In my view, it’s at least pointing in the right direction, in line with my Indigo Blob theory about how the lines between nonpartisan institutions and partisan actors have become blurred. In the B.T. days — Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship — a sharp contrast to edgier and less experienced journalists in the Trump era who would later claim to own the disinformation beat. Perhaps because demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left... the journalists who selected into the subfield tended to be especially left of center....
What filters through to the fact-checkers, who are rarely the journalists on the front lines of a story, are often the edge cases: half-truths and political hyperbole, or claims for which there’s “no evidence” either way, but a particular null hypothesis is privileged. Labeling these claims as “dangerous” misinformation or otherwise cordoning them off as out of bounds is essentially a bluff....
My impression is that journalists who label themselves as misinformation experts or fact-checkers have a relatively poor capacity for self-reflection.... But that’s a hard claim to prove.... I just don’t think it has done journalism much good to have a group of people specifically designated as misinformation experts or fact-checkers — that should be everyone’s job. And although I don’t really trust Zuckerberg’s motivations, it was fact-checkers who pressured Facebook for the partnership in the first place, not the other way around. It’s another chapter in the long history of journalists trying to sew ground with Meta and not liking what they reaped.
Sew? What do you reap when you sow homophones?
Let's digress into a Bible reading. Galatians 6:7–12:
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. See what large letters I use as I write to you with my own hand! Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised....
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54 comments:
I'm already weary of the ritual denunciation, "And although I don’t really trust Zuckerberg’s motivations..."
Hey Nate, are you for FREE SPEECH or NOT? Sometimes self-interest coincides with national interest: why does his internal thought (which we will never know for certain) matter to you?
It depends on whom decides what are facts and what aren't....which is weird, because it seems that all the facts go one way, and one way only. Hmmmmm....I wonder why???
In the B.T. days — Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship
Dan Rather lied. It was a fake and nothing accurate about it. Shall we go back further into the journalist record of providing "facts"? One thing that has significantly changed (I'd put the date somewhere in the 90's) is news media no longer properly labeling editorials as such, and rather presenting editorials as regular "factual" news stories. It is stuff like this that is why CNN is in court today.
Nate himself falls somewhat into the category of a fact checker. A bad one.
See Allsides.com's fact checker bias chart:
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/fact-check-bias-chart
This source is more systematic about reporting the nuances of fact-check bias than this Silver analysis.
“Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised....” I take it bloggers, podcasters and influencers are not circumcised… or something.
"Those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised...."
and use their preferred pronouns.
I expect Pinocchio Glenn Kessler to come back from sabbatical.
👆🏽😅
Nate was pretty spot on, IMO.
Nat was dancing around "spot on" anyway.
Speech is violence. Violence is speech. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Let us NEVER forget who tried to make "fact-checking" an arm of government. FJB deserves to be hanged from a lamppost for that alone, never mind the ten percent for the Big Guy.
Where are fact checkers when we need them, like Christmas and Easter. Not to mention all the Jewish holidays.
Not forgetting what happened, not forgetting the perfidious onslaught on Free Speech (specifically) and Freedom (generally), not forgetting the people getting cancelled and de-banked for protesting the overreach of mass medical experimentation, not forgetting the shutdown and the whole rest of the sh*tshow. But I'm sure you'll find takers for your 'it really was different to what you thought it was' spiel. Just not with me, Jack. Retconning is the new gaslighting.
Meta's re-branding and so-called reform is an expedient sign-of-the-times. It's a step in the right direction, sure, but once the changes take place, it will be 'wait and see'.
People are generally better informed these days - they've been motivated to inform themselves as a survival response to government that is openly hostile to them. This is the case in quite a few Western countries, now, and it's drawn the attention of the citizens. We'll see.
Let's cut the crap. They're leftist hacks.
Just like how the German governments post war were run by NotNazis.
It's a trend, though, that has been going on for some time. I stopped watching ESPN because I didn't want to hear the woke rants coming out of nowhere, and because one World Series, the pregame was about the races of all of the players rather than baseball, but the announcers indulged in their political rants too. But they have gotten better. I still change the channel whenever that big bald guy comes on, he's no Chris Berman, but at least I can watch it and be entertained again. The Golf Channel turned me off with their constant cut ins to the late nite TV shows doing Trump bashing, you know "advertising" the shows, but really it was to expose the audience to their propaganda. I watch it again, and they now steer clear of politics. It's a much larger trend than just Zuck.
If only. They are fascists.
" Before Trump — journalists who were appointed (or who appointed themselves) as fact-checkers tended to be experienced generalists with a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship "
BULL!
Before Trump noone called them out on it was all
Nate is unreadable these days. Maybe all days before, I don't know. He's like Freddy DeBoer, lots of words circling around, equivocating, looping, digressing, tuckpointing, caulking, and then starting all over in a great circular toilet of ideas.
Yes, that was B.S. too. Trump was the true light bringer, Trump is the one who showed us that these people lied all of the time, that most political news was fake. The first time I saw Trump in action, he was giving a press conference in Iowa in 2016, and he took on a "heckler" and I thought it was great, really took him to school. But of course it wasn't a heckler, it was a 'journalist."
"demand for fact-checking was coming overwhelmingly from the left" Translation: demand for imposing the correct narrative and squashing heterodoxy was coming overwhelmingly from the left.
heh
"sew ground" = cover-up
Nate Silver's sub-conscious? "journalists trying to cover-up with Meta"
Zucker dutifully had obeyed the State. His employees smothered all COVID information that was not state-sponsored. (state sponsored = big pharma + Dem-Soviet Chi-Com State)
Wait! All this was to tell people not to be circumcised?
”But is Zuckerberg’s claim that 'fact-checkers have just been too politically biased' correct?"
The first time I saw Glenn Kessler give a couple Pinocchios to something Donald Trump had said even though Kessler admitted it was true, pretty much because it was Trump who said it, then I had my answer to this question — years before it was even asked!
"... a scrupulous reputation for nonpartisanship ...". The key word there is "reputation. A reputation coming from the very center of the circle-jerk of media types. Self aggrandizing buffoons that they are. Still proclaiming journalists don't take a side. Like the inflation-is-over, no-evidence-of-Biden corruption, the campaign of JOY! and more, the media, apparently still thinks we want to swallow the bilge water.
Excellent, but very late in the game. About "fact checkers" not having self-consciousness: Glenn Kessler saying that Tim Scott's rags to riches story wasn't true because an ancestor of Scott's had a lot of land at one point in the 19th century. Kessler's own ancestors ran Royal Dutch Shell oil. He was a "fact checker," so he wasn't used to people turning the spotlight back on himself. Kessler "fact checked" his accusers: That wasn't my grandfather giving the Nazi salute in that photo. My grandfather was a hostage in a concentration camp. It's his brother who's giving the Nazi salute in the picture.
*
The article Silver links to is also worth reading.
You can see the problem. Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:
1) This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
2) We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.
"No evidence" is ambiguous. At least half the time you see the phrase it's meaningless and just intended to discredit whoever journalists don't like.
The context that I first heard of fact checkers was magazines like the New Yorker, which was famous for checking the facts in a nonfiction piece. This made sense if you were trying to establish a reputation for accuracy (and perhaps avoid liability). On the other hand, fact checking something that someone said as having been stated “without evidence” was always going to be a way to discredit them, as people don’t usually cite their sources or the underlying basis for the statement in speaking.
Zuckerberg isn’t oblivious to the changing political environment.
Musk bought Twitter for $44bn, used it to essentially win Trump the election, made himself $200bn in just the week after the election victory, and got himself a quasi-government position.
Zuckerberg was right- the fact checkers he and others employ are extremely biased and everyone knows it, too.
We all need to be our own fact checkers.
There’s a new sheriff coming to town in a couple of weeks, and Zuck doesn’t want to be on the top of his naughty list. So, he naturally sacrifices a bunch of employees, and blames the whole thing on it being a huge company, and he really didn’t understand that they were that out of control. He did the right thing, so can’t we all be friends now?
I think that it will be somewhat successful. He has acknowledged Trump’s power (unlike others), and as a result will probably drop significantly in Trump’s Naughty List.
People who want to discredit Zuckerberg from the Left take one of two paths. The short one is to claim Zuck is just doing this for the money. Silver chose the more circuitous route of conflating media fact checkers with the people who were chosen to identify "misinformation", and then spend the rest of the article talking about the media's relationship to politicians.
What an odd "Dip the toe in" discussion of "fact checkers". Silver wants to pretend there are "Objective" MSM journalists with some other journalists who Left-of-center and some others on the Right. The reality is that 95 percent of the MSM and the people who worked there, are hard-core left and Democrat Partisans, and their "Objectivity" is just a con designed to fool the rubes.
We have no idea how far to the center Zuckerberg will go. Right now, and for years, he was far-left and helped the Biden FBI/DHS police Facebook. And this censorship applies to all sorts of things that are not "Right/left". The ADL pretty much gets what it wants. I've known WW II discussion boards that have been run off Facebook because anything other than 100 percent ritual denunciation of everything German or Japanese is "fascist" or "Nazi".
For example, saying Rommel was a great General. Or that Japanese soldiers were brave. Civil war boards have faced the same type of censorship. The kind of people who destroyed the Lee Statue are the same type running the "Moderation" and "Fact-checking" at Facebook.
If Zuck was serious about combatting "censorship", then he should publish all of the communications from the CDC and the other governmental agencies that sent "guidance" to Facebook.
First, we can see what true facts the government wanted suppressed. Secondly, we can then go back and see how the "fact checkers" covered these topics and easily evaluate the level of bias with our own eyes.
Prediction: Zuck will not publish any of that material.
Before Trump? Maybe before Reagan. I was a local elected prosecutor between 1976-96. At speeches I told my constituents that they would be fortunate if coverage of crime and politics by the two local newspapers got 50% right. Sometime that was caused by ignorance. Sometimes by bias. The "reporters" were, however, an arrogant bunch. Not so with the TV news people.
Yeah, I was noticing that. Nate's complaint is that all the members of his profession are a bunch of whores. Got it, Nate.
Nancy said...
"Wait! All this was to tell people not to be circumcised?"
Althouse provided more context than was needed for the 'sew/sow' homophone thing, but since she brought it up, here's the back story:
In Galatia, Jewish Christians were telling the gentiles they couldn't truly be Christians unless they observed the Torah - including, but limited to, the rite of circumcision. Paul had to set Peter straight on the issue - publicly - and the letter to the Galatians was needed because the same teachings were being promoted there, by some of the same people.
All in one week, Clegg leaves to be replaced by Republican Joel Kaplan, Dana White is appointed to the board and they scrap fact-checking while announcing their support for free speech. Sounds like Trump gave Zuckerberg some pretty straightforward instructions when they had dinner together at the end of last year.
grow a pair and keep prepuce
fascists are leftist too
lol.
Indeed.
Fact checking can be done with honesty.
Leftists are not honest.
Scully and Mulder need to do Z-files
Poor Bich- having to deal with free speech for all is a tough thing to suffer.
"fact checking" is just a leftist creation to smother any and all negative information about democrats. hide democrat corruption etc...
Narayanan: Many years ago, while an impoverished grad student, I was driving an old beater that only got AM radio. One of my favorite shows was the G Gordon Liddy show. One day, somebody called in and asked him - as a former FBI agent - whether or not the X Files actually existed. He said "yes, they come immediately after the W Files and right before the Y and Z Files." He then hung up and went to commercial. Doesn't really translate to print, but it was hilarious.
100% of the time. Trust no one.
Musk bought Twitter for $44bn, used it to essentially win Trump the election...
So, re-establishing a platform for free speech won Trump the election.
Thanks for making our point, dork.
Two things about "fact-checking"
1. It's mostly NOT about checking facts. It's mostly about deciding what "facts" are acceptable, and what aren't.
2. Therefore, the result of a "fact-check" should NOT be to delete a comment that the "fact-checker" disagrees with. THIS is the big problem with "fact checks" in this era. Publish a comment and also the comment disagreeing with it.
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