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.
> 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.”<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Didn't convince me that "fact checking" isn't vile, but it convinced me that in this specific case, the content was shit:<p><a href="https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-strike-back-against-mark-zuckerberg-and-facebook/" rel="nofollow">https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-s...</a><p>EDIT - actual link: <a href="https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-the-bmj/" rel="nofollow">https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...</a>
A previous discussion on the"Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg" mentioned in this article had 677 comments: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595598" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29595598</a>
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.<p>So, what's preferable? Unfettered venom and lies mixed with the best attempts at rationality or the discourse moderated by unseen arbiters and algorithms?<p>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.<p>Thus, I refer back to the choice above. Which will it be?
Fact checking on media is bad.<p>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).
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.<p>is the sky blue? depends. maybe it emits a certain spectrum based on gas content on our planet, but color is a perceptual experience.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/</a><p>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.
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.<p>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".<p>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").<p>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.<p>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.
Frankly, if I were the BMJ I would start contacting lawyers and issuing writs. I'm unsure of <i>exactly what</i> or <i>where</i> or <i>how</i>, 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.<p>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.
The very existence of fact-checking demonstrates a deplorable intellectual arrogance.<p>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?<p>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.)<p>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.
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].<p>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 <i>entire world population</i> (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].<p>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.<p>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:<p>> 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...<p>This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom</a><p>[2] <a href="https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-19-is-deadlier-than-the-spanish-flu-and-seasonal-flu.html" rel="nofollow">https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/1483585218741248000?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/148358521874124800...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/</a><p>[5] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu</a><p>[6] <a href="https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-69-million-deaths-globally-more-double-what-official-reports-show" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-...</a><p>[7] <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid</a>
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?<p>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.<p>I’d bet if you actually engaged with those people you’d discover this system accelerated misinformation not curbed it.
I think my only strong opinions on fact checking are that the situation has exposed the problems inherent in <i>techne</i> without <i>episteme</i>, and that it is no longer tenable to punt on philosophical questions.
From Lead Stories' Response [1]:<p>> 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.<p>“Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial”<p>> The BMJ.com headline, shown above, fails to make two important distinctions:<p>> 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."<p>Given how many of the social media audience would read just the title, perhaps the missing context label is accurate.<p>[1] <a href="https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-response-to-a-bmjcom-open-letter-objecting-to-a-lead-stories-fact-check.html" rel="nofollow">https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...</a>
Welcome to the future ?<p>Stop fact checking sites, and social media becomes even worse than it is.<p>Use fact checkers, and you love with false positives and false negatives.<p>Then narratives form around those errors ( because we are pattern recognition machines, even when there are no patterns).<p>So what’s the out ?<p>All fact checking will create some amount of False pod/negative. No amount of money, time or resources can avoid that.
What I find fascinating is that anyone pays attention to or takes these "fact checkers" seriously.<p>The only people benefiting from "fact checkers" are the big tech companies that can use them as a shield to hide behind.
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.<p>Am I missing something about American fact checkers ?<p>The sites I know have limited resources so they spend their time on quality work in the few places they can.<p>How does fact checking work in the states ? Is there something non obvious about fact checking groups?
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<p>> 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.”<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 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
The BMJ itself tightly controls who can say what on its platform, and that is precisely why it gained its reputation.<p>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.
"Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong"<p>Where has it gone wrong?<p>“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.<p>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...
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that Facebook made the right call here.<p>The problem isn’t the content, but rather the audience, and how they react to said content.<p>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.<p>The BMJ have a reputation as being a reputable source of information.<p>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!”.<p>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?<p>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.
There is a different issue with the "fact checking" approach: it allows Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) to deflect blame from their algorithm.<p>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).<p>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.
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.
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:<p>>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.”<p>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.<p>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<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
From the last discussion: <a href="https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-the-bmj/" rel="nofollow">https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-t...</a><p>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.
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.<p>Without getting too far into controversial territory, I’ve observed that<p>- Out of many competing vaccines, Pfizer was always the “cool” one, in both scientific and lay circles<p>- 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<p>- It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way<p>And yet<p>- You still won’t read this in most mainstream media, and still can’t mention these things in many social contexts<p>- Governments around the world are still pushing Pfizer/Moderna over all other vaccines (hear about AZ recently?)<p>This article is another example of how their marketing machine is working for them.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>There is something very dangerous about wanting to discuss a serious issue seriously and being squelched because it doesn’t fit some narrative.<p>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.