[Spivak]

"Fact checking" as a means of combating mis/disnformation is kinda doomed from the start. The whole reason you're fact checking in the first place is because some nugget of bullshit was put into some large distribution channel and the damage is already done. Nobody reads the retraction, fact checkers by their very nature have smaller reach than the misinformation they're chasing.

The Wikipedia list of common misconceptions are still common and a lot of them are embarrassingly old if you believe that correcting misinformation is something that's possible to achieve on any scale other then waiting for people to die and hoping the next generation learns the right thing this time round.

[__MatrixMan__]

We could make it a little less bad by not treating fact checker content the same as the content that it refers to. Google news has a "fact checking" section at the bottom as if it were the same sort of thing as "entertainment" or "science".

If you could subscribe to somebody's fact checking work, it could appear as annotations on the original content that was being checked. You could then either delay that content from showing up in your feed until it was checked, or you could subscribe to retraction related notifications which could be filtered based on whether you browser thinks you actually saw the retracted thing. We could divert some ad revenue to fact checkers (the checkers could be chosen by the users, as a browser setting, and communicated to the ad).

I'm not confident that the protocol that I'm designing for this is any good, but I am confident that the problem won't get any better until we design some kind of protocol for it and bake it into the web at a fundamental level.

And yes, you should do it for yourself also. But there's no reason to do that in a vacuum.

[johnchristopher]

I was told verbatim "we don't care about fact checkings, we have had enough of it and you always bring them up" in a thread about covid.

People like that are not in the fight because of some facts they disagree with, it's about raging against the Man for other reasons.

[robertlagrant]

I think that's to do with the idea the fact checkers appeared to move in lockstep with social media trust and safety teams, rather than being independent sources of actual facts.

I don't know if that's true, but that was the reason. It's not about not liking facts. It's about not trusting people who claim to be fact checkers.

[johnchristopher]

I don't disagree with you about the situation regarding fact checking initiatives from social media moderation and safety teams and how their social capital and brand image play out against them.

In that particular case though the sources I provided were (1) an fact checking piece from a well known and respected information household and (2) a detailed and documented rebuttal of how the numbers provided by the other party (something like "millions of people died in Europe from RNA vaccines") were actually wrong.

[robertlagrant]

Yeah, at that point people are too far gone. But it's taken a lot of small steps over decades to get them there.

[jandrese]

Even so, you still have to do it. The only alternative is unchecked bullshit, and that is highly corrosive to polite society.

It's basically information guerilla warfare. Lies are cheap and easy to produce, while the facts require investigation and analysis. Lies lead to conspiracy theories which lead to radicalization which lead to destruction of society.

[Spivak]

I guess what I'm getting at is that checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth. Nobody believes the moon landing happened because they read a fact-checker's piece on the hoax, they believe it because there's so much positive evidence just floating out there that the conspiracy theory can't take hold except in teeny tiny little pockets.

[lazide]

And how do you do that when the bullshit is in some new direction where there is no truth?

[squigz]

> checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth.

Maybe so, but one of the problems is that the bullshit is more often drowning out the truth - so why not do both? Get the truth out there, and push back on bullshit.

[robertlagrant]

The best antidote is speech and information flow. The Covington kid story changed drastically when an unclipped video of what happened came out, for example.

[roenxi]

The incentives are against good fact checking. There are 3 broad kinds of misinformation:

1) Stuff that just isn't true and is kinda stupid. Flat earth territory (you can literally see the sea curve, c like). Barely worth debunking because nobody who cares about the truth is going to hold on to an opinion like that, but something for fact checkers to do.

2) Stuff that is not true but has powerful interests pushing it. Like war propaganda. The fact checkers are useless because they tend to get either drowned out or co-opted by someone since the players involved are so big they can corrupt things.

3) Hazy stuff that is plausible where the fact checker probably doesn't know what happened either.

So if the fact checker focuses on accuracy they tend to focus on trivialities, on money they tend to get corrupted and on important stuff they will tend to be wrong about a lot of things. There is no winning that game.

[riedel]

I guess it all depends on the distribution/business model of fact checking. News magazines and classical broadcasting can actually decide what to publish. Other might call it censorship if non-verifiable stuff does not happen there, but that is clearly a matter of scaling and money. I agree that fact checking the internet is useless. However, that is why I heavily rely on our well financed national public broadcasting. In cases that they cannot check, I at least get mostly a disclaimer like 'war party is source of information'.

[meisenhus]

I'm in the same camp w.r.t. national public broadcasting, but obviously there could be interests there too. It's different in different countries, and one red flag is if an election changes the governing majority and as a result, the leadership of the broadcaster is exchanged (like happened in Poland the previous election and the most recent as well), or if its a more authoritarian country anyway with elections mainly being a sham (like in Russia).

[blowski]

Also, there are fuzzy lines between opinions, consensus, and facts. What may be considered a fact amongst one group will be described as a wrong opinion by another. Chances are, the LLMs will try to work out what group you are in, and present accordingly, without seeking any real truth.

[toenail]

> The whole reason you're fact checking in the first place is because some nugget of bullshit was put into some large distribution channel and the damage is already done.

Selective fact checking that only happens when you're prejudiced against the people who presented the information? Sounds like confrontational activism.