Leave fact-checking to the fact-checkers
December 15, 2021 6:28 PM Subscribe
Does telling your readers “No, 5G towers don’t give you Covid” make them more likely to associate 5G with some cloud of suspicion that wasn’t there before? While fact-checkers might assume that their work is inherently neutral — they’re only interested in facts, after all — in the U.S. environment, fact-checking both as a journalistic genre and as done by third-party organizations is anything but. People use fact-checks to dunk on the other side, to cherry-pick information, and to counter-fact-check other fact-checks. In addition, the decisions fact-checkers make on which claims to check — and which to ignore — is a form of gatekeeping that can enrage partisans.
This article is confirming a bias that's been growing in my mind. Spend any time observing the social media scroll and you'll find people whose timeline is littered with posts that have been "fact checked", and more often than not they see them as part of the conspiracy, with the chorus of comment voices joining in to back them up. If anything, a fact check blaze is a badge of honor. This feels like a failure, not a success.
It's difficult to tell if this is the echo chamber at work or not (the vocal X%). I always appreciate a good debunking myself, but I am naturally suspicious to begin with, and I honestly feel like a minority anymore.
When it comes to wildly dishonest information, I think deleting in place is still the better course. Deplatform and clear the deck, remove the reinforcement. Privately explain to the users in a PM. And as social media platforms have access to good sources, feed them those sources -- it's totally within their power, and they know that. We see the knobs turn every time they have to get up in front of Congress. When we ran forums years ago, the delete-and-PM model was how we reinforced TOS. It's what they should be modeling now. But no, Silicon Valley had to try something "better". Except it's not, because: humans.
posted by offalark at 6:42 PM on December 15, 2021 [10 favorites]
It's difficult to tell if this is the echo chamber at work or not (the vocal X%). I always appreciate a good debunking myself, but I am naturally suspicious to begin with, and I honestly feel like a minority anymore.
When it comes to wildly dishonest information, I think deleting in place is still the better course. Deplatform and clear the deck, remove the reinforcement. Privately explain to the users in a PM. And as social media platforms have access to good sources, feed them those sources -- it's totally within their power, and they know that. We see the knobs turn every time they have to get up in front of Congress. When we ran forums years ago, the delete-and-PM model was how we reinforced TOS. It's what they should be modeling now. But no, Silicon Valley had to try something "better". Except it's not, because: humans.
posted by offalark at 6:42 PM on December 15, 2021 [10 favorites]
As danah boyd and Joan Donovan have highlighted in the context of journalistic (non-) coverage of extremism and suicide: Sometimes the best coverage is no coverage. I argue that fact-checking as a journalistic genre for news publishers likely accomplishes little more than what third-party organizations do, while potentially doing harm by responding to and echoing misinformation and disinformation.Unfortunately, we're well past the point of "just ignore it and it'll go away" with American extremism. It's hard to see how the New York Times will slow the spread of disinformation by simply not talking about it when Tucker Carlson has a well-funded major network on which to spew his bullshit every day.
Those separate pieces should be left to the third-party fact-checkers.The other day, Facebook put a fact-check on the "airline pilot deaths up 1700%" post of a friend (a friend who often gets fact-checked). I followed Facebook's fact-check link to a third-party fact-checker. The post my friend had put up, a screenshot from a pilot's association magazine, was wildly misleading, but the third-party fact-checking article that Facebook posted was lazy and rushed and did very little to address what was actually wrong with the piece of viral misinformation my friend was passing along.
My friend and I ended up going back and forth about it for a while, both digging up more information, until she found a right-wing site which finally said, "That viral content may have been misleading, we're looking into it." (And then the right-wing site changed the spin to, "Looks like deaths rates among pilots haven't changed at all! I guess that means the vaccine doesn't work at all!")
Anyway... I was thinking to myself... here I am doing all of this fact-checking for free, and I'm doing a much better job than the lazy BS that Facebook posted as a fact-check, and Facebook makes billions of dollars in profit every year. If Facebook really wanted to fight misinformation, they'd put some real money into it.
But they don't, of course. That piece of misinformation generated more discussion and "engagement" than most of the other stuff my friend posts, so Facebook got more ad revenue, so the lazy third-party fact-check worked out just fine from Facebook's point of view. They got to look like they were doing something without having to spend any money or lose any revenue.
posted by clawsoon at 10:52 PM on December 15, 2021 [17 favorites]
I just finished taking a class on misinformation/fake news, and the research is pretty clear that public fact checks only work in very limited cases. They're mostly helpful for true "fake news" where the source of the misinformation lies about who they are and pretends to be a mainstream news site to borrow credibility.
But for partisan-biased misinformation, that comes from sources which are plainly partisan, fact checking will do absolutely nothing. This comes down to trust: If someone trusts Fox News (or some shady left wing site) as a reliable source of information, why would they suddenly decide to trust a random fact checking site they've never heard of? It's not rational for anyone to trust an unknown source of information more than one they're comfortable with, so fact-checks only work for people who already trust fact-checks. And who really trusts Facebook these days? My personal theory is that a fact-check site that LOOKS like Fox News or the Drudge Report would be more effective than one that looks like a mainstream site and I wonder if Snopes lost effectiveness when they updated their design to look more modern.
On a more extreme view, we may just need to give up on "facts" entirely. When a claim is turned into a fact, all of the context and evidence supporting the claim is removed and replaced by trust in some authority. This is fine if everyone involved trusts the same authorities, but facts are useless as soon as there isn't common ground. Even "true" facts are simplified versions of somewhat ambiguous scientific or journalistic truths. Telling someone a fact that contradicts an existing belief, without justifying it via evidence or trust in a shared authority, will never change their mind.
posted by JZig at 11:17 PM on December 15, 2021 [6 favorites]
But for partisan-biased misinformation, that comes from sources which are plainly partisan, fact checking will do absolutely nothing. This comes down to trust: If someone trusts Fox News (or some shady left wing site) as a reliable source of information, why would they suddenly decide to trust a random fact checking site they've never heard of? It's not rational for anyone to trust an unknown source of information more than one they're comfortable with, so fact-checks only work for people who already trust fact-checks. And who really trusts Facebook these days? My personal theory is that a fact-check site that LOOKS like Fox News or the Drudge Report would be more effective than one that looks like a mainstream site and I wonder if Snopes lost effectiveness when they updated their design to look more modern.
On a more extreme view, we may just need to give up on "facts" entirely. When a claim is turned into a fact, all of the context and evidence supporting the claim is removed and replaced by trust in some authority. This is fine if everyone involved trusts the same authorities, but facts are useless as soon as there isn't common ground. Even "true" facts are simplified versions of somewhat ambiguous scientific or journalistic truths. Telling someone a fact that contradicts an existing belief, without justifying it via evidence or trust in a shared authority, will never change their mind.
posted by JZig at 11:17 PM on December 15, 2021 [6 favorites]
When it comes to wildly dishonest information, I think deleting in place is still the better course. Deplatform and clear the deck, remove the reinforcement.
Well, yeah, but the entire business model is built on spreading disinformation because facts are boring and stories are interesting, especially when they confirm someone's existing viewpoint or align to it in some way.
Facebook 'confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news'. That posts attracting the 'angry' emoji carry five times the weight of a 'like' in determining what posts users are presented with in their feed and that they knew in advance this would happen is both unsurprising and horrifying.
posted by dg at 12:02 AM on December 16, 2021 [11 favorites]
Well, yeah, but the entire business model is built on spreading disinformation because facts are boring and stories are interesting, especially when they confirm someone's existing viewpoint or align to it in some way.
Facebook 'confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news'. That posts attracting the 'angry' emoji carry five times the weight of a 'like' in determining what posts users are presented with in their feed and that they knew in advance this would happen is both unsurprising and horrifying.
posted by dg at 12:02 AM on December 16, 2021 [11 favorites]
I was never afraid of being sucked down the bathtub drain until Mister Rogers tried to assure me this was impossible.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:05 AM on December 16, 2021 [16 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:05 AM on December 16, 2021 [16 favorites]
On a more extreme view, we may just need to give up on "facts" entirely.
It's not extreme at all, it's the only sane approach. Conservatives never worry about convincing anyone, they just focus on obtaining the power to impose their views. Meanwhile it's the liberals who wring their hands and agonize over how they can persuade people to see their point of view.
Enough whining about fact-checking, focus on winning at all costs. Our opponents certainly are.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:16 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
It's not extreme at all, it's the only sane approach. Conservatives never worry about convincing anyone, they just focus on obtaining the power to impose their views. Meanwhile it's the liberals who wring their hands and agonize over how they can persuade people to see their point of view.
Enough whining about fact-checking, focus on winning at all costs. Our opponents certainly are.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:16 AM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
I was never afraid of being sucked down the bathtub drain until Mister Rogers tried to assure me this was impossible.
I was, because my parents would frequently sing this awful song about a baby gettingmurdered involuntarily manslaughtered (babyslaughter'd?) by being washed down the plug hole during a bath given by a negligent caretaker. I found Mr. Rogers' take on the subject to be somewhat reassuring.
But I digress...
posted by Juffo-Wup at 9:27 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
I was, because my parents would frequently sing this awful song about a baby getting
But I digress...
posted by Juffo-Wup at 9:27 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
posted by Uncle Ira at 11:16 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by Uncle Ira at 11:16 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]
It's not extreme at all, it's the only sane approach. Conservatives never worry about convincing anyone, they just focus on obtaining the power to impose their views. Meanwhile it's the liberals who wring their hands and agonize over how they can persuade people to see their point of view.
I don't understand how that bolded assertion squares with the multitude of right-wing disinformation campaigns run by their assorted think-tanks, media outlets, blogs, and troll farms. They spend a huge amount of time and money trying to convince people, and they've constructed a massive echo chamber designed to then keep people convinced.
Conservatives worry about convincing people all the time, because that's how they obtain the power (i.e. mobilize voters, flip voters in suburban VA from blue to red, flip Obama voters to Trump voters, chip away at the Democrats' presumption of "ownership" of previously safe ethnic groups, etc. etc. etc.) Every time you talk to someone who says something like "I used to think I was a liberal, but then I see some liberal policy failure and I'm not so sure," that is someone who is teetering on having been convinced. Nobody has coerced them, put a gun to their head, or escorted them to the polling place and pointed at the right boxes to check -- instead they've probably seen a thing that has gone wrong (in my town, it's probably homelessness) and they've absorbed some talking point that says it's somehow a liberal failing, and they are now becoming convinced that a conservative approach would be better (or, more likely, that anything else would be better than whatever the libs want).
You can say "oh, that's all disinformation and propaganda," but disinformation and propaganda are tools people use to convince people, whether they ought to or not.
To give up on facts is to give up on a common framework for reality. It's a tempting position when a solid 40 percent of US voters have gone down the "Stop the Steal" and QAnon rabbit holes, and it's a position with some philosophical tailwind among people who are embracing standpoint epistemics anyhow, but to give up on facts is to give up on the whole project. Which we kind of are? Or perhaps people increasingly are? It wasn't a Proud Boy who knocked a reporter down, called her a "slut" and maced her at a recent demonstration ... it was some black bloc cosplayer who thought her First Amendment rights were a bourgeois affectation from a benighted age.
posted by mph at 11:23 AM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
I don't understand how that bolded assertion squares with the multitude of right-wing disinformation campaigns run by their assorted think-tanks, media outlets, blogs, and troll farms. They spend a huge amount of time and money trying to convince people, and they've constructed a massive echo chamber designed to then keep people convinced.
Conservatives worry about convincing people all the time, because that's how they obtain the power (i.e. mobilize voters, flip voters in suburban VA from blue to red, flip Obama voters to Trump voters, chip away at the Democrats' presumption of "ownership" of previously safe ethnic groups, etc. etc. etc.) Every time you talk to someone who says something like "I used to think I was a liberal, but then I see some liberal policy failure and I'm not so sure," that is someone who is teetering on having been convinced. Nobody has coerced them, put a gun to their head, or escorted them to the polling place and pointed at the right boxes to check -- instead they've probably seen a thing that has gone wrong (in my town, it's probably homelessness) and they've absorbed some talking point that says it's somehow a liberal failing, and they are now becoming convinced that a conservative approach would be better (or, more likely, that anything else would be better than whatever the libs want).
You can say "oh, that's all disinformation and propaganda," but disinformation and propaganda are tools people use to convince people, whether they ought to or not.
To give up on facts is to give up on a common framework for reality. It's a tempting position when a solid 40 percent of US voters have gone down the "Stop the Steal" and QAnon rabbit holes, and it's a position with some philosophical tailwind among people who are embracing standpoint epistemics anyhow, but to give up on facts is to give up on the whole project. Which we kind of are? Or perhaps people increasingly are? It wasn't a Proud Boy who knocked a reporter down, called her a "slut" and maced her at a recent demonstration ... it was some black bloc cosplayer who thought her First Amendment rights were a bourgeois affectation from a benighted age.
posted by mph at 11:23 AM on December 16, 2021 [6 favorites]
> When it comes to wildly dishonest information, I think deleting in place is still the better course. Deplatform and clear the deck
Here is an interesting article about how Covid deniers have used the Wayback machine to massively evade this particular method of de-platforming them.
(BTW I don't disagree with you re: de-platforming, in fact I agree completely. It's just interesting how everything of this sort becomes an arms race.)
posted by flug at 5:09 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
Here is an interesting article about how Covid deniers have used the Wayback machine to massively evade this particular method of de-platforming them.
(BTW I don't disagree with you re: de-platforming, in fact I agree completely. It's just interesting how everything of this sort becomes an arms race.)
posted by flug at 5:09 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]
> the research is pretty clear that public fact checks only work in very limited cases
> the third-party fact-checking article that Facebook posted was lazy and rushed
I became aware of this some years back when I came across an fact-check article about something Obama said.
The article went through all this ho-hum stuff and came out with (if I recall correctly) "Mostly False." He had gotten some numbers off, whatever.
But when I dug in and actually read the sources that the fact-checkers had pointed to in proving what he said "wrong" in fact there was nothing particularly wrong at all with his summary.
In fact he had been essentially 100% correct in his overall argument and the only place they had for some gotchas was in the way he turned the original research into some soundbites and summaries in the way any politician or public speaker MUST do in turning that type of research into a public statement. Maybe he'd gotten a number a bit "wrong" here or there (8.9 million instead of 9.3 million, that type of thing - the type of thing that isn't even really wrong at all, but just he might have been using a different source or time frame or estimate or whatever, than what the reporter was able to find).
Beyond that, any mistakes were the type anyone might make in summarizing research or complex results if they didn't happen to be one million percent on top of every single detail of the research on that particular day. Like I myself might make that type of mistake summarizing my own research if someone happened to ask me about it and I hadn't looked at the details in a couple of weeks. Exact percentages might be a bit off and such, but still I would be able to summarize the thrust and main points of the research - and those wouldn't be wrong at all, even though there would be some opportunity to "gotcha" on specific (insignificant) details or numbers.
Point is, this was really eye-opening to me in the sense that previously I had thought that these fact-checkers were really getting those Conservatives and catching them in their lies.
In reality, a conservative voter reading a fact-check about somebody from their side is going to be rolling their eyes as fast and hard as I was about the Obama fact check.
Yeah, "gotcha" on a couple of minor and insignificant facts and figures, but the essential point the politician was trying to make is still correct and they didn't say one thing to change my mind about that.
And it's funny but (just like Trumpers and Q-Anon-ers) I haven't wasted my time reading even one "fact check" article from that day to this.
They just simply do not add anything to the conversation.
posted by flug at 10:06 AM on December 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
> the third-party fact-checking article that Facebook posted was lazy and rushed
I became aware of this some years back when I came across an fact-check article about something Obama said.
The article went through all this ho-hum stuff and came out with (if I recall correctly) "Mostly False." He had gotten some numbers off, whatever.
But when I dug in and actually read the sources that the fact-checkers had pointed to in proving what he said "wrong" in fact there was nothing particularly wrong at all with his summary.
In fact he had been essentially 100% correct in his overall argument and the only place they had for some gotchas was in the way he turned the original research into some soundbites and summaries in the way any politician or public speaker MUST do in turning that type of research into a public statement. Maybe he'd gotten a number a bit "wrong" here or there (8.9 million instead of 9.3 million, that type of thing - the type of thing that isn't even really wrong at all, but just he might have been using a different source or time frame or estimate or whatever, than what the reporter was able to find).
Beyond that, any mistakes were the type anyone might make in summarizing research or complex results if they didn't happen to be one million percent on top of every single detail of the research on that particular day. Like I myself might make that type of mistake summarizing my own research if someone happened to ask me about it and I hadn't looked at the details in a couple of weeks. Exact percentages might be a bit off and such, but still I would be able to summarize the thrust and main points of the research - and those wouldn't be wrong at all, even though there would be some opportunity to "gotcha" on specific (insignificant) details or numbers.
Point is, this was really eye-opening to me in the sense that previously I had thought that these fact-checkers were really getting those Conservatives and catching them in their lies.
In reality, a conservative voter reading a fact-check about somebody from their side is going to be rolling their eyes as fast and hard as I was about the Obama fact check.
Yeah, "gotcha" on a couple of minor and insignificant facts and figures, but the essential point the politician was trying to make is still correct and they didn't say one thing to change my mind about that.
And it's funny but (just like Trumpers and Q-Anon-ers) I haven't wasted my time reading even one "fact check" article from that day to this.
They just simply do not add anything to the conversation.
posted by flug at 10:06 AM on December 17, 2021 [2 favorites]
Some glowing reviews for the latest in 5G protective gear:
‘Anti-5G’ necklaces are radioactive and dangerous, Dutch nuclear experts say
Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:24 PM on December 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
‘Anti-5G’ necklaces are radioactive and dangerous, Dutch nuclear experts say
Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:24 PM on December 17, 2021 [1 favorite]
Glowing reviews for "glowing" products
posted by cynical pinnacle at 5:44 AM on December 18, 2021
posted by cynical pinnacle at 5:44 AM on December 18, 2021
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