The problem with "fact checkers".
After going through both legal and peer review, but without contacting Ventavia — apparently, they feared an injunction — the BMJ published Thacker’s piece on November 2nd, 2021. The money passage read:
Beginning on November 10th, 2021, the editors began receiving complaints from readers, who said they were having difficulty sharing it. As editors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbassi later wrote in an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:
Facebook has yet to respond to queries about this piece. Meanwhile, the site that conducted Facebook’s “fact check,” Lead Stories, ran a piece dated November 10th whose URL used the term “hoax alert” (Lead Stories denies they called the BMJ piece a hoax). Moreover, they deployed a rhetorical device that such “checking” sites now use with regularity, repeatedly correcting assertions Thacker and the British Medical Journal never made. This began with the title: “The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.”
The British Medical Journal never said Jackson’s story revealed “disqualifying flaws” in the vaccine. Nor did it claim the negative information “calls into question the results of the Pfizer clinical trial.” It also didn’t claim that the story is “serious enough to discredit data from the clinical trials.” The BMJ’s actual language said Jackson’s story could “raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight,” which is true.
The real issue with Thacker’s piece is that it went viral and was retweeted by the wrong people. As Lead Stories noted with marked disapproval, some of those sharers included the likes of Dr. Robert Malone and Robert F. Kennedy. To them, this clearly showed that the article was bad somehow, but the problem was, there was nothing to say the story was untrue.
In a remarkable correspondence with BMJ editors, Lead Stories editor Alan Duke explained that the term “missing context” was invented by Facebook:
“Missing context” has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient. As Thacker notes in the Q&A below, “They’re checking narrative, not fact.”
The significance of the British Medical Journal story is that it showed how easily reporting that is true can be made to look untrue or conspiratorial. The growing bureaucracy of “fact-checking” sites that help platforms like Facebook decide what to flag is now taking into account issues like: the political beliefs of your sources, the presence of people of ill repute among your readers, and the tendency of audiences to draw unwanted inferences from the reported facts. All of this can now become part of how authorities do or do not define reporting as factual.
“But that’s not a fact check,” says Thacker. “You just don’t like the story.”
[...]
This new “fact-checking” standard bastardizes the whole idea of reporting. It’s also highly convenient for corporations like Pfizer, which incidentally have extensive records of regulatory violations. As Thacker details below, firms have successfully manipulated reporters and Internet platforms into seeing a binary reality in which all critics are conspiracy theorists.
“We don’t have main and minor [points of view] anymore,” he says. “What we have is truth, and conspiracy.”
After the BMJ episode, a “Missing context” flag should be understood for what it is: an intellectual warning label for true but politically troublesome information.
Source: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-british-medical-journal-story
True, but there are a minority of people who try to force people to rely on\use "fact checkers" (sometimes falsely labelled as "Skeptics resources") despite the knowledge that such resources are heavily biased...
I have sites I trust, but even those sites will tell you not to rely solely on them.
(anyone else ever find the rabbit hole at Snopes where you get to the piece they tell you've been played, just with respect to the one article, as a way of proving the reliance point? You get there by following out all the "to learn more" links; it's been so long I don't remember exactly where or what; some silly urban legend though)
What I care most about is that fact checkers want to be accurate, even when inconvenient. Perfection simply isn't possible.
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Mom to an amazing young adult AS son, plus an also amazing non-AS daughter. Most likely part of the "Broader Autism Phenotype" (some traits).
That's sort of the issue brought up in the quoted article, they weren't trying to be accurate, they were trying to protect a favored narrative. You should read it, it's a good piece.
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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson
Manipulation of information is a weapon used against you, and a terrible one.
Doing your own research from multiple sources, especially the source material, is the best way to form something akin to the truth as it exists. Not many people will have the time to do this or can process things/see things as easily, but it's worth the effort when it comes to important things so you don't get led astray by biased actors. Some of these lies, omissions and half-truths can end up harming you, which is why I say important things.
I had a recent example where someone I know was seeing the lies by a government official and was utterly confused how they could do this. They do, they don't care they do it, they don't care if some of us know they do it, because most will believe them and they'll never face punishment for it.
Snopes "Mostly False" on the Biden issuing crack pipe. It's actually true but there were other things issued. Too funny!
"It’s true that the grant description required the provision of smoking kits — an established component of harm reduction strategy — but in reality, those kits constituted just one of several sub-components of an even longer list of requirements for grant recipients. In other words, while outraged media coverage focused almost exclusively on “crack pipes,” this was actually only a very small part of the program."
$30mil into the corruption machine that is our goobermint, thanks Hunter.
"It’s true that the grant description required the provision of smoking kits — an established component of harm reduction strategy — but in reality, those kits constituted just one of several sub-components of an even longer list of requirements for grant recipients. In other words, while outraged media coverage focused almost exclusively on “crack pipes,” this was actually only a very small part of the program."
$30mil into the corruption machine that is our goobermint, thanks Hunter.
You mean this?
Or in simple terms:
Rating: Mostly False.
What's true: They did what was claimed.
What's False: They did other things as well.
Personal opinion, despite the way it can be misused: context matters. Articles like the fact check sample above are giving the context. Are you assuming that people who read it can't understand the meaning of the context the article provides and, thus, will end up with the wrong impression? I don't find it fair to judge any statement without the full context. What is inexcusable in one context, may be a slight wording fumble in another, or even positive in a very different one. If I see any fact check that isn't headlined 100% true or 100% false, I'll read the article and the reason (I'll probably read it even with a 100% header, but that is beside the point). It would be bizarre to go so far as to search for a fact check and then stop at a murky summary statement; anyone going that far wants the whole story so they can decide for themselves. This whole thread seems to assume that people who use fact checking are easily mislead, which I think is unfair. Let them read the articles and decide for themselves. Unless you are charging the articles miss key data, the charges against them are misplaced, IMHO; choosing from a limited number of summary options will never be fully accurate and it isn't that big a deal to me if a little bias entered in that process; I feel like I know how to read past bias. If the necessary information is all there in the article for a reader to find and decide, it's all there.
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Mom to an amazing young adult AS son, plus an also amazing non-AS daughter. Most likely part of the "Broader Autism Phenotype" (some traits).
Context matters if you are doing a "context check" - If you are doing a fact check, you are looking at the claim and comparing whether the facts support it (the hint is in the name).
In this case, did Mr Biden fund "crack pipes" to "Advance racial equity".
As the fact check stated, he did fund the pipes, and "advancing racial equity" was an aim of the program - so, while he may have funded other items as well, and the "advancing racial equity" may (or may not) have been a primary concern, that does not detract from the fact that he did fund the items, and it was for the stated reason (among others), meaning that the statement was objectively true.
Context matters if you are doing a "context check" - If you are doing a fact check, you are looking at the claim and comparing whether the facts support it (the hint is in the name).
To read any news without considering the context is asking to be mislead.
There is, thus, no difference between a context and a fact check. Facts cannot be understood without context. To only care about the accuracy of any single standalone statement is to not actually care about truth and reality, IMHO.
In my line of work, there are a lot of literal people who want to take A and box it up without context. But law and life do not work that way. Being able to apply context is essential to understanding what is really going on, even when it comes to seemingly black and white tax laws. In my experience, seeing "beyond" is a key component of exercising good judgement and exhibiting intelligence.
You made a decision on the statement while reading the context. Nothing in the way the contextual information was presented changed how you felt about the initial statement, and that is fine. My point is that as long as all the facts are there, you get to decide what does and doesn't matter to you. To not include all the facts would hobble your decision making.
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Mom to an amazing young adult AS son, plus an also amazing non-AS daughter. Most likely part of the "Broader Autism Phenotype" (some traits).
Last edited by DW_a_mom on 09 Feb 2022, 10:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Isn't that your rationale for wanting to crack down on "disinformation", the assumption that all these morons who aren't you are too stupid to know any better unless lead by the nose?
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“The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.”
-- Robert Anton Wilson
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