Been meaning to make this for a while. But it's tedious and I'm both busy and lazy. The Joe Rogan thread, plus finding a bunch of relevant tweets today, prompted me to finally do it.
Since 2016, and the narrative of (mostly Russian) disinformation/bots as the determining force in the election, combating misinformation and determining The Facts has become an important part of US journalism. It's spread to the other parts of the west (Guardian heavily pushes stories about fake news on social media), and fact-checking is even turning up far away (a few sites and stories in India too). As usual, the US is the hegemon and sets the tone for the rest!
PizzaGate, QAnon, and finally Covid and the vast amounts of nonsense about it (does anyone remember the quaint 5G virus of summer 2020 , or has it all been forgotten with the vaccine stuff?) all emphasised the importance of combating misinformation.
One of the ways the good journalists will combat bad social media Russian Fox fake news is by fact checking. In the US, the most well-known fact checkers are Snopes, Politifact, and the WaPo fact checker with its Pinnochio rating.
Among the entire population, fact-checkers aren't particularly trusted, but among liberals, they are. This tracks with the partisan narratives from 2016. It means that fact-checkers have a pretty exalted place among liberals and among the mainstream/liberal media (which is pretty invested in the disinformation narrative). But are they brave paragons of truth, or ideological devotees to centrist politics, who expand or collapse the definition of facts to suit their agenda? (obviously the 2nd)
1. Flagging things as false/mixture even though they are literally true:
A classic of the genre is Bernie getting a "misleading" rating for saying that millions of Americans work 2 or 3 jobs, which is true, because the fact-checker did not like the use of the word "millions" to refer to literally 8 million people. Not making this up. This is not a fact-check. It's a ideological vibe check. It is someone trying to push back at politics he dislikes.
More examples here, here, here, here and here. All clear *facts*, not rated as such.
2. Defending partisan spin:
The libertarian Mercatus Center released a study showing that universal public healthcare would cost ~32tn over 10 years. It then put this number in the headline of a press release, and the press duly reported on this frightening price tag. A blogger went into the tables of the study and noted that its projection for healthcare spending under the current model for 10 years is ~34tn, and released his arithmetic with the 2tn saving as thee title.
The Bernie campaign then referred to this study - by an ideological opponent! - to note that his plan saves 2tn. For this, he was given 3 Pinnochios by the Washington Post fact-checker, who invited the Mercatus people to cry about Bernie using their published data in a way they didn't like. This shouldn't matter to a *fact-checker*, who has to determine if Bernie is representing a study's numbers faithfully, not if he is following it's authors' ideological spin. Once they put those numbers in that table and published it, they have to stand by them, or explain why it's wrong and retract the study!
A summary of the entire debacle here.
3. What isn't fact-checked -
Even with this seeming expansion in the scope of "fact"-checking, some things go unnoticed through these eagle-eyed guardians of democracy.
I searched and found nothing in snopes.com or politifact on this clearly misleading graph. Unlike in points 1 and 2, this is where a neutral fact-checkers adding a misleading/context missing might be helpful! For some reason, it's not been done.
Paid news by a lobby group is inserted into local news:
https://theintercept.com/2021/06/16/ed-newsfeed-american-federation-for-children-local-news/
Nothing from Snopes or Politifact, informing their readers that the "news anchors" on these segments are actually lobbyists. Again, context, which they are sometimes so eager to provide, would be useful here.
4. The bottomless pit of social media fact-checking:
Most fake news spreads through FB, insta, youtube, twitter, and they have started flagging (some) of it. Problem 1: obviously, they can't get it all, which means some fake news now appears more genuine since it's not been flagged. Problem 2: their fact-checking teams are even more ideologically biased, leading to predictable outcomes. Problem 3: openly in thrall to fake-news-spreading advertisers. Problem 4: algorithm-driven, and thus largely garbage: here it disallows factual information good vaccine effectiveness from being posted let alone shared, here it intervenes and erases a debate.
Not even getting into the debacle of the Hunter Biden story which could not be posted about or referred to on any social media, prior to any fact-checking being done on it. This was retroactively defended by creating a new standard that news referencing hacked materials cannot be shared (what about, say, the Pentagon papers or MKUltra?), and then quietly dropping that policy too.
Towards the end of this post, I realised that someone else wrote an article covering a lot of this 3 years ago, using a few of the same examples, with much better style. And with some interesting personal background on a prominent fact-checker. So uhh ignore everything my nonsense and read that instead.
Fake news sucks. Indian politics has been massively influenced by Whatsapp, this is a good writeup on how organised and poisonous it is. This happened, unbelievably. The covid vaccine thing is terrible.
But fact-checking comes with its own issues and biases and isn't effective at its supposed job.
Since 2016, and the narrative of (mostly Russian) disinformation/bots as the determining force in the election, combating misinformation and determining The Facts has become an important part of US journalism. It's spread to the other parts of the west (Guardian heavily pushes stories about fake news on social media), and fact-checking is even turning up far away (a few sites and stories in India too). As usual, the US is the hegemon and sets the tone for the rest!
PizzaGate, QAnon, and finally Covid and the vast amounts of nonsense about it (does anyone remember the quaint 5G virus of summer 2020 , or has it all been forgotten with the vaccine stuff?) all emphasised the importance of combating misinformation.
One of the ways the good journalists will combat bad social media Russian Fox fake news is by fact checking. In the US, the most well-known fact checkers are Snopes, Politifact, and the WaPo fact checker with its Pinnochio rating.
Among the entire population, fact-checkers aren't particularly trusted, but among liberals, they are. This tracks with the partisan narratives from 2016. It means that fact-checkers have a pretty exalted place among liberals and among the mainstream/liberal media (which is pretty invested in the disinformation narrative). But are they brave paragons of truth, or ideological devotees to centrist politics, who expand or collapse the definition of facts to suit their agenda? (obviously the 2nd)
1. Flagging things as false/mixture even though they are literally true:
A classic of the genre is Bernie getting a "misleading" rating for saying that millions of Americans work 2 or 3 jobs, which is true, because the fact-checker did not like the use of the word "millions" to refer to literally 8 million people. Not making this up. This is not a fact-check. It's a ideological vibe check. It is someone trying to push back at politics he dislikes.
More examples here, here, here, here and here. All clear *facts*, not rated as such.
2. Defending partisan spin:
The libertarian Mercatus Center released a study showing that universal public healthcare would cost ~32tn over 10 years. It then put this number in the headline of a press release, and the press duly reported on this frightening price tag. A blogger went into the tables of the study and noted that its projection for healthcare spending under the current model for 10 years is ~34tn, and released his arithmetic with the 2tn saving as thee title.
The Bernie campaign then referred to this study - by an ideological opponent! - to note that his plan saves 2tn. For this, he was given 3 Pinnochios by the Washington Post fact-checker, who invited the Mercatus people to cry about Bernie using their published data in a way they didn't like. This shouldn't matter to a *fact-checker*, who has to determine if Bernie is representing a study's numbers faithfully, not if he is following it's authors' ideological spin. Once they put those numbers in that table and published it, they have to stand by them, or explain why it's wrong and retract the study!
A summary of the entire debacle here.
3. What isn't fact-checked -
Even with this seeming expansion in the scope of "fact"-checking, some things go unnoticed through these eagle-eyed guardians of democracy.
I searched and found nothing in snopes.com or politifact on this clearly misleading graph. Unlike in points 1 and 2, this is where a neutral fact-checkers adding a misleading/context missing might be helpful! For some reason, it's not been done.
Paid news by a lobby group is inserted into local news:
https://theintercept.com/2021/06/16/ed-newsfeed-american-federation-for-children-local-news/
Nothing from Snopes or Politifact, informing their readers that the "news anchors" on these segments are actually lobbyists. Again, context, which they are sometimes so eager to provide, would be useful here.
4. The bottomless pit of social media fact-checking:
Most fake news spreads through FB, insta, youtube, twitter, and they have started flagging (some) of it. Problem 1: obviously, they can't get it all, which means some fake news now appears more genuine since it's not been flagged. Problem 2: their fact-checking teams are even more ideologically biased, leading to predictable outcomes. Problem 3: openly in thrall to fake-news-spreading advertisers. Problem 4: algorithm-driven, and thus largely garbage: here it disallows factual information good vaccine effectiveness from being posted let alone shared, here it intervenes and erases a debate.
Not even getting into the debacle of the Hunter Biden story which could not be posted about or referred to on any social media, prior to any fact-checking being done on it. This was retroactively defended by creating a new standard that news referencing hacked materials cannot be shared (what about, say, the Pentagon papers or MKUltra?), and then quietly dropping that policy too.
Towards the end of this post, I realised that someone else wrote an article covering a lot of this 3 years ago, using a few of the same examples, with much better style. And with some interesting personal background on a prominent fact-checker. So uhh ignore everything my nonsense and read that instead.
Fake news sucks. Indian politics has been massively influenced by Whatsapp, this is a good writeup on how organised and poisonous it is. This happened, unbelievably. The covid vaccine thing is terrible.
But fact-checking comes with its own issues and biases and isn't effective at its supposed job.
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