Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

You don’t need to have a nuanced perspective on the truth to be able to spot outright lies and nonsense. E.g. Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population.

I’m perfectly OK with fact checkers getting rid of that level of nonsense while letting most of everything else true.




An example of a fact that can be checked would be the height of a tree or the size of an island.

Whether person X helped group Y do Z is vastly more complex and can be answered on several levels. It’s best left to the public to apply literal common sense. Also, most political debates are on this level of abstraction, making fact-checking a non-starter


The problem with your reasoning--and it is exhausting that society seems to need to relearn this every generation--is that this is not about what standard you think is reasonable. It is about the granting and exercise of power. Once the power has been granted to determine what is true or false, and to suppress the latter, then absent a carefully constructed system of checks and balances, that power will be abused, as all unchecked power is.

It doesn't even take long. When they took out Infowars a few years back, people kept saying it was ok because they are so terrible, etc. A couple years later and they are brazenly censoring the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in the US, and one with a very large readership, because it posted a completely and obviously true, newsworthy, and timely story about Hunter Biden during a presidential election.

That anybody defends this paradigm of social media censorship shows how deeply rooted tribalism is in human nature, and how it degrades the capacity in otherwise smart people for critical thinking.

If an article has false assertions, is missing context, or is being used by third parties to promote related falsehoods, then the remedy is for critics to write other pieces that correct the record and let the public sort out truth from falsehood. If the critics can't make their case, then that is on them, not an excuse to set up an unaccountable power structure to quash unfavored ideas.


>"Bill Gates is most certainly not using the vaccines to inject tracking chips on the whole of the world population."

True, but if this is so self-evident do we really need to fact check the likes of this? Why is fact-checking the most obviously false things used as a shield to justify slapping true/false labels on far more nuanced and politically motivated information?




Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: