A Field Guide to Dubious Fact-Checking \ stacker news ~culture

2693 sats \ 12 comments \ @Undisciplined 25 Jan culture

We've had a few good posts about how to improve our terrible news sources. Fact-checking clearly has a role to play, but who checks the checkers? We've seen some pretty egregious uses of "fact checking" by Big Tech to censor people who were sharing true information that just happened to go against a regime approved narrative.

I think it's very difficult to come up with incentives that will actually lead to honest news media.

A Field Guide to Dubious Fact-Checking By Thomas Buckley

Fact-checking has become a veritable industry in the media. However, the conclusions of “fact checkers” mysteriously seem to align with the opinions of elites. That’s their story, and political, educational, and social elites are sticking to it.

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641 sats \ 3 replies \ @JuanMiguel 25 Jan

MSM = Fact Checkers = Evil liers

Twitter Community Notes is, so far, the best implementation of fact-checking.

50 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 25 Jan

I'm only passingly familiar with Twitter's community notes.

I definitely like the idea, but how does it safeguard against conforming to the prevailing views of an echo chamber that may be incorrect?

526 sats \ 1 reply \ @JuanMiguel 25 Jan

Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.

https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introduction

It may not be perfect, but it's the best implementation of fact-checking in my opinion. The notes I've seen were always extremely good, unlike traditional mainstream media fact-checkings, which are highly biased and often outright lies.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 26 Jan

Cool, thanks

497 sats \ 5 replies \ @kurszusz 25 Jan

Because of these fake news-sources, we are forced to filter a lot (maybe filter 2-3x) the informations we receive. Because of the huge amount of informations which we are bombarded day by day, it is impossible to verify the source for all, and the credibility of information. We need to focus on what we want to do really, and leave the other informations to flies away. But the best option to check credibility is fact-checking, as @JuanMiguel indicated

497 sats \ 4 replies \ @JuanMiguel 25 Jan

I usually assume something is false/lie until i can prove otherwise. Specially if it's comming from main stream media, big tech, government and leftists.

280 sats \ 1 reply \ @kurszusz 26 Jan

Several years ago, in my 20's years it was my priciple to trust everyone (especially in peoples) until won't prove otherwise. This was functional some years, but I finally had to admit it that is not a very good "strategy", because I was disappointed many times (sometimes by peoples in whom I believed the most). After this period, I changed my philosophy, and started to use your strategy (false until the opposite is proven), but using this "model" I missed a lot of opportunities in my life (between which the Bitcoin in extremely early phase - 2010-2011). And finally...some years ago I started to "mix" these 2 visions, looking carefully between possibilities / informations. I can tell you, it is much more OK my life than before (of course, it is just my personal opinion and experience).

I think the essence is to be attentive and very careful.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 26 Jan

It's like we're twins.

When I was younger, I had exactly the approach. If I didn't already have conflicting information, I would trust what people said. Now I consider the reliability and incentives of the messenger pretty heavily.

With age, I've become much more comfortable saying "That's what I've heard, but I really don't know."

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 26 Jan

I don't like to assume it's false, because that still gives them the power to drive my views. I try to just give it very little weight, until I can confirm it with a source I trust.

28 sats \ 0 replies \ @JuanMiguel 26 Jan

very little weight

Or this. 👍

497 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 25 Jan

A difficult problem. Especially on issues with a lot of nuance. Even those checking the checkers have inherent biases and I have seen a lot of community notes that lack nuance as well.

I think community notes is a positive development but how do we keep it from being corrupted or captured? I am unsure. If I community note your post all I need is enough people that agree with my bias to confirm the note was helpful and it stays up even if it doesn’t tell the whole story.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 25 Jan

I guess if a post has seemingly contradictory community notes (or any type of fact check really) that signals it's a complicated topic and you should probably look into a bit more.