I agree they leave a lot to be desired, but they're both at least perceived as somewhat reliable and trustworthy - factcheck is used by Facebook for example. I'm sure lots of people have pointed to those sites as proof, unfortunately.
I don't think any fact checker did a good job or influenced anything. It is mostly preaching to the choir and the result is mixed at best, not am improvement in my opinion.
True, credibility must be earned and that is a difficult and slow process, and it is given by individuals.
That said, it is true that you should not believe random people on Facebook. That lesson can quickly be learned in my opinion.
Some of the fact checking websites are just blatant partisan punditry disguised as 'fact-checking'. (Verrit is worst offender: labeling something as 'True' if someone said something verbatim, even if it is not a factual assertion).
Even the ones with decent records often display bias, ex. when someone they like says something where the thesis is correct but a supporting fact is incorrect, they'll mark it as "mostly true". But when someone they don't like does the same, they'll mark it as "mostly false".
I have completely different observations. Most of the time sites try to sell me opinion and thoughts of some sort of "experts", but I want pure facts with fact-checking.
If there were any real trustworthy fact-checking web sites, this study would mean a lot more, but there's a LOT of obvious bias on any of the fact-checking sites. That's not to say that nothing is objectively false (or true), but just to say that it's been "fact-checked" doesn't tell anybody which it is.
I can't be the only person who finds these kinds of so-called 'fact check' sites more sinister than the so-called biased media they're trying to spotlight.
They can fact check whatever they want, it's their site. It's stupid but people that should leave to greener pastures, it's not like in the beginning there was Facebook and we're bound to use that forever.
The problem is people want to 1) trust blindly and 2) not be taken advantage of that. You can only have one of those.
I think the biggest issue is that the "Facts" the fact checkers present, often isn't factually based. Not to mention, the fact checking orgs will cover factual, even if mixed with hyperbolic opinion articles in favor of their own news orgs articles (that are monetized to boot).
It's also less than ideal that they body-check facts from right leaning news sources far more than left leaning. FTR, I'm Libertarian not typical left/right.
I posted a humorous meme, and it was tagged with a couple different "get the facts" messages, which was just plain stupid and kind of funny, even drawing in comments to that effect.
In the end, it's hard to trust most of the media sources without getting news/pov from multiple left/right/foreign sources. I'm starting to think that anything that is opinion based over facts in news reporting should have a big red label of "OPINION, NOT NEWS!" on it in order to receive any protection from libel, including videos for a couple seconds. I also think that any social media org that has more than 25% of a country as its' users should probably have to comply with the same free speech norms as a government agency would.
I work in the elections space, and while some things seem really fishy, it's hard to take any of it without a grain of salt considering how many of the things I've seen being accused are purely BS from people who don't know/understand what's happening. I mean, I'm pretty sure there was some fishy stuff going on in at least some places, but I just don't know what to believe anymore... and that's almost worse than just picking a side.
I think having peer review opportunities would go a long way over some of the paid and algorithmic review options. Even if you had a hidden Karma like here and other sites and was randomly chosen to "review" judge/vote on content posts... maybe not private messages, but say public posts or group posts... just a general thumbs up/down.. and the quorum is comprised of say 3-5 randomly selected each of left/right/other for a decent mix. You get a 55% quorum for violation, the post then goes to FB for review/action.
Reviews are done by those in the same locality of the person posting. Private groups or message posts go directly to FB monitors... but there's no reason not to have a community judge for itself if something is over the line.
As part of a project I worked on, I did a daily review of fact-check sites. Politifact is great if you're a liberal and want fact checks to suit your partisan view of the world. This is easily proven by looking at the people who comment on their fact checks on Facebook, who are overwhelmingly liberal. If you are actually looking for unbiased fact checks, you should look elsewhere.
I kind of agree TBH, although I would say their search engine (as it is today) and a 'fact-repo' are quite different things. I'd expect a higher level of rigour in the fact-repo ML checking processes.
I think that politifact, snopes, and most fact-checking websites I'm aware of are great and everyone should use them as sources of reason and skepticism in a larger sea of information and misinformation.
But they are not authorities on the truth.
Google is not qualified to decide who is an authoritative decider of truth. But as the de facto gateway to the internet, it really looks like they are now doing exactly that. I am deeply uncomfortable with this.
See, this is the rub. If I ask you why you consider factcheck.org more biased than any other site, I won't have any better way to verify the credibility of your evidence than I do to verify the credibility of factcheck.org directly. It wins us nothing but uncertainty!
Does anyone have a good algorithm for this problem that does not degenerate at some point to blind faith in some ideology?
Fact checking all the facts is an extremely broad scope. A small mom and pop company is hardly able to support such a mission unless they happen to be multidisciplinary experts/geniuses. I always seemed a bit doubtful about some of the conclusions drawn from that site.
This article is about their news aggregator failing to represent a fact check correctly, not about their search engine failing to deliver a wide variety of sources with various levels of reputability. Which it does do quite reliably. Their fact checking AI on the other hand... not so reliable clearly.
I'm sure there's a neutral, disinterested fact checker somewhere in the world. But my experience with political fact checkers is mostly composed of people posting Snopes articles with similar keywords to what I said. I'm not sure I trust Facebook to hire the right kind.
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