| Let's look at one recent (3 days ago) example from Politifact. [1] > "There was a very large infrastructure bill that was approved during the Obama administration, a trillion dollars. Nobody ever saw anything being built." - President Trump Politifact's response? > "Mostly false" >> It "Underplays the law's actual achievements." There are _so_ many ethical questions and conclusions you can make about this one article. On Trump's side? - The bill wasn't entirely about infrastructure, but he implies that the entire thing was. Wait... would you consider what he said an implication? Or a claim? What percentage of the bill's total funding, actions, and verbiage need to be about infrastructure before it becomes an "infrastructure bill"? - "Nobody saw anything" --> Hyperbole, which means fact checking is incredibly difficult. Do we fact check on his hyperbolic aim (maybe "The bill didn't fund as many infrastructure projects as it should have") or do we fact check the statement? But on Politifact's side... - If we fact check the statement as-is, its not "mostly false"; it is false. At least one person saw an infrastructure project. The article even says so. - Most reasonable people would interpret his statement as hyperbole. Politifact clearly does in giving him a "mostly false" rating. If we fact check the hyperbole, how do you decide what the actual intention of his statement is? The point is: When we are fact checking every sentence politicians say, even if they're very short summaries of a much deeper issue, there is no such thing as objective fact. Period. In this example, Trump cannot reasonably be expected to fully talk about every part of the bill Obama passed. Its a long bill. He summarizes his position on it. This is what comes out. There is hyperbole. There is rounding error. There is factual error. Its imperfect. Humans are imperfect. The flipside of that is also true: Politicians summarize and use hyperbole, but fact-checkers do the same thing. That politifact article takes thousands of words of research, argumentative facets, points against, points for, hundreds upon hundreds of hours of work... and just says "Mostly false." Does that really explain the situation? Really? Most readers will not read past that single line: "Mostly false". Yup, Trump lied again, bad Trump! Politifact is responsible enough in providing the rest of the data. And, really, we can place some of the blame on lazy readers who don't read the rest of the article. Not politifact's fault. Yet, think of the corollary between a lazy reader and a machine. A machine cannot read the rest of that article. It cannot understand the intricacies of this debate; not without much stronger AI than we have today. The algorithm sees "mostly false" and thinks "ok lets factor that into the score." And that's assuming the algorithm even considers this fact-checking website. What makes a fact checking website reliable? Who gets to decide which websites we trust? Is it that they are right 100% of the time? I've already outlined how much room there is for bias just in this single instance; how can we even truly decide what "right" means when the statements we are fact checking aren't scientific papers, with every data and variable accounted for? This whole thing is dangerous. I hate it. I hate Google for doing it. I hate Facebook for doing it. They have no respect for how much power they wield. They have no respect for the bubble their decision-makers live in. They are children who, almost accidentally, stumbled upon the nuclear football. They flip switches and dials with no responsibility, and if Australia gets nuked up in the process, they'll be there to sell you iodine. [1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/... |