Today, Everybody's a Fact Checker

Hugh Pickens points out an article by David Zweig at The Atlantic about the rise of fact-checking sites on the internet, and the power they give to journalists and average internet denizens to sniff out fiction parading as truth. Quoting: "Since the beginning of the republic (not the American republic, I'm talking the Greek republic) politicians have resorted to half-truths and bald-faced lies. And while tenacious reporters and informed citizens have tracked these falsehoods over the years, until now they've lacked the interconnectivity and real-time capabilities of the Web to amplify their findings. Sites like the Washington Post's Fact-Check column and FactCheck.org, which draws hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month, often provide fodder for public fascination with fact-checking. ... Perhaps the masses don't care about inaccuracies. Many Democrats and Republicans alike will believe what they want and ignore or disregard the truth. ... But there are enough experts within a variety of fields rabidly conversing about errors that content-creators—be they politicians, journalists, or filmmakers—are now forced to be on their toes in a way they never have been before. And that's a good thing.'" Zweig also points out Snopes, Prochronisms, and Photoshop Disasters as useful tools for spotting errors or misrepresentations.

Comments

Fact checking is one thing...

[RabidReindeer]

But too many people would rather only listen to facts that they agree with.

Re:Facts are facts... or are they?

[SomeKDEUser]

This. This is very important: the necessity to seem "non-partisan" for those sites makes it wayyy too easy for the liars. After all, if you get to lie all the time and the "fact checkers" feel compelled to scrutinise your opponents extra-hard just so they can say that both sides have about the same lying rate, it's win-win!

There are issues where there are two sides. But more and more, people fight over _facts_ and this means that one side is right and the other wrong, and if you claim otherwise, you are delusional. There is no middle ground to the debate on the shape of the planet. If you say that gay parents cannot raise a child, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me there is no global warming, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me that the gold standard is a good idea, this is a statement of fact, that reducing taxes will increase revenues, and so on, and so forth.

All things amenable to experimental verification -- and in many case which have been previously experimentally checked -- should not be debated. Journalists should just mock the politicians saying stuff which is obviously false.

Misrepresentations killing political discourse

[GodfatherofSoul]

I'm done w/ politics after what I've been seeing this cycle. It's one thing when there are deliberate distortions coming from candidates, but it's another when media outlets play along to keep them in the news and fueling their programs for a few more days.

Two examples to be bipartisan. The whole "You didn't build that." comment from Obama. As soon as I heard it and saw the way it was being broadcast on TV chopped up, I knew immediately that the quote was being attributed with a false meaning. Based on past experience, I figured it would be a few more days before I ever heard the full quote. Sure enough...

As for Romney, he had his "I like to fire people" comment. While poorly phrased, he was obviously speaking in the context of a consumer shopping for services, not as an employer. Maybe a little bit subtle, but not so subtle that an adult wouldn't be able to decipher the meaning.

This is why our politicians talk like sterilized, focus-group driven robots. Even the slightest stumble in a speech gets blown up into a bullshit storm. I used to LOVE debating politics online, but nowadays you spend all your time debunking spin from a campaign and not really talking about issues. I'll still be voting alright, but I'm not in the game anymore.

Re:Misrepresentations killing political discourse

[GodfatherofSoul]

You're an AC so I'm assuming you're trolling, but I'll answer. That quote was specifically about a bridge someone uses to get to work. Now, unless you manufacture bridges, you didn't build the bridge or the road you use to get to work.

You also didn't run the power lines, pay for the eletrical infrastructure, pay for the fuel infrastructure, pay for the education infrastructure that you're probably exploiting to hire employees who can read, write and count well enough to work for you, you didn't build the hospital just in case someone gets hurt on the job, you didn't pay for the law enforcement to protect your business and the safety of your workers at home and on the job, you didn't pay for the fire fighters who risk their lives should your business burst into flames, you didn't pay for the court system to address your grievances, you didn't pay for the military that protects you from raiding hordes of bandits from Canada and Mexico (and they WOULD exist if we didn't have a military) streaming in to steal our resources, and you probably didn't pay for the *fundamental* research your products are based on.

Yes, *A* business might have build some of those, but not YOUR business. And it's our collective tax revenue that funds these sweet amenities you call society. Your small contribution to a collective pool is what makes all of this infrastructure possible.

So, NO YOU DID NOT PAY FOR THAT.

Re:Misrepresentations killing political discourse

[SomeKDEUser]

Thank you for illustrating the fact that for Republicans, "truth" is whatever delusion fits their particular belief about what their imagination makes them think ought to have happened.

You said it yourself: it is not what Obama said, but what you think he should have said to be consistent with the image you have of him. Truth is irrelevant.

Re:Misrepresentations killing political discourse

[error_logic]

Neither can win while the other denies. Both sides have people blinded by biases--and arguments that do nothing but prolong an imagined war. The real enemy is a mutual lack of respect, yet it runs rampant through the country...and the world.

Re:Misrepresentations killing political discourse

[khallow]

I grant it includes the infrastructure as well as the business. It's still a disturbing thing for a sitting president to be saying.

At least Obama corrects himself, a week later, by attacking Romney for "twisting his words". It's a half-hearted, belated correction. Sorry, that's not sincere.

It's also worth noting that a few sentences before that, he says:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didnâ(TM)t -- look, if youâ(TM)ve been successful, you didnâ(TM)t get there on your own. You didnâ(TM)t get there on your own. Iâ(TM)m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)

If they paid taxes, and most of those people would have, then they have already given something back. If they contribute to charity and I bet most of them have to some degree, then they've given something back. Why does Obama claim otherwise? Once again we have a block of reasonable sounding prose (though no real reason for saying it) with little controversial phrases spicing it up. Seems part of a pattern to me. Like he meant to say what he said.

And while there are probably a small number of people who think they did it all, I doubt most people wealthy or otherwise have that illusion. So why pull out what looks to me like a straw man?

Let's get back to the original statement. Even if we grant that he really was just referring to infrastructure, what's the point of saying it? The business may not have built that infrastructure or made it happen, but neither did Obama. It was the work of a lot of people and it was paid for by a lot of people. Technically, no one person or entity made it happen.

The business contributed by paying taxes. And they might even have helped make it happen by building some component of the infrastructure in question. Here, I see insufficient gratitude here on the part of Obama, even if we assume he meant what you and he claim he meant.

Frankly, it looks like a classic Friday surprise propaganda trick. The leader says something controversial while speaking to the base on Friday (July 13 being coincidentally a Friday and the group being Obama supporters). It hangs in the newspapers for a couple of days over the weekend, and then his spokespeople spend Monday cleaning up ("What he really said was...").

If done well, the speaker gets the best of both worlds. He appears hard core to his base while retaining the appearance of a more central politician to everyone who doesn't watch or read news over the weekend and just reads the correction on Monday.

In my view, it didn't work this time because the statement was just too blatant. In summary, I think Obama meant to say what we think he said. It's part of a pattern (that even shows up a second time in the speech).

Re:Facts are facts... or are they?

[dynamo52]

The problem with Politifact, and in fact much of political reporting, is the cult of false equivalency.

You just nailed the greatest problem with political discourse in this country. Most of the major news organizations have decided that impartiality requires they provide an equal platform to both sides of any issue regardless of where the facts lie. Rather than informing their audience, this type of "balanced" reporting only clouds the debate by giving the appearance of credibility to science deniers and conspiracy theorists.

Re:Facts are facts... or are they?

[kaatochacha]

The biggest problem isn't a false partisanship, or equality on these.
The biggest problem is ( and I say this after following politifact and fact-check for about five years now) that EVERYTHING stated in a debate/political speech is at best a huge bending of the truth, and at worse, and outright lie.
You get so glazed over from BOTH sides consistently never telling the truth.

Fact checkers: voluntary DoS victims

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Liars can make things up faster than honest people can check them, and the liars know it.

Liars have nothing to lose. Their followers won't abandon them. Their followers will be too busy retweeting the next lie to notice that the previous one was disproven.

Fact checking yields the initiative to the liars and lets them set the agenda. Fact checking hands the liars blank checks payable with the fact checker's time.

Better to build reputation scores for public figures based on a reasonable sample of their utterances, and stop paying attention to the ones who prove themselves to have no credibility.