The problem is the poorly-considered but extremely widespread epistemology that goes something like "whether a claim is true depends on how convinced certain people are of that claim."
> Once you create a fact checking entity, it will decide for itself what are object truths.
No, it will just make claims, which may be true or false. There's nothing mysterious or troubling about this. They're not "deciding" what's true.
It is exactly what they are doing. You are playing with semantics. The public as well as private companies use the claims as an argument for validation of truth.
The troubling aspect is it comes with some level of authority backing the claims. There are consequences for not aligning with the positions of the claims.
It very well may be an explanation of the truth, and there's nothing wrong with that. If that's what you mean by "validation" then that's great! But if you mean that whether a claim is "valid" depends on any one person or source's position on the claim, then you're back to that bad epistemology I described.
> But if you mean that whether a claim is "valid" depends on any one person or source's position on the claim, then you're back to that bad epistemology I described.
No, I'm not asserting that view. However, what you are stating I think is the viewpoint of most people. They will accept the claim as valid.
> However, what you are stating I think is the viewpoint of most people.
Do you think that most people think that whether a claim is true depends on Facebook's stance on that claim? That would be extremely shocking to me. My impressions is the opposite: that there is mainstream repulsion to Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) being so bold as to take any stance on factual issues.
> Once you create a fact checking entity, it will decide for itself what are object truths
okay, so what? What do you think a court does? The guy who reads the meter at the water sanitation plant or someone who hands out parking tickets?
A fact checker is nothing but an institution with the authority to adjudicate on some questions which are relevant for the maintenance of the platform, no different from any other authority that manages public conduct. Where is the problem?
And of course fact-checkers are not unaccountable. Like in this case their behavior itself is topic of public discourse.
The view of "if we just implement it right" it will be fine is a fallacy.
These organizations represent immense power through influence. By their very existence arises the conflict power and truth. If you can have influence over the fact checkers, then you have influence over truth. Who would you trust to form such an organization? Where is the oversight? Who monitors the monitors?
We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
>The view of "if we just implement it right" it will be fine is a fallacy.
Good thing I didn't say that then. The original comment that I was challenging said there was no such thing as fact checking. "Fact checking is hard" is not an argument in support of the idea that fact checking doesn't exist as a concept.
>We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
What is your definition of censorship? Because there is plenty of speech that I think is reasonable to censor. Obviously there is the illegal speech. Should Facebook be forced to host threats, defamation, copyright infringement, child porn, etc? What about the speech that is not illegal but is objectionable in some way? Should Facebook be forced to include hardcore porn in people's feeds if someone posts it? Once we establish that not all speech is appropriate in all contexts, censorship sure starts to seem reasonable. We just don't call it censorship because of the negative connotation. We call "reasonable censorship" moderation.
Yes, what is bound by law is not an option. However, in most cases the law should handle it. Meaning that the post remains unless some legal action is taken as the host often can't just know the legal status except in the more obvious case of child porn etc.
It is censorship when it is out of the control of users. It is filtering when the user has a choice.
Yes, users want to see or not see some categories of content. That certainly is not a problem when it is presented to the user as a choice.
There are platforms that operate mostly in this method, like MeWe.
There is objective truth. The earth is objectively not flat. There are people who don't agree with that (or at least who say they don't), but the earth is objectively not flat, whether or not some people don't agree. Not only that, it's provably not flat. So those who don't agree, well... they prove the contrariness of human nature, I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For all intents and purposes there is always an objective truth, the hard question is when you consider it proven.
Even for the flat Earth theory it's hard to dismiss it offhand. I mean sure there are plenty of experiments you can do to show that it is pretty close to a sphere. But who do you trust to do those experiments?
Either the person fact-checking needs to do the experiments/research themselves (which doesn't scale well) or they need to trust other people to have done the experiments. However at that point you're simply placing the word of some people above the word of others, which is not objective at all.
And even assuming you've actually picked honest people acting in good faith you're still relying on people to not be confidently incorrect, which I can fairly confidently say is always going to go wrong at some point.
> Even for the flat Earth theory it's hard to dismiss it offhand. > I mean sure there are plenty of experiments you can do to show that it is pretty close to a sphere. But who do you trust to do those experiments?
All the various people who have done them, some of which can be repeated by anyone motivated enough, and all the technology that relies on it being the case. This was known to the ancient Greeks. One even calculated the circumference within a reasonable accuracy.
The Earth is objectively and unironically flat from the point of view of some, in fact many, narratives.
Certainly the architectural drawings of my house do not include a "bulge" in the basement due to heretical sphericalness.
All discussion of my basement floor being flat within about 1/2 inch need to be censored by big brother to save us all from free and independent thought.
The purpose of arguing about what should be censored is to distract from the argument of should there be censorship at all. Classic divide and conqueror strategy. Nobody ever gets asked if they should have concentration camps or not, they only argue about competing paint schemes and honorary mottos.
The problem is that almost any positive statement can be shown to be objectively wrong. "F=m * a", "x^2 = -1 has no solutions", "light travels in straight lines", etc. There are always conditions under which those are true or are good approximations for specific purpose.
Spelling out those applicability conditions explicitly is critical in research publications (but even then, only used for the topic under investigation). In all other contexts such pedantry is impossible. My 2c.
No, that just means that some people ignore or discount objective facts for ideological reasons. The Earth is roughly a sphere, and that is empirically provable.
The arbiter should be well established science, history, math and logic. Of course there is still room for plenty of debate where the matter is not already settled by overwhelming evidence. That's where there shouldn't be an arbiter. But for factual matters like the Earth being (roughly) spherical, there's no actual debate. Just belief that goes contrary to the evidence.
Facts don't care about feelings. Feelings do care about facts.
Fact: the Earth is an oblate spheroid (roughly round) undergoing human-caused climate change.
Example contrary feeling: I live in the arctic circle, it's cold and all I can see is a flat ice-scape. How can the Earth be warming and round when this is all I experience?
There are at least two facts that are creating cognitive dissonance here:
1) I feel cold.
2) I can't see the whole Earth from the surface.
What we feel guides us to question the world (which is healthy) but we shouldn't cling to what we feel is right when we can prove our feelings are wrong. Turns out that being cold on one point of the Earth is an experience that has nothing to do with the global average temperature rising. Also, we are living on a giant rock whose size is so much larger that it locally feels flat. We can also only see so far before our vision is impeded by the atmosphere.
Flat-Earthers are wasting all of our time IMO because there is a lot of well established evidence to prove the Earth is round (ish) and much bigger than us. It's even easy to visually verify if you spend time/money to go high enough to see it for yourself.
The real issue here is that the facts are more complex than just repeating what "feels" true. Humans (much as all animals) are lazy and often don't pursue rigor.
It is really a fact. It's a provable fact. It's a fact that was proven thousands of years ago. Here's a whole-ass section on Wikipedia with evidence[0].
Not sure if that’s a good comparison: 1) the lab leak theory is only incidentally political since the two sides decided to make it into yet another hot button issue; 2) the media did cover the emails story extensively and it was never prematurely “fact checked” as false.
Well the obvious response to that is at one point in human history the objective truth was that the Earth was flat.. you could literally be killed if you denied the Earth was flat.
There is great danger in giving one group of people the power to choose what is "objective truth"
Everyone loves to mock the flat Earthers, but I believe the theory deserves more respect.
For the typical person, who roams around on some small patch of the Earth's surface, but who isn't launching rockets or traveling between continents, the flat earth theory is more useful than the spheroid earth theory. When you walk a short distance, your path's deviation from planar geometry due to the earth's global curvature is orders of magnitude smaller than the deviation due to local surface roughness, and hence the global curvature is irrelevant in practice. Let's say you walk 5km (about 3 miles); the difference between your path as predicted by the planar-earth theory versus the spherical earth theory is about one tenth of a millimeter. For 99% of what we do, invoking the spheroid Earth theory would be like using general relativity to model a baseball's trajectory in the presence of air resistance.
And if you happen to be far from the earth, on a length scale greater than about 10**9 km, then the point-earth theory is probably going to be the most useful model to you.
In short, it's all a matter of perspective. "Objective truth" isn't a thing; all that matters is how effective your model is at describing the properties that are relevant to you.
"When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
Within a fact checking entity you essentially have the same issue as regulatory capture.