[velcii]

>Nothing wrong with fessing up and saying “we made a mistake, here’s the correction”

Sadly if you do retractions, you are not qualified for the name "fact checker". Because "facts" are not retractable.

And fact-checkers are just the tip of the iceberg, and if you care to look, there are many things that are peddled as being "fact" when there is not enough credible evidence to say so..

For example the statement "Vaccines don't cause autism". Any one with two brain cells will know that this NOT a fact, simply because it does not say "Which vaccines".

But that does not prevent people from saying that as a FACT.

So it is not only them. It is you as well.

[SllX]

You’ve touched on a basic problem with claiming to be a fact checker where it intersects with science, because “fact checking” is a journalistic tool decent for checking he said/she said BS, but science is an ongoing and continuous process that has its own form of review not assisted by the fact (fact check this!) that most science reporting is crap.

That said, fact checks are typically written by journalists or institutions claiming to serve a journalist function; and so are fully governable by common journalist practices such as retractions.

Retractions are nice because they acknowledge that there was a human error somewhere in the organization’s processes, memorialize the error but then correct the record with supplementary and reviewable matter. Doing this also provides a signal to readers that even though this particular institution filled with these imperfect humans made a mistake on the record, they sufficiently value their reputation to own the mistake and correct it on the record.

Good faith and honesty can take you far.