The Anonymous
Bag On My Head
When Donald Trump said last May he was “confident” that a vaccine would be ready by the end of 2020, the president was upbraided by NBC with what has become in recent years a popular journalistic and political device: the “fact check”. “Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right,” the broadcaster declared.
Trump turned out to be right.
Facebook used the same device last week on a piece that criticized the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 investigation for dismissing the possibility the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory as “extremely unlikely”. The social media platform labelled the article with a “false information” tag. Facebook alleged the article contained “information that independent fact-checkers say is false”.
The article turned out to be right. Three days later, even the Biden White House expressed “deep concerns” about the WHO probe.
In both cases it wasn’t facts that were being checked.
Fact-checking can be a powerful tool in the fight against online falsehood. But it can be used as a means of censorship if opinions are checked.
What gets called fact-checking too often feels like political point-scoring, but with the veneer of impartiality.
In the run-up to last year’s US election, a number of outlets ran fact-checks on a video of Joe Biden seeming to get confused about Trump’s name and referring to someone called George.
“No, Biden did not confuse George W Bush and Donald Trump,” the Washington Post wrote, arguing that he must have been talking directly to the interviewer George Lopez.
The paper gave the claim that Biden had been confused “four Pinocchios” — its rating for the most mendacious claims.
I’ve watched the video and find it implausible that Biden was addressing Lopez, but neither I nor the Post can be sure either way. “Fact-checking” an opinion makes a mockery of the whole concept.
We must limit the checking to facts, and not opinions that the checkers don’t happen to like.
https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0bdc
Trump turned out to be right.
Facebook used the same device last week on a piece that criticized the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 investigation for dismissing the possibility the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory as “extremely unlikely”. The social media platform labelled the article with a “false information” tag. Facebook alleged the article contained “information that independent fact-checkers say is false”.
The article turned out to be right. Three days later, even the Biden White House expressed “deep concerns” about the WHO probe.
In both cases it wasn’t facts that were being checked.
Fact-checking can be a powerful tool in the fight against online falsehood. But it can be used as a means of censorship if opinions are checked.
What gets called fact-checking too often feels like political point-scoring, but with the veneer of impartiality.
In the run-up to last year’s US election, a number of outlets ran fact-checks on a video of Joe Biden seeming to get confused about Trump’s name and referring to someone called George.
“No, Biden did not confuse George W Bush and Donald Trump,” the Washington Post wrote, arguing that he must have been talking directly to the interviewer George Lopez.
The paper gave the claim that Biden had been confused “four Pinocchios” — its rating for the most mendacious claims.
I’ve watched the video and find it implausible that Biden was addressing Lopez, but neither I nor the Post can be sure either way. “Fact-checking” an opinion makes a mockery of the whole concept.
We must limit the checking to facts, and not opinions that the checkers don’t happen to like.
https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0bdc