Facebook Gets Rid of Fact Checkers

 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly74mpy8klo.amp

As your confirmation bias can find you the spin you want from some source on the internet, let me say I’m part of the group that believes they never really had fact checking in the first place.

Fact checking on social media has always been some kind of cruel joke.  You can come across the most mind bogglingly stupid ideas with no basis in reality and see that nothing ever gets done about.  Maybe it will be something that’s just a short term grift like magic glasses that cure color blindness, or maybe it’s something with further ramifications, like Covid disinformation.

Supposedly the paid fact checking companies (not keen on losing their paid job) are being replaced by a Twixter community notes style user participation format.  The reason - the bias of the fact checkers.  And we’ll get back to that.  As a former Twixter community notes author who spent the better part of two months noting let me tell you.  That doesn’t work either because of bias.  In the case of Macebook (if I call it Twixter I should probably do a mashup for Facebook/Meta) this change is more lip service than actual change.  Why spend money you don’t need to?  Operationally like health violations at the meat packing plant it’s often less expensive to violate the law, get fined, pay that instead of making expensive changes that cost way more.  Macebook ignoring small fry grift like gematria sports scams is nothing compared to the major advertising dollars at stake.  Global policies for all online grift with no regard to scale?  Cheaper to just ignore it and wait until the government slaps with a fine.  Which although it may seem hefty has obviously not stopped social media from ignoring things.  Like trying to overthrow election results.

I’ve seen the way the both sides political grift works over decades of pattern recognition.  There’s enough activity on both sides that neither really wants to disrupt the gravy train too much.  It works something like this.

1). Republicans up front talk small federal government, looking for deregulation and ridding us of pesky laws like paying taxes or regulated industries like making it safe to get on a Boeing commercial airliner.

2). Democrats up front talk about the common person being overburdened with a larger % tax burden because the rich never pay taxes or the commoner is a victim of poison gas from a train derailment.

3). Both can never agree on a middle ground and gridlock on actual change is the status quo.

4). Every four years the rabid bases make political campaign donations that get turned into personal profit despite laws to the country.  That’s on both sides.

And what we’ve been experiencing on social media is a grifter picking one side of the other to try and cash in.

About ten years ago, the Republican grift became more and more unhinged.  Like one of my favorite jokes from Steve Martin where you ask for the letter ‘m’ to be stricken from the English language.  Only now the bargaining table is asking for m and every letter that follows after it to be removed.  And to get something done, you may actually have give up on m to keep your precious w or else the gridlock shuts the economy down and doesn’t help anybody.

It’s not political bias to report that Fox News propaganda lies consistently when they actually do lie consistently.  If you have a pie chart with 75% side A lies correctly fact checked to 25% side B lies correctly fact checked you *should* have an independent media reporting 75% to 25%.  If anything those that openly call themselves Democrats can be accused of being too complacent.  We’re the party that’s not openly evil.  Go with is you not evil person.  Sorry about losing m, but what can you do?  No sense of urgency to the behind the scenes creation of getting rid of all the numbers as well as letters so you are in danger of losing w in the next round of negotiations.

As someone who leans left I’m allowed to be biased in my reporting.  What I’m not allowed to do is make stuff up and generally put a source in this blog to back up my stories.  If I want to talk about a woman forcing eggs back up a chicken’s privates then I can find it and source it.  I don’t need to make up “Haitian immigrants are eating pets” and then say sorry I was wrong.  Or double down and insist they still are.  Actually fact checking is an art of actually looking at both sides.  IF BOTH SIDES ACTUALLY EXIST.

But confirmation bias borne of lifelong indoctrination doesn’t work that way.  The knee jerk reaction, the emotional response to instantly reject the buzzwords from “the wrong side” kicks in and dismisses actual facts.

Twixter community notes will surely be a model that Macebook will follow.  And that pattern is that all meaningful fact checking will be gridlocked into nonexistent.  Trolls with an agenda will just downvote the actual facts check, claim it’s biased and not needed.  And it works.  Actual facts check checks are incredibly difficult to maintain when the illusion of bias can be forced into the process.  It has not been a happy time to understand things using critical thinking, logic and structured arguments for a long, long time when it can be hand waved away by an emotional based counterattack.