Maybe the fact checkers seem left-biased because most of the alternative facts emanate from the right. And maybe the need for 24x7 fact checking as an appendage to journalism emanated from the deliberate 'flood the zone with shit" strategy of the right.
1) Russian misinformation is still Russian misinformation, not your excuse to be willfully ignorant.
2) The lab leak itself was not censored anywhere, the unbased bullshit from Trump was labeled as bullshit. Sorry that bugs you. But I understand, when your this willfully ignorant, facts are upsetting.
Or maybe EVERYBODY'S are and we ought to let the free exchange of ideas go on. It's fascinating that when Russia was ruled by the Communists, the Right would label things unfavorable to countries or causes they liked "Communist propaganda" and the Left would say that this was "right-wing paranoia". Now it's the Left talking about "Russian disinformation" and the Right talking about "left-wing censorship". Truth will out; let discussion be free.
Virtue Signaling ostentatious "fact checking" which seems to be component of Nate calls the Big Cope has been really nothing more than self-deception on the Lefty side of the college educated professional class.
Evidently as Patrick M has written, your reaction is every bit as driven by your sentiments as to whom you replied....
It's quite clear that such Fact Checkers have been security blankets for the Left oriented progressive fraction of college educated professional classes, who have swung sharply in a political direction. But have about zero credibility outside of the pre-convinced - a form of self-deception, virtue signaling to one's one tribe but not really doing anything outside of that.
Conservatives and MAGA won't admit they lie all the time and have zero credibility. Falous thinkis that's just fine. Let them lie, we'll counter it with our own bullshit? What crazy world do you live in where it's a good idea to let bad actors pass off bullshit as the truth?
I think you've hit the diagnosis squarely on the head, but I'm not sure if fact checking is the best prescription to solve the problem. It strikes me kind of like those medieval physicians prescribing bleeding for patients that have a fever as doing more harm than good. I can't say I've got the right answer, but the old internet saying of the best antidote to bad speech is more speech sounds better to me.
That's just naivitie. Letting liars blast bullshit 24x7 from hundreds of sources without labels is just naive. Letting Bots blast bullshit at you should be illegal. We don't need more bullshit, we need less.
Masks work at what they are made to do. Surgeons wear surgical masks because they are talking and perhaps breathing heavily over a physically compromised patient and don’t want their own spittle contaminating the operating theater. The same principle applies to somebody with a bad cough or sneezing; it’s simple politeness not to spew your gobs into the people you pass.
It’s a lot less clear that masks do much of anything to protect the *wearer*. If someone walks right up to you and sneezes directly into your face, you’d probably be happier if you had a mask on, but that’s a pretty uncommon occurrence. (What they said about masks early on was that they were for the protection of others.)
Once it became clear that Covid was mainly airborne, rather than conveyed by droplets or fomites, the argument for masks largely fell apart, on the “chain-link fence to keep out flies” analogy. It might on the margin make it very, very slightly harder for a given airborne virus to reach your lungs, but the effect is in the noise.
Masks are mgic one way material that filters exhaled material but not inhaled.
If you reject masking because it isn't 100% effective you are missing the point. Lowering the transmission rate even by 10% saves lives. Well run mask studies showed high quality masks reduced transmission 10 to 50%>
Lockdowns: you're Comparing SF to the state with the country's oldest population to compare death rates of a disease that overwhelmingly affects older populations more than younger populations.
Biden: passed a law that overwhelmingly contributed to the highest inflation the country has seen in decades, completely botched the Afghanistan pullout, and made false claims about the vaccines that contributed to a complete loss of faith in public health officials.
Check out SFs age histogram. Do both sides of the research instead of pretending.(FL is 33% under 30, SF is 30%, FL is 29% over 60, SF is 23%). Age adjusted death rates don't begin to eliminate the gap.
There was world wide inflation. The US economic recovery post Covid was the best among countries with leading economies. Your other claims about Biden are opinions, and you are welcome to them, but perhaps the opinions of US historians who rank Biden at 14th is more interesting.
The article you cite says "Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%." So 56% reduction for surgical style masks, not N95, which would be even better. As I said, masks work.
Nate partly addresses this in terms of implicit bias that might result from trying to sort thru the tons of lies and spin coming from all around. You see a bunch of wrong things you probably grab for what is most wrong looking first, and if you're politically left that bias will lead you to noticing the lies of the right more. So even if you're trying to be fair, that's not super easy.
It also plays out in how type of statements are different, the right tends to tell wildly outright falsehoods ("Trump won in 2020") while the Left tends to go with a lot of part facts and highly biased statements. Like when lots of people said "Trump said Cheney should be shot" when what he really said was crass but not completely different from a lot of 'chicken hawk' attacks I've seen over the years. The latter is harder to notice and fact check.
Don’t confuse statements by individuals (“Trump won in 2020”) with statements by the media. I haven’t seen that statement in ANY media, although I’ve read plenty of reader comments saying it.
Sorry, I saw him live. He wanted to put Cheney in front of a firing squad. Watch it again. You've been propagandized off of the actual truth. You keep making excuses for the lies. You don't see how that blackens your soul?
You keep living in the firehose of bullshit and we'll watch you slowly bend the knee.
This is definitely true. The right wing will say any shit they think will make people outraged, regardless if the truth. For Zuck to let this go unchallenged shows exactly what he is, he doesn’t give one rat’s ass about truth or harm, unless it is to him. Pogroms in Bangladesh? Are our user minutes up is his only question. Hundreds of deaths in India? Not a big deal, we barely promoted the hate and bigotry. Are our user minutes up?
This is the worst move for America, the most obsequious move made by Zuck. He’s a coward.
Or maybe yove been convinced the actual truths are alternative when you never looked to read both sides. Both sides like to add some and leave some out. You can find the truth, but you have to read both and the Middle.
I think the core problem was that fact checkers were simply bad faith actors. Most thought the views of half the population weren't permissible and wanted to suppress those views no matter how accurately expressed.
I won’t take a position on what you said, but Nate in his post above seems to disagree with you:
> The most persistent biases in the mainstream media are rarely sins of commission — the media rarely just makes stuff up — but sins of omission: which stories are deemed “newsworthy” or not, and then which receive greater editorial resources.
The “mainstream media” and fact checkers aren’t the same group of people, but Nate is pretty clear that the biases he’s referring to are more likely to play out indirectly than be bad-faith efforts.
I think the biggest reason for the failure of the fact checkers is because they arbitrated in items that were not matters of fact, including opinions and jokes. If they had stuck strictly to things that had a factual basis, then it wouldn't have been an issue, but they felt the need to check everything.
For example, My dad got a 2 week ban on Facebook for "spreading misinformation" because he posted a meme with a picture of Chuck Norris with the caption "Covid caught a case of Chuck Norris. It was fatal."
Fact checker is a fairly narrow role when done correctly. Opinions, scientific evidence that may or may not bear out in the long run, value driven statements, and yes even good Dad jokes are not the place for them. It’s for balls and strikes. Overreach is undermining what should be a self-evidently good thing.
The main reason for the failure of the fact checkers is that they didn’t fail. They were independent and couldn’t be coerced. Zuck couldn’t keep them pointing out the truth when the republicans just want to lie. He’s completely bent the knee to Trump. He’s a coward. Disgusting.
I would like to submit a citizen's arrest for a chart crime. The political leaning of misinformation experts chart puts the left bars on the right of center and vice versa. As a stupid person, it makes it difficult for me to understand who to be mad at.
Everybody knows that time increases as you move to the right on a graph, so naturally that’s where the progressives live. They are the future, after all! Whereas the right is mired in worship of the past, which is always to the left on a graph.
It's getting better at being able to achieve what its programmers desire for it to do.
In the case of AI Bot programming, the programmers want it to be good at realisticly writing like a human and at spreading lies, both of which have gotten significantly better in AI.
Depending on the program and who codes it, the AI won't even know it's lying, the programmer just narrows the scope of it's learning capabilities to well-known biased/false media. This can be done on the left or the right or anywhere in the middle.
Without fact checking, someone in a position of authority can make demonstrably false statements without contradiction from an authoritative source. For example, if an anti-vaxer heads up HHS and declares that the MMR vaccine causes autism, who is going to fact check that? If it is left to a gaggle of competing claims, the public won’t know what to believe and the result could be harmful to public health.
That certainly is a risk, but does not warrant throwing out the baby with the bath water. The penalty for a biased fact checker is the loss of credibility. Credibility is all fact checkers have to persuade people. If a fact checker has a reputation for bias, the fact checker properly will be ignored.
Then you should be pleased with this outcome, because the fact-checkers have obviously lost credibility (otherwise this wouldn't be happening) and are being ignored. You are welcome to follow them on a personal basis if you wish, but no longer are they being imposed on all Meta customers. Let a hundred flowers bloom.
Interesting that you used the phrase “Let 100 flowers bloom.” If I recall correctly, it was a Chairman Mao saying “let 1000 flowers bloom.” Mao’s idea was to encourage dissenting views so that he could identify his political enemies and then quash dissent . Fortunately, here in the US it just means a bit of chaos so there is little opportunity for us to figure out the true state of the facts. That state of affairs advantages the loudest bullhorn . The book “Nexus” has a lot to say about that phenomenon.
Happy to be fact checked. Kinda makes my point? But, if you knew it was a Mao quote, I am interested to know what your intent was to use it in this context.
I think it rather makes the point that communities can fact-check themselves perfectly well. We don't need a Substack nanny watching over us at all times, ready to pounce if we diverge from the official narratives.
I used the line just because it is a nice turn of phrase. However, I think you're wrong that Mao created the campaign as a brilliant, dastardly scheme to identify dissenters. It seems more likely that he was trying to loosen the authoritarianism so as to stop choking the country, and was shocked when he realised just how hated he and the CCP had become, so had to hurriedly reverse course.
Regardless, many conservatives are indeed sceptical of the loosening of restrictions and sometimes urge each other to be as circumspect now as they would have been before lest the restrictions return and apply retroactively. So it's an interesting analogy: the patterns of the left's tyrannical speech restrictions hold as strong today as they did in mid-century China.
There are sources more qualified and authoritative than “fact checkers” that can evaluate and have evaluated claims like “vaccines cause autism” such as the National Academy of Sciences. People with real subject matter expertise.
Nate, if you're going to criticize fact checkers, it's incumbent on you to give persuasive examples where fact checkers were wrong or promoted misleading narratives. But you say that the "overwhelming majority" of what fact checkers provided was "narrowly true". So where's YOUR data to back your assertions?
One pet peeve I have about the way that Zuckerberg and Musk talk about social media is they are acting like these are platforms that feature some default neutral free-speech, and moderation and community notes is all about what manual intervention away from that free-speech environment.
In reality, Facebook, X and all social media companies have deliberately moved away from a chronological feed generated by known contacts (i.e. akin to email or group chat), to an algorithmic feed interleaved with engagement recommendations and paid advertising.
The entire value proposition of these companies is a non-neutral walk through social media content, and all this discussion about free speech or responsible moderation thereof is designed to avoid taking accountability for how their platform draw users and make money off them. Zuckerberg has admitted as much that there is an inverse relationship between the quality of information and how engaging it is for their platform.
We need to move to a business model in which users pay to either get the high-quality content they really want, or pay to express themselves in an higher quality fashion. i.e. Substack, Patreon, NYTimes, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, Adobe etc. The power of AI content generation will only heighten the distinction, between being fed slop and unleashing your personal creativity.
I don't like Facebooks older approach, their recent approach, or their new approach. I think its a repugnant middleman that inserts itself between its users and what they actually want.
Great point. I like the metaphor of a town square. Email, web 1.0, or an old school non-algorithmic forum is like a town square with individuals handing out pamphlets they printed themselves, or the mail service delivering requested materials to your door. The post algorithmic internet - Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, new Reddit - have built in amplification policies where they make the more engaging, enraging, or advertiser friendly content bigger and louder and hide away other content with no regard for truth value or prosocial features beyond what is demanded by advertisers. Old school media has explicit human curation, but algorithmic social media has a black box machine amplifying our worst human traits.
The mainstream media, which as Nate has said is left leaning, has lost any claim to superiority when it comes to fact checking and not promulgating misinformation.
Witness:
-The multi year coverup of the Biden incompetence and incapacity
- The Hunter Biden laptop coverup, which they KNEW about
- Essentially ignoring Joe Biden’s lies regarding the use of his political position to promote his and Hunter’s highly dubious financial schemes in Ukraine and China (which I would love for Nate to do a series on)
- Promoting the conspiracies regarding Trump Russia collusion without any facts whatsoever
- Buying in to the left’s claims about the threat to democracy
- Constantly lecturing that everyone was better off during Biden than Trump (had it not been for Covid, Trump would have run away with the 2020 election)
- Promoting the legitimacy of boys competing in women’s sports
- Promoting the idea that Harris was a legitimate and superior candidate, against all evidence, endorsing her, and in the cases where her candidacy was not endorsed (Post, LA Times) raising hell about the the “corruption” the non-endorsement represented
- Not covering the harm of DEI initiatives
- Not covering perhaps the most important story of the last 4 decades, the complete loss of free expression at our most cherished institutions of free expression, universities, where only woke ideology is accepted, and any other view is canceled.
The idea, which Nate has suggested, that the right is more responsible for disinformation than the left simply does not hold up; in fact I would argue that misinformation from the left is and was much more dangerous because most right biased misinformation is ridiculous, and the left was provided the legitimacy of the mainstream media for its coverups and lies.
I am left leaning, have no love for Trump. But how can any thinking person trust the mainstream media any longer? No wonder alternative outlets, including Fox, X and internet, are thriving.
In the spirit of fighting misinformation, I'll point out that "sewing ground" doesn't mean anything (though you probably meant "sowing ground"). Consider yourself fact-checked.
I mean, as long as we're engaging in community grammar-policing, here (and, to state the obvious, I expect Substacks to be written fairly quickly and contain this sort of stuff), I think the sentence needs some other work, too. They did, in fact sow something (otherwise there's nothing to reap), they didn't attempt to do it. And I'm not sure how I feel about "sown ground"--maybe that's an acceptable extension of "sown fields" (as opposed to the slightly more common usage where the seeds are the things you sow, not the ground), but possibly if you're sowing the field, then you harvest the field, whereas if you sow the seed, you reap the crop or something?
I dunno, if I were getting paid to edit this I'd come up with an actionable re-write that was elegant and clear, but I'm just some guy procrastinating from his real job and making a half-hearted attempt to provide meta-commentary (see what I did there) on the limits of community moderation...
I am usually on the same page as Nate but I disagree with him here. The solution is to improve the fact checkers not open things up more to the most persuasively presented disinformation. Most people don’t have time to do the research themselves.
And those people will still be able to follow fact-checking organisations on a personal basis. Fact-checking has not been banned. It just won't be subsidised and enforced by the biggest social media network in the country any more. Everyone will be able to make their own choices as to which, if any, fact-checking sources they trust.
Lol nobody is going to independently check facts. The vast majority of people are not consuming their social media feed with a critical eye, especially when everything they see there reaffirms their world-view. And simply telling hundreds of millions of American citizens to become more discerning of the information they see online is not going to work.
It's not about intelligence. People's brains can be hacked, and it's being done all the time online. Expecting everybody to care about politics enough to go beyond their literally addictive social media feeds and fact check *everything* is absurd, who has the time for that?
The solution to falsehoods is to point out that they are falsehoods, not to try to censor the speaker. If you can't win the debate, if you need to rely on censorship, most observers will conclude that you don't have a case.
? but your comment above explicitly argues that censorship is the problem, conflating fact-checking with censorship. I have a much longer post above on this issue, as i think that Nate's whole post is conflating politics with the issue - and not really addressing the real problem. I do not claim to know how well fact-checking was helping the problem, nor do I dissagree with Nate, that FB was politically motivated to support the fact-checking to begin with, and is now politically motivated to dump it. That may be true, but it ignores the very real problem with "news" on social media, as opposed to news on a TV channel or in a newspaper, or information in a book. The latter sources are somewhat constrained by libel and defamation suits, the former is not (due to Section 230. Thats the real issue that we have to grapple with.
The so called fact checkers have been flagrantly biased since at least 2012. For a while it seemed practically any statement from Romney or Ryan would get somehow construed as false no matter how great the contortions required.
Maybe the fact checkers seem left-biased because most of the alternative facts emanate from the right. And maybe the need for 24x7 fact checking as an appendage to journalism emanated from the deliberate 'flood the zone with shit" strategy of the right.
Like the lab leak hypothesis? Or Hunter Biden's laptop?
1) Russian misinformation is still Russian misinformation, not your excuse to be willfully ignorant.
2) The lab leak itself was not censored anywhere, the unbased bullshit from Trump was labeled as bullshit. Sorry that bugs you. But I understand, when your this willfully ignorant, facts are upsetting.
1. Like the Biden laptop?
2. Did you even read the article?
Or maybe your sentiments are a product of your political biases.
Or maybe yours are.
Or maybe EVERYBODY'S are and we ought to let the free exchange of ideas go on. It's fascinating that when Russia was ruled by the Communists, the Right would label things unfavorable to countries or causes they liked "Communist propaganda" and the Left would say that this was "right-wing paranoia". Now it's the Left talking about "Russian disinformation" and the Right talking about "left-wing censorship". Truth will out; let discussion be free.
The history of political pamphlets that circulated in the early days of the US is instructive.
Open discourse is what the first amendment is about. Fact checking is part of discourse.
Yes, a good BS detection system is a good thing.
However, we don't need a High Priesthood of the Truth(TM). Too many opportunities for shenanigans, at the very least.
Shrug.
There are high priests of “Truth”, and many more of them sharing fiction on the right than left.
Whataboutism is great, but it isn't empirical.
Virtue Signaling ostentatious "fact checking" which seems to be component of Nate calls the Big Cope has been really nothing more than self-deception on the Lefty side of the college educated professional class.
Evidently as Patrick M has written, your reaction is every bit as driven by your sentiments as to whom you replied....
It's quite clear that such Fact Checkers have been security blankets for the Left oriented progressive fraction of college educated professional classes, who have swung sharply in a political direction. But have about zero credibility outside of the pre-convinced - a form of self-deception, virtue signaling to one's one tribe but not really doing anything outside of that.
Better to stop self-deception
Conservatives and MAGA won't admit they lie all the time and have zero credibility. Falous thinkis that's just fine. Let them lie, we'll counter it with our own bullshit? What crazy world do you live in where it's a good idea to let bad actors pass off bullshit as the truth?
Go ahead... Fact check the fact checkers.
Without that, you are just presenting an unsupported opinion.
I think you've hit the diagnosis squarely on the head, but I'm not sure if fact checking is the best prescription to solve the problem. It strikes me kind of like those medieval physicians prescribing bleeding for patients that have a fever as doing more harm than good. I can't say I've got the right answer, but the old internet saying of the best antidote to bad speech is more speech sounds better to me.
That's just naivitie. Letting liars blast bullshit 24x7 from hundreds of sources without labels is just naive. Letting Bots blast bullshit at you should be illegal. We don't need more bullshit, we need less.
Masks work
Greedy corporations cause inflation,
lockdowns help slow the spread of COVID-19.
Biden is fit for office
These are right-wing?
Masks do work. Mask mandates don't because people don't wear masks.
Lockdowns worked. Look at SFs fatality rate vs Florida's.
Biden has had a very successful presidency by any objective measurement.
Masks work at what they are made to do. Surgeons wear surgical masks because they are talking and perhaps breathing heavily over a physically compromised patient and don’t want their own spittle contaminating the operating theater. The same principle applies to somebody with a bad cough or sneezing; it’s simple politeness not to spew your gobs into the people you pass.
It’s a lot less clear that masks do much of anything to protect the *wearer*. If someone walks right up to you and sneezes directly into your face, you’d probably be happier if you had a mask on, but that’s a pretty uncommon occurrence. (What they said about masks early on was that they were for the protection of others.)
Once it became clear that Covid was mainly airborne, rather than conveyed by droplets or fomites, the argument for masks largely fell apart, on the “chain-link fence to keep out flies” analogy. It might on the margin make it very, very slightly harder for a given airborne virus to reach your lungs, but the effect is in the noise.
Masks work to cut transmission of respiratory illness, whether worn by the patient or the healthy individual.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4420971/
Surgical masks > Cloth masks for practitioners.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3359891/
TB patients wearing masks greatly reduced transmission to an animal model.
Right.
Masks are mgic one way material that filters exhaled material but not inhaled.
If you reject masking because it isn't 100% effective you are missing the point. Lowering the transmission rate even by 10% saves lives. Well run mask studies showed high quality masks reduced transmission 10 to 50%>
Yeah, they don't help the wearer much, which is why there was a push for everybody to wear them. But "muh freedom"
This is just horseshit. It's obvious masks work if you use them correctly. Doctor Mist is making up hyupotheticals to pretend they don't work.
Mostly airborne - in fucking droplets. The measurements showed it reduced spreads by factors of 5 to 10. Sorry, Dr. Mist, you're mistaken.
Lockdowns: you're Comparing SF to the state with the country's oldest population to compare death rates of a disease that overwhelmingly affects older populations more than younger populations.
Biden: passed a law that overwhelmingly contributed to the highest inflation the country has seen in decades, completely botched the Afghanistan pullout, and made false claims about the vaccines that contributed to a complete loss of faith in public health officials.
Mask: The N95 mask showed marginal benefits, but cloth masks little to no difference: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Check out SFs age histogram. Do both sides of the research instead of pretending.(FL is 33% under 30, SF is 30%, FL is 29% over 60, SF is 23%). Age adjusted death rates don't begin to eliminate the gap.
There was world wide inflation. The US economic recovery post Covid was the best among countries with leading economies. Your other claims about Biden are opinions, and you are welcome to them, but perhaps the opinions of US historians who rank Biden at 14th is more interesting.
The article you cite says "Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%." So 56% reduction for surgical style masks, not N95, which would be even better. As I said, masks work.
Agree that masks work and that lockdowns helped slow the spread.
Disagree that Biden is fit for office.
By any reasonble measure, he was fitter than the upcoming denizen of that office is going to be. The chaos is coming....
https://presidentialgreatnessproject.com/
Biden is pretty high on the list, but I suppose an argument can be made that about 75% of presidents are unfit.
He has dementia.
Sure he does. Just not like anyone ever had dementia before. Did you see him at Carter's ceremony?
Nate partly addresses this in terms of implicit bias that might result from trying to sort thru the tons of lies and spin coming from all around. You see a bunch of wrong things you probably grab for what is most wrong looking first, and if you're politically left that bias will lead you to noticing the lies of the right more. So even if you're trying to be fair, that's not super easy.
It also plays out in how type of statements are different, the right tends to tell wildly outright falsehoods ("Trump won in 2020") while the Left tends to go with a lot of part facts and highly biased statements. Like when lots of people said "Trump said Cheney should be shot" when what he really said was crass but not completely different from a lot of 'chicken hawk' attacks I've seen over the years. The latter is harder to notice and fact check.
Don’t confuse statements by individuals (“Trump won in 2020”) with statements by the media. I haven’t seen that statement in ANY media, although I’ve read plenty of reader comments saying it.
Dominion voting and the $787 million they won from Fox News would like a word with you....
I don’t watch Fox News so I missed that.
Sorry, I saw him live. He wanted to put Cheney in front of a firing squad. Watch it again. You've been propagandized off of the actual truth. You keep making excuses for the lies. You don't see how that blackens your soul?
You keep living in the firehose of bullshit and we'll watch you slowly bend the knee.
Keep making excuses for Trump saying Cheney should have a firing squad pointed at her. You’re not willfully ignorant, you’re just gaslighting us.
You excuse whatever Trump does and pretend it’s okay. Guess what? It’s not. Karma will come and you will be in the receiving end.
Untrue. An example of a biased statement by a presumably left leaning individual.
This is definitely true. The right wing will say any shit they think will make people outraged, regardless if the truth. For Zuck to let this go unchallenged shows exactly what he is, he doesn’t give one rat’s ass about truth or harm, unless it is to him. Pogroms in Bangladesh? Are our user minutes up is his only question. Hundreds of deaths in India? Not a big deal, we barely promoted the hate and bigotry. Are our user minutes up?
This is the worst move for America, the most obsequious move made by Zuck. He’s a coward.
Do you have any documentation/proof of that?
Or maybe yove been convinced the actual truths are alternative when you never looked to read both sides. Both sides like to add some and leave some out. You can find the truth, but you have to read both and the Middle.
The Willie Sutton rule applies.
Sure, you can go after random individuals, but the banks are bigger targets.
Did you see the image of Bjorn Lomborg's tweet in the article?
I think the core problem was that fact checkers were simply bad faith actors. Most thought the views of half the population weren't permissible and wanted to suppress those views no matter how accurately expressed.
I won’t take a position on what you said, but Nate in his post above seems to disagree with you:
> The most persistent biases in the mainstream media are rarely sins of commission — the media rarely just makes stuff up — but sins of omission: which stories are deemed “newsworthy” or not, and then which receive greater editorial resources.
The “mainstream media” and fact checkers aren’t the same group of people, but Nate is pretty clear that the biases he’s referring to are more likely to play out indirectly than be bad-faith efforts.
No, Nate doesn't absolve them on bad faith in that passage, only of outright lying in bad faith. Bad faith sins of omission are still bad faith.
but social media platforms are not the main stream media.
I think the biggest reason for the failure of the fact checkers is because they arbitrated in items that were not matters of fact, including opinions and jokes. If they had stuck strictly to things that had a factual basis, then it wouldn't have been an issue, but they felt the need to check everything.
For example, My dad got a 2 week ban on Facebook for "spreading misinformation" because he posted a meme with a picture of Chuck Norris with the caption "Covid caught a case of Chuck Norris. It was fatal."
Fact checker is a fairly narrow role when done correctly. Opinions, scientific evidence that may or may not bear out in the long run, value driven statements, and yes even good Dad jokes are not the place for them. It’s for balls and strikes. Overreach is undermining what should be a self-evidently good thing.
The main reason for the failure of the fact checkers is that they didn’t fail. They were independent and couldn’t be coerced. Zuck couldn’t keep them pointing out the truth when the republicans just want to lie. He’s completely bent the knee to Trump. He’s a coward. Disgusting.
This is delusional.
I would like to submit a citizen's arrest for a chart crime. The political leaning of misinformation experts chart puts the left bars on the right of center and vice versa. As a stupid person, it makes it difficult for me to understand who to be mad at.
I came here to make the same comment. As an ever stupider person I could not have said it better.
Everybody knows that time increases as you move to the right on a graph, so naturally that’s where the progressives live. They are the future, after all! Whereas the right is mired in worship of the past, which is always to the left on a graph.
(JK, in case I was too subtle.)
The answer to falsehoods and misinformation isn't censorship--it's more speech.
Good idea in practice but the bots are many...
Then it's up to you to develop the critical skills required to weed them out .
Yeah, AI writing isn't getting vastly better by the day, just git gud at interweb, duhhh
Is it getting better at lying or better at writing?
It's getting better at being able to achieve what its programmers desire for it to do.
In the case of AI Bot programming, the programmers want it to be good at realisticly writing like a human and at spreading lies, both of which have gotten significantly better in AI.
Depending on the program and who codes it, the AI won't even know it's lying, the programmer just narrows the scope of it's learning capabilities to well-known biased/false media. This can be done on the left or the right or anywhere in the middle.
So since human beings can both write and lie, and frequently do both, what's the big deal?
Without fact checking, someone in a position of authority can make demonstrably false statements without contradiction from an authoritative source. For example, if an anti-vaxer heads up HHS and declares that the MMR vaccine causes autism, who is going to fact check that? If it is left to a gaggle of competing claims, the public won’t know what to believe and the result could be harmful to public health.
In theory you're right. In practice, the self-proclaimed fact-checkers frequently ended up adding to the "gaggle of competing claims" problem.
That certainly is a risk, but does not warrant throwing out the baby with the bath water. The penalty for a biased fact checker is the loss of credibility. Credibility is all fact checkers have to persuade people. If a fact checker has a reputation for bias, the fact checker properly will be ignored.
Then you should be pleased with this outcome, because the fact-checkers have obviously lost credibility (otherwise this wouldn't be happening) and are being ignored. You are welcome to follow them on a personal basis if you wish, but no longer are they being imposed on all Meta customers. Let a hundred flowers bloom.
Interesting that you used the phrase “Let 100 flowers bloom.” If I recall correctly, it was a Chairman Mao saying “let 1000 flowers bloom.” Mao’s idea was to encourage dissenting views so that he could identify his political enemies and then quash dissent . Fortunately, here in the US it just means a bit of chaos so there is little opportunity for us to figure out the true state of the facts. That state of affairs advantages the loudest bullhorn . The book “Nexus” has a lot to say about that phenomenon.
Mao's original was a Hundred Flowers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
Happy to be fact checked. Kinda makes my point? But, if you knew it was a Mao quote, I am interested to know what your intent was to use it in this context.
I think it rather makes the point that communities can fact-check themselves perfectly well. We don't need a Substack nanny watching over us at all times, ready to pounce if we diverge from the official narratives.
I used the line just because it is a nice turn of phrase. However, I think you're wrong that Mao created the campaign as a brilliant, dastardly scheme to identify dissenters. It seems more likely that he was trying to loosen the authoritarianism so as to stop choking the country, and was shocked when he realised just how hated he and the CCP had become, so had to hurriedly reverse course.
Regardless, many conservatives are indeed sceptical of the loosening of restrictions and sometimes urge each other to be as circumspect now as they would have been before lest the restrictions return and apply retroactively. So it's an interesting analogy: the patterns of the left's tyrannical speech restrictions hold as strong today as they did in mid-century China.
I think those “re-educated “ in the subsequent purge might disagree with your optimistic view of Mao’s motives.
Sure it does. The baby was thrown out because it destroyed its credibility. This is the literal process playing out.
The problem is it's already a Gaggle of competing claims,
and what's needed isn't a quick fact check but a actual in depth nuanced discussion.
There's nothing wrong with the fact checks separate from the system.
In fact, put them in the new community reporting if you like.
But in attempting to turn Fact Checks into part of the content system,
they lost the ability to convince or honestly in many cases to look deeper than the surface level.
There are sources more qualified and authoritative than “fact checkers” that can evaluate and have evaluated claims like “vaccines cause autism” such as the National Academy of Sciences. People with real subject matter expertise.
Nate, if you're going to criticize fact checkers, it's incumbent on you to give persuasive examples where fact checkers were wrong or promoted misleading narratives. But you say that the "overwhelming majority" of what fact checkers provided was "narrowly true". So where's YOUR data to back your assertions?
He is bluffing.
My all-time favorite, for what it's worth: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/09/29/carly-fiorinas-career-a-response-to-readers/?itid=lk_inline_manual_58
One pet peeve I have about the way that Zuckerberg and Musk talk about social media is they are acting like these are platforms that feature some default neutral free-speech, and moderation and community notes is all about what manual intervention away from that free-speech environment.
In reality, Facebook, X and all social media companies have deliberately moved away from a chronological feed generated by known contacts (i.e. akin to email or group chat), to an algorithmic feed interleaved with engagement recommendations and paid advertising.
The entire value proposition of these companies is a non-neutral walk through social media content, and all this discussion about free speech or responsible moderation thereof is designed to avoid taking accountability for how their platform draw users and make money off them. Zuckerberg has admitted as much that there is an inverse relationship between the quality of information and how engaging it is for their platform.
We need to move to a business model in which users pay to either get the high-quality content they really want, or pay to express themselves in an higher quality fashion. i.e. Substack, Patreon, NYTimes, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, Adobe etc. The power of AI content generation will only heighten the distinction, between being fed slop and unleashing your personal creativity.
I don't like Facebooks older approach, their recent approach, or their new approach. I think its a repugnant middleman that inserts itself between its users and what they actually want.
Great point. I like the metaphor of a town square. Email, web 1.0, or an old school non-algorithmic forum is like a town square with individuals handing out pamphlets they printed themselves, or the mail service delivering requested materials to your door. The post algorithmic internet - Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, new Reddit - have built in amplification policies where they make the more engaging, enraging, or advertiser friendly content bigger and louder and hide away other content with no regard for truth value or prosocial features beyond what is demanded by advertisers. Old school media has explicit human curation, but algorithmic social media has a black box machine amplifying our worst human traits.
The mainstream media, which as Nate has said is left leaning, has lost any claim to superiority when it comes to fact checking and not promulgating misinformation.
Witness:
-The multi year coverup of the Biden incompetence and incapacity
- The Hunter Biden laptop coverup, which they KNEW about
- Essentially ignoring Joe Biden’s lies regarding the use of his political position to promote his and Hunter’s highly dubious financial schemes in Ukraine and China (which I would love for Nate to do a series on)
- Promoting the conspiracies regarding Trump Russia collusion without any facts whatsoever
- Buying in to the left’s claims about the threat to democracy
- Constantly lecturing that everyone was better off during Biden than Trump (had it not been for Covid, Trump would have run away with the 2020 election)
- Promoting the legitimacy of boys competing in women’s sports
- Promoting the idea that Harris was a legitimate and superior candidate, against all evidence, endorsing her, and in the cases where her candidacy was not endorsed (Post, LA Times) raising hell about the the “corruption” the non-endorsement represented
- Not covering the harm of DEI initiatives
- Not covering perhaps the most important story of the last 4 decades, the complete loss of free expression at our most cherished institutions of free expression, universities, where only woke ideology is accepted, and any other view is canceled.
The idea, which Nate has suggested, that the right is more responsible for disinformation than the left simply does not hold up; in fact I would argue that misinformation from the left is and was much more dangerous because most right biased misinformation is ridiculous, and the left was provided the legitimacy of the mainstream media for its coverups and lies.
I am left leaning, have no love for Trump. But how can any thinking person trust the mainstream media any longer? No wonder alternative outlets, including Fox, X and internet, are thriving.
Right. You confuse opinion with facts and are irritated that no one fact checked in a way that supported your opinions.
You say you are left leaning, but you seem to have a solid pipeline to right wing fantasies about reality.
In the spirit of fighting misinformation, I'll point out that "sewing ground" doesn't mean anything (though you probably meant "sowing ground"). Consider yourself fact-checked.
Or "sow ground", rather. Gotta watch out, I was almost spreading misinformation there myself.
I mean, as long as we're engaging in community grammar-policing, here (and, to state the obvious, I expect Substacks to be written fairly quickly and contain this sort of stuff), I think the sentence needs some other work, too. They did, in fact sow something (otherwise there's nothing to reap), they didn't attempt to do it. And I'm not sure how I feel about "sown ground"--maybe that's an acceptable extension of "sown fields" (as opposed to the slightly more common usage where the seeds are the things you sow, not the ground), but possibly if you're sowing the field, then you harvest the field, whereas if you sow the seed, you reap the crop or something?
I dunno, if I were getting paid to edit this I'd come up with an actionable re-write that was elegant and clear, but I'm just some guy procrastinating from his real job and making a half-hearted attempt to provide meta-commentary (see what I did there) on the limits of community moderation...
I am usually on the same page as Nate but I disagree with him here. The solution is to improve the fact checkers not open things up more to the most persuasively presented disinformation. Most people don’t have time to do the research themselves.
And those people will still be able to follow fact-checking organisations on a personal basis. Fact-checking has not been banned. It just won't be subsidised and enforced by the biggest social media network in the country any more. Everyone will be able to make their own choices as to which, if any, fact-checking sources they trust.
Lol nobody is going to independently check facts. The vast majority of people are not consuming their social media feed with a critical eye, especially when everything they see there reaffirms their world-view. And simply telling hundreds of millions of American citizens to become more discerning of the information they see online is not going to work.
The ordinary citizens you have such a low opinion of are smarter than you give them credit for.
It's not about intelligence. People's brains can be hacked, and it's being done all the time online. Expecting everybody to care about politics enough to go beyond their literally addictive social media feeds and fact check *everything* is absurd, who has the time for that?
Wesley Yang on X posted that it says something that you suck up to Democrats by censoring speech while you suck up to Trump by unleashing it.
Unleashing LIES, you mean, plus nonsense and ignorance. Those are the only words Trump spews.
The solution to falsehoods is to point out that they are falsehoods, not to try to censor the speaker. If you can't win the debate, if you need to rely on censorship, most observers will conclude that you don't have a case.
but that is precisely what fact-checkers DID NOT do. They did not excercise censorship, and that is explicitly stated in the article.
If that is the case then surely it's no big deal if FB decides to terminate its agreements with those fact checking organizations, right?
? but your comment above explicitly argues that censorship is the problem, conflating fact-checking with censorship. I have a much longer post above on this issue, as i think that Nate's whole post is conflating politics with the issue - and not really addressing the real problem. I do not claim to know how well fact-checking was helping the problem, nor do I dissagree with Nate, that FB was politically motivated to support the fact-checking to begin with, and is now politically motivated to dump it. That may be true, but it ignores the very real problem with "news" on social media, as opposed to news on a TV channel or in a newspaper, or information in a book. The latter sources are somewhat constrained by libel and defamation suits, the former is not (due to Section 230. Thats the real issue that we have to grapple with.
The lab leak hypothesis. The Hunter Biden laptop. The coverup of Biden's age.
Exactly how truthful has legacy media been?
The so called fact checkers have been flagrantly biased since at least 2012. For a while it seemed practically any statement from Romney or Ryan would get somehow construed as false no matter how great the contortions required.