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by SllX 1774 days ago
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.