[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.