Not the specific issues you mention, but the problem with this approach is that just occasionally "blatant lies" turn out to be true.
Powerful people have acted to suppress dissenting opinions; whether it's whether Covid leaked from a lab or Galileo Galilei's 'Eppur si muove' way back in 1633[0], and most likely this has been going on long before that.
When I look at social media I can't help thinking of that line: "It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so'?"
>Not the specific issues you mention, but the problem with this approach is that just occasionally "blatant lies" turn out to be true.
More often than not. Just look at the politicization of COVID. In the last couple of months we have seen a complete 180 on messaging around the lab leak theory, the vaccines don't prevent infection after all, vaccines don't prevent spread by the vaccinated after all, CDC director admitting that at least 40% of COVID hospitalizations weren't because of COVID but because people went to the hospital with something else why also happening to have COVID...
I could go on. All things that would get you "fact checked" just a few months ago (and hell probably still will get this post flagged). It's nuts.
If you really want to get angry just do some searching on Japan and the much maligned horse dewormer. Millions of people sentenced to hospitalization when there are multiple treatments that we know (now and then!) that could have prevented them? Many of these "fact checkers" were (and still are) in the middle of peddling politically motivated BS instead of actual science.
People are literally dying because of it - and still folks here are advocating for better fact checking. Simply amazing...
>> blatant lies like Pizzagate, Q Anon, Stop the Steal, and all kinds of Anti-vax crankery
> Not the specific issues you mention, but the problem with this approach is that just occasionally "blatant lies" turn out to be true.
> Powerful people have acted to suppress dissenting opinions; whether it's whether Covid leaked from a lab or Galileo Galilei's 'Eppur si muove' way back in 1633[0], and most likely this has been going on long before that.
That's certainly true, but it's also important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, either. It doesn't help those "dissenting opinions" if they're drowned out in a sea of lies or if the lies (collectively) do far more damage.
Social media fact checking isn't some kind of hard block that can suppress any idea from being seen by anyone (in fact, this case it was little more than a caution sign), and IMHO it's probably better for the truth if it has to pass some hurdles and gets slowed down a bit, just as long as those hurdles increase the single-to-noise ratio. There's reason process like scientific peer review are respected.
> It doesn't help those "dissenting opinions" if they're drowned out in a sea of lies or if the lies (collectively) do far more damage.
It's a fairly central part of the scientific method to be able to construct falsifiable hypotheses and then to attempt to test them.
> Social media fact checking isn't some kind of hard block that can suppress any idea from being seen [..]
Except it just did: discussion on the origins of Covid was almost completely shut down for well over a year by the actions of one or more bad actors, hugely amplified by well-meaning but weak-minded media and social media outlets?
>> Social media fact checking isn't some kind of hard block that can suppress any idea from being seen by anyone (in fact, this case it was little more than a caution sign), and IMHO it's probably better for the truth if it has to pass some hurdles and gets slowed down a bit, just as long as those hurdles increase the single-to-noise ratio
> Except it just did: discussion on the origins of Covid was almost completely shut down for well over a year
So? The idea made it out, though it's far from proven. In any case social media chatter and speculation about the idea like that has little value.
And this is something I'm totally fine with. I think it's totally in the service of truth to let an idea cook, before it's blasted to the public over social media at a loud volume.
>So? The idea made it out, though it's far from proven.
It only "made it out" because (thankfully) not all communication has yet to be fully gatekept through "fact checkers".
In the world you are advocating for it would have never made it out.
If that doesn't scare the utter crap out of you I would strongly advocate you are GROSSLY ignorant of history and need to do some serious learning - especially about how a certain party in Europe happened to come to power before world war II. And if you don't think what we are going through right now isn't a precursor on that level - again do some serious reading (preferably from books with copyrights before the 1990s and not online) about the rise of said party. The parallelism going on right now is pretty breathtaking when you stop and really look around.
Not the specific issues you mention, but the problem with this approach is that just occasionally "blatant lies" turn out to be true.
Powerful people have acted to suppress dissenting opinions; whether it's whether Covid leaked from a lab or Galileo Galilei's 'Eppur si muove' way back in 1633[0], and most likely this has been going on long before that.
When I look at social media I can't help thinking of that line: "It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so'?"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves