared frame of reference", in this case our shared frame of reference is physical reality and propositional statements can be "grounded".

Some people just stop trying because they are tired. Some because they lack the tools to evaluate data and create confidence intervals. Like most nerd skills, talented data analysts can be hard to find.

The very existence of this article and the ensuing discussion shows that the internet continues to surface facts and route around censorship. The efficacy and methodologies forums use will continue to evolve and require refinement, and have evolved from the early BBS days, some forums will also tend to be run in an overly authoritarian/restrictive/harmful way, just like in the old BBS days.

All online community that philosophically and practically reject error correction tend to end up shut down by the state for child pornography or overwhelmed with snake oil salesmen preying on the credulous.

FredPret3• 5 years ago

Thinking that one can compare a checksum with a factchecker is exactly the kind of misunderstanding that I’m referring to.

A checksum can be computed and compared. It is simple. A political statement will be higher up the ladder of abstraction and cannot be parsed as precisely or understood out of context. It is complex. It can only be judged by millions of complex brains coming up with their own nuanced opinions.

Wishing for a world where all important statements can be judged as “true” or “mostly true” or some such nonsense is magical thinking.

huetius• 5 years ago

I think my only strong opinions on fact checking are that the situation has exposed the problems inherent in techne without episteme, and that it is no longer tenable to punt on philosophical questions.

RHSeeger• 5 years ago

Without trying to express any opinion on the correctness of Facebook's behavior in this specific instance... this quote in the BMJ writeup concerned me

The Lead Stories article, though it failed to identify any errors in The BMJ’s investigation, nevertheless carried the title, “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying and Ignored Reports of Flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.”
The first paragraph wrongly described The BMJ as a “news blog” and was accompanied by a screenshot of the investigation article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or inaccurate.

It is _entirely_ possible for a story to be factually correct and still be completely misleading. Just because it doesn't outright lie doesn't mean it's not misleading.

For example, I can point out that "Senator <X> voted, multiple times, against adding funds for the support of military veterans", and that would leave a lot of people with the idea that Senator <X> is specifically trying to prevent funding for veterans. However, it's just as likely that the bills in question were primarily about something that the senator was against, and the veterans part was a tiny "pet addon"; and the senator was voting against the more substantial goal of the bill.

That type of misleading information is used ALL the time, and nothing about it is factually incorrect... but it's still intentionally misleading. It's goal is to make people believe something that isn't true.

rob_c• 5 years ago

The only way to counter bad speech is with more speech.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

If you want to go up against the trillion dollar vaccine companies, then you better be able to buy congress and pay off social media, cause otherwise they are getting more from censoring anything that may be seen as negative towards their trillion dollar enterprise.

tynpeddler• 5 years ago

If this is BMJ's best argument, then I'm going to have to side with Facebook on this one. This quote right here basically sums up the silliness of the BMJ's argument:

Alan Duke, editor in chief of Lead Stories, told The BMJ that the “Missing Context” label was created by Facebook specifically “to deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real.”

This whole episode is one more piece highlighting the difficulties caused by casual readers attempting to read technical literature. Technical literature covers topics that average readers have little to no experience with and as such non-technical readers are prone to drawing unsupportable conclusions from them. Honestly, any technical article can be slapped with the "Missing Context" flag by default.

The positions in this article are pretty simple. BMJ publishes a report showing that one of the contractors performing studies for Pfizer's covid vaccine had practices that were flawed but did not render the data unusable. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on these facts. This article was widely shared on Facebook, primarily by anti-vaccine groups. Lead Stories is asked by Facebook to fact check the article and Lead Stories assigns the "Missing Context" flag

Extrapolating from context, I'm going to assume that anti-vaxxers were arguing that this was proof that the vaccine is entirely unreliable and should not be used (this seems like a safe assumption because it's the conclusion that anti-vaxxers always come to no matter the evidence). It's important to note that BMJ and Lead Stories both agree that this conclusion is entirely unsupportable by the article.

The BMJ is intended for a technical audience, so from a technical reader's standpoint, the article is complete as it is. Lead Stories is reading from the viewpoint of a non-technical reader; someone who lacks the skills and experience necessary to understand the article. So Lead Stories points out that readers need more information than is in the article in order to understand it. This is trivially non-controversial from the plain english definition of "technical literature". It's even more true in light of the fact that anti-vaxxers are using the article to build flawed arguments that are resulting in the deaths of thousands. BMJ's response to the situation is unsupportable and, perhaps intentionally, is arguing something completely differently than Lead Stories.

That's not to say BMJ doesn't have a real grievance. They should push back on the wording Facebook provided in their notice. Facebook states that the article is partly false, which Lead Stories does not agree with. Facebook also, ironically, does not provide sufficient context on the meaning of the "Missing Context" label. But none of these problems with Facebook refute the appropriateness of the "Missing Context" label.

EricE7• 5 years ago

What I find fascinating is that anyone pays attention to or takes these "fact checkers" seriously.

The only people benefiting from "fact checkers" are the big tech companies that can use them as a shield to hide behind.

Blackstrat• 5 years ago

Facebook has already admitted in court (John Stossel’s lawsuit) that their fact checkers aren’t fact checks but rather opinions. It is time to de-platform Facebook.

Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong

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