By CERES team
In George Orwell’s science fiction dystopia, 1984, he envisaged a totalitarian society run by four “ministries”. The titles given to each ministry were deliberately the opposite of what they did:
“Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.” – George Orwell, 1984, Part 2, Chapter 9 (1949).
In recent years, a real-life equivalent to “the Ministry of Truth” has arisen with the rise of so-called “fact-checking organizations”. Currently, there are 118 such organizations that are “verified active signatories” (Archived link) of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)’s code of principles. The IFCN is a unit of the Poynter Institute that “was launched in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”
The official stated goal of each of these “fact-checking organizations” is to “fact-check” alleged “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Specifically, the IFCN state that,
“We believe truth and transparency can help people be better informed and equipped to navigate harmful misinformation.” – Poynter Institute, IFCN. (Archived link).
However, as we will discuss, the reality is that, in many cases, these organizations are themselves actively generating disinformation and promoting misinformation. Their definition of “truth” seems to be that practiced by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. In terms of “transparency”, these organizations apparently are accountable to nobody but themselves as the self-proclaimed arbiters of “truth”.
Often these “fact-check” articles might seem harmless, innocuous, and even useful. Naïvely, one might assume that if you disagreed with a particular fact-check, you could simply ignore it. However, they are much more consequential than you might think. This is because the top global social media platforms explicitly delegate these IFCN “independent fact-checker organizations” to evaluate “the truth” of content shared by the platform users. The social media platforms will substantially downrank or penalize users who are sharing content that has been “fact-checked” by one of these IFCN organizations.
As can be seen from the chart above, the number of monthly active users on these platforms represent a substantial proportion of the world’s population. Facebook has 3 billion users (nearly 40% of the world’s population); Instagram has 2 billion users (25% of the world’s population); and TikTok has 1.2 billion users (15% of the world’s population). [As an aside, TikTok also have a Chinese version, “Douyin”, that has an additional 0.7 billion users.]
Facebook and Instagram, owned by the same company, Meta, explicitly rely on IFCN-approved fact-checking organizations (link here; archived link here) to alter the information users see in their timelines, as described below:
“Fighting misinformation is an ever-evolving problem, and Meta can’t do it alone. We rely on independent fact-checkers to review and rate the accuracy of stories through original reporting, which may include interviewing primary sources, consulting public data and conducting analyses of media, including photos and video.
Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false on our platforms, we significantly reduce that content’s distribution so that fewer people see it, label it accordingly and notify people who try to share it. Fact-checkers do not remove content, accounts or Pages from our apps. We remove content when it violates our Community Standards, which are separate from our fact-checking programs.” – Facebook (2024) (Archived link)
TikTok’s fact-checking “partners” are also IFCN-approved organizations – see here (Archived link).
A major problem with most of these “fact-checker organizations” is that they do not provide any right of reply – or any mechanism for the people they accuse of spreading misinformation to even respond to the claims made against them. Nor can the victims of a “fact-check” get the social media platforms to review or withdraw the allegations made by the alleged “fact-checker” website because those platforms do not assess the accuracy of content themselves. Instead, the platforms insist that it is not their responsibility to evaluate the accuracy of a fact-checker’s claims.
Indeed, the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, recently admitted that much of the content that his platform was asked to be censored, “in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”:
“Fact-check” attacks on CERES-Science’s scientific research
The CERES-Science team have now twice been victims of disinformation campaigns by Science Feedback, one of the IFCN “independent fact-checkers” used by Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Science Feedback is an organization with two sister “fact-checking” websites: Climate Feedback and Health Feedback.
We have already written in September 2021 about the first time that Science Feedback wrote an alleged “fact-check article” on a newspaper article reporting on some of our scientific research. We published a detailed 15 page “fact-check fact-check” on their erroneous “fact-check” that can be downloaded here. We even wrote an open letter to Climate Feedback and Science Feedback in which we described how their article referring to our scientific research made multiple false and misleading claims that needed to be corrected.
Yet, more than two years later, this false article by Climate Feedback remains uncorrected – link here (Archived version). As we described above, these “fact-checking organizations” are apparently accountable to nobody but themselves as arbiters of “The Truth”.
This lack of opportunity for victims of a Science Feedback article to respond to the allegations made against them is particularly dangerous given that science thrives on different scientists being free to form their own scientific opinions on their research topics. In the scientific literature, if a research team publishes an article that expresses a different scientific opinion to other research teams, the other research teams are also able to write their own articles. The idea that one scientist might be the sole authority on what is “scientific truth” is anathema to the entire scientific endeavor.
Last month, Climate Feedback attacked us again. This time, they claim to have “fact-checked” the recent interview by Tucker Carlson of Dr. Willie Soon, a CERES-Science co-team leader. For links to the Tucker Carlson interview, see our January 9th, 2024 post.
Climate Feedback’s alleged fact-check of this interview was called, “Evidence greenhouse gasses cause global warming denied by Willie Soon in Tucker Carlson interview, resulting in mass social media climate misinformation” (Archived link).
This “fact-check article” has been used by Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to limit the ability of users to share or view any content related to this interview. It also potentially could be mis-used to harm the professional reputations of Dr. Soon, the CERES-Science team and the Tucker Carlson Network.
However, as with their 2021 alleged fact-check, this new “fact-check” is filled with false and misleading lies, disinformation, and other untruths. As before, they do not provide any right-of-reply – and users of those social media platforms are unable to object to Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
Nonetheless, because unlike Science Feedback, we actually care about truth and scientific information, we have systematically responded to every one of the false or misleading claims made by Climate Feedback in their article in the following 62-page document:
Fact-check of Science Feedback’s alleged “fact-check” by CERES-Science
The dangers of this modern “Ministry of Fact-checking”
Science is a method for seeking the truth. In order for science to function effectively, scientists should be free to discuss and ask open-minded questions, and to offer their scientific opinions for discussion. As soon as their ability to express a scientific opinion is suppressed or prevented, then this shuts down scientific progress.
Similarly, journalists should be able to investigate topics, ask open-minded questions, and report their findings.
So, on complex issues, it is dangerous for any organization to try to censor the ability of people to express their opinion – even if that opinion is “wrong”, people have the right to be wrong.
And it becomes even more sinister when those censored opinions happen to be correct.
In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith notes that, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four.” To get an idea of the power that these fact-checking organizations have, if Science Feedback were hypothetically to falsely issue a fact-check disputing the statement that “two plus two equals four”, there would be no way for the person who made that statement to reply or challenge this “fact-check”. If they tried to post this statement on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, they would be penalized for sharing “false misinformation”.
Moreover, it is worth remembering that social media platforms were originally designed with the view that members of the public would be able to share information, opinions and ideas with members of their social network. The success of social media platforms was the organic grassroots way in which members of the public were given the power to share content with each other.
Increasingly, social media platforms are letting “fact-checking organizations” undermine the very foundations and even success of their own platforms.
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Poynter is consistently a set of partisans. If one really wants to know what the US Democratic Party has as dogma on a subject, check the results of a Poynter affiliated “truth check” organization, such as PolitiFact.
Politifact is aptly named. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals #5. Ridicule.
Given the far-left leaning of the three linked “factcheck” [lol] organisations…
…. you can generally expect their findings to diametrically opposite the actual facts.
They are there purely as a paid attempt to shore up the lies and mis-information continually being generated by the far-left media.
Obrien torturing Winston in 1984,
A timely development.
Australia’s public broadcaster (ABC) severs ties with its ‘Fact-Checking’ unit at the RMIT university.
(after $600k of taxpayers’ money wasted of course)
https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/embarrassing-scandal-abc-axes-lucrative-contract-with-disgraced-rmit-fact-checking-unit/news-story/665dd4d67055f9a41af5d03b1f8e7d9f
When I wrote ‘The Arts of Truth’ (deliberately using the Orwellian Ministry of Truth meaning ‘untruth’) the internet existed but social media by and large didn’t. The situation is much worse now. Even worse, we know now from the ‘Twitter files’ that the federal government pressured Twitter (and by inference other social media) for censorship prohibited to it itself by the first amendment.
There is a partial solution. Don’t rely on social media for any information at all. Just don’t do social media, period. Do primary internet research to find ground truths. For example, it is true that in 2008 AL Gore predicted that Arctic summer sea ice would soon disappear because of rising CO2. CO2 rose, but Arctic summer sea ice didn’t disappear. The truth is Al was very wrong despite his Nobel.
There is another partial solution. Practice the ‘simple’ critical thinking techniques explained and illustrated in the various chapters of The Arts of Truth. Cheap ebook available at both iBooks and Kindle. Simple stuff like wind purveyors insisting wind is competitive while demanding big subsidies—sumtingwong.
There is another partial solution. Be skeptical of experts like Fauci on complex new stuff like COVID 19. Fauci’s track record on HIV was horrible. And his earnest but useless masking and distancing COVID recommendations made no sense once we knew COVID was at least partly aerosolized—and we knew that about a year in. Because influenza mostly is aerosolized and we have known for many decades that masks and distancing don’t work against flu.
With Fauci, the old saw of Often in error, Never in doubt applies.
Yes, I’ve recommended R.F.K.Jnr’s book “The Real Dr. Fauci” to relatives and friends.
Most said –
“I just don’t want that sort of stuff.”
Note that Al shared a Peace Prize with the UN IPCC liars. No science involved with either recipient.
And as we all know the Peace Prize is entirely political and has nothing to do with science.
The Nobel Peace Prize means you are the moral equivalent of Yasar Arafat.
Yes, Mr. “We’re running out of ammo – start the ‘peace talks.’
Thanks Rud.
Just ordered it.
(provided a link, but it included my account i.d. details.
there’s some shady characters on here from time to time, can’t trust some of them – too loose with realities 🙂
Unfortunately there are so many younger people that just blindly accept anything they read if it goes along with what they have been brainwashed to believe. And rather than investigate what seems to go against their thinking, they just ignore or ridicule it.
There is no way out of this.
There is no way out of this.
I don’t quite agree with that, but, as it was for Dante, the only way out is down.
I think the assumption made by the public is that a “fact-checker” knows more about the subject than those who wrote or said what is being “checked”.
But who are these people? What is their background? What qualifications do they have to decide, in certain areas, that this or that statement is wrong? (They were making such declarations long before “AI” reared it’s ugly head.)
A related assumption is that if something passed “peer review”, then it was correct, that is, the reviewers knew more about the subject that the writers.
Being a Layman, I now realize that, at it’s best, passing peer review simply means they didn’t say “2+2=5” somewhere in their calculations. Once published, others were free to disagree at a deeper level.
Today’s “Fact-Checkers” and “Peer-Reviewers” seem to allow “2+2=5” if the conclusion agrees with what they believe.
(Or just what they want other to believe.)
Peer reviews are mostly Pal reviews, as revealed by Climategate. Nope.
The scientific situation is worse yet, by a lot.
Faulty statistics (produced by readily available stat software neither the reviewers nor the authors actually properly understand) produces spurious results, as in medicine. (P values = pee values).
Reviewers never presume academic misconduct, when it is rampant. See very recent Harvard Med cancer research crisis at Brigham with several papers already retracted.
Finally, academic publish or perish. Publishing trivia garbage is highly rewarded.
Fun real example. I hold two very basic issued patents in electrocarbons for supercaps. How did I invent them? Simple. Was a complete outsider trying to make sense of the suoercap scientific literature for a potential investment client. It didn’t. As a complete novice, I got to thinking about the basic Helmholtz layer physics, and realized several long accepted ‘science experimental’ literature things could not be correct. Developed (after 18 months of struggle) a simple mathematical theory (my intrinsic capacitance equation) of what was actually going on in esoteric ‘flat’ (gold, platinum, various electrolytes) electrode results, then validated it in many experimental ‘anything but flat’ results. Could not get it published anywhere except in the proceedings of an annual conference AFTER I took the ‘expert’ host through a day of my thinking and results at his home. I think he allowed me on thinking I would be chewed up. Nope. I won cause scientific truth will eventually out.
“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”
Leave ideology and Government out of it, what works, sells. What doesn’t work, doesn’t sell.
Just so that you know, my full first name is Rudyard. In honor of my dad’s WW2 British Battle of Britain flight instructor (they both survived) who himself was named after Rudyard Kipling. The Jungle Book was a favorite early read.
And in supercap physics, I am now the mongoose RikiTikiTavi.
In that case you are just the man to kill off the snakes in the factchecker nests.
As a junior auditor, I learned very early in my working life to –
“always look behind the curtain”
(after a while at this, you find you’re not at all surprised by chicanery & perfidy by those in positions of “trust”)
But today’s youth are told there is no curtain.
“Fact checkers” like Snopes and Politifact always attempt to debunk climate-related subjects, not by presenting actual real-world observations, but by appeals to authority: “Distinguished Climate Scientist and Nobel Prize winner Professor Michael Mann states that is false”.
🤮 🤢
(Reaction to that last bit.)
passing peer review simply means they didn’t say “2+2=5” somewhere in their calculations.
I’m not even convinced that is the case anymore.
In case you only do checks on the right side and ‘correct’ the ‘wrong’ behavior, the left side seemingly gets a big advantage.
As a result, the left side will exhibit the most inaccuracies over time.
😎
Reminds, for some reason, of a story I read today that some liberal DA (or maybe he was just a lawyer?) suggested that the way to reduce crime was to redefine just what is a “crime”!
My extreme take: Make murder legal and there would be no “murders”!
(But this guy was coming from a racist point of view.)
IIRC, it was the race-hustling-bating attorney Crump (or some other practicing racial liar). Leftist jurisdictions have been providing that “solution” for some time now.
He was a social justice warrior. I forget what group of losers employed him.
He made the claim that laws have been written in order to suppress black culture.
Technically you can’t have a centralized scientific fact checker because science is not finished yet (even climate science isn’t). Imagine a fact checker called in in 1905 to check on Einstein’s theory of relativity, which, at that time, only one scientist was convinced of this new theory.
Today’s fact checkers would have absolutely flagged this admittedly wayout theory as nonsense. They would have advised Newton’s theory as already “settled” on this subject! The discipline ‘science’⁶ is never “settled”. It is an ongoing search.
Facts, like Queen Victoria’s birthday, yeah have at it.
I wonder, what percentage of those claimed billions of users of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are fake accounts?
It’s very likely (if not a dead certainty) that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, SnapChat, and Pinterest know very well that the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) checks facts like the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) reports the news.
Tell the truth when it suits one, hide the truth when it doesn’t, and lie when one must.
Back in 2019, I analysis-checked FactCheck.org when they contested Trump’s statement that crime had decreased in El Paso TX after a border wall had been built.
FactCheck.org’s fact check had charts and graphs and time-series crime rates showing violent crime had not decreased in El Paso, post wall.
So, I got and analyzed the crime data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And FactCheck.org were right — violent crime had not decreased in El Paso.
But drug crimes had rapidly gone to near zero. Trump had said that crime decreased, Not that violent crime had decreased. Trump was right
FactCheck.org had shifted the ground and then constructed a straw man. Naive guy that I was back then, I wrote to the checker and his manager, showing them their error — complete with charts, graphs and time series of my own.
Their response? Silence.
There’s the experiment. They don’t check facts. They construct prejudiced polemics.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, SnapChat, and Pinterest know that. They just agree with the polemics. And the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) gives them the cover they need to censor information contradicting their progressivist narrative.
Dishonest to the core.
Yeah, it’s the same deal with “Covering Climate Now”.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/
They don’t, as their name suggests, cover climate.
They’re only “Covering Climate Alarmism Now”
There is a legal approach to this internet censorship, potentially very powerful but as yet untested, that I have been urging someone to try for a long time. Given the effort that CERES-science has already put into this, they might be just the group to give it a go.
The idea is to combine two areas of law: civil rights law and anti-trust law.
Conspiracy to suppress civil rights (which include speech rights, rights of association, rights to associate via speech for the advancement of common objectives, be they artistic, scientific, or most importantly political and policy objectives), is illegal in the United States under the Civil Rights acts of 1964-65.
The punishments for conspiring to suppress these rights are very severe, up to ten years in jail for each victim of suppression and for each instance of suppression, and this applies to each participant in the suppression. Systematic suppression of the ability of half the country to communicate effectively to advance their common understanding could easily be literally billions of violations every year, punishable by potentially tens of billions of years in jail.
The severity of the punishments is no surprise. This was meant stop Democrat Jim-Crow states from suppressing the political rights of blacks, which they had been doing a hundred years since the Civil War. And because the authors of the law knew they would be up against state actors, even at the federal level, they also made conspiracy to suppress civil rights a civil violation, a tort, so that if prosecutors refused to prosecute, victims could sue directly on their own behalf.
Clearly this would apply to systematic suppression of speech and association on one side of any scientific and/or policy question, which is what is being done to skeptics of the anti-CO2 “consensus” in general and to CERES-science in particular.
That leaves just two more hurdles to being able to sue the censors. How to meet the criterion that the censors must be engaged in a “conspiracy”? And how to overcome the leeway that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides for internet companies to regulate content, free from liability?
As for conspiracy, much has come out recently about the massive amount of censorship that has been orchestrated by the federal government itself, working in concert with pretty much every internet monopolist and social media company. See The Twitter Files, on through to Tucker Carlsen’s recent interview with Mike Benz (a jaw-dropping must see).
But there is a simpler approach also available (my idea): use anti-trust law. The whole idea of anti-trust law is that monopoly in itself constitutes a conspiracy (a trust). Are the big internet companies monopolists? Do they have large amounts of monopoly power?
Yes. Network externalities make internet monopolies natural monopolies. When a social media company like Facebook captures that natural monopoly space, it gains huge monopoly power. That doesn’t mean it has no competitors, but oligopolists still have substantial monopoly power, and a dominant oligopolist has vast monopoly power.
That makes them conspirators in whatever they do. There are many things that it is perfectly fine to conspire to do. We can all conspire to contribute our best efforts to science, allowing us to be effective in achieving scientific progress. Nothing illegal about that.
But there are some things that it is illegal to conspire to do, and suppressing the speech of people who disagree with you is one of them, as established by our Civil Rights Acts.
This is very straightforward. What is a conspiracy? Under anti-trust law, monopoly per se is conspiracy, meaning there are certain things that monopolists cannot engage in. They can’t do anything that it is illegal to conspire to do, but they ARE doing such things, on a massive scale, and right out in the open.
Maybe bring a double-pronged civil rights lawsuit just to be sure: accuse Facebook of engaging in a conspiracy to suppress speech rights just because it is a monopoly that uses its monopoly power to suppress views that it does not like; and at the same time show that it is engaged in a conspiracy involving other organizations as co-conspirators, including the federal government and various other high profile internet companies and their various agents.
That would give the courts a chance to accept the simpler monopoly-as-conspiracy grounds for suit without the case automatically failing if they don’t accept it. I came up with the monopoly-as-conspiracy idea before all the government-involved conspiracy had been exposed, and I think it still has a lot of merit.
The logic of the monopoly-as-conspiracy grounds is especially compelling in the case of speech. In a competitive market between a host of different news/information providers, it would not matter if any particular outlet only catered to the views of a particular side. Other outlets would be able to prosper by catering to the other side, and so in a free market these alternative outlets would emerge, as historically this is how things have gone. There have long been liberty-hating leftist publications alongside liberty-loving conservative publications.
It is only when monopoly power is able to effectively corner the publication market that this one actor’s censoring of one side results in only one side having a chance to be heard, while the other side is largely debilitated, being kept from those venues where the great majority of network externalities are engaged.
When only one side is heard, the contest between truth and falsehood will no longer reliably be won by truth, undermining the very rationale for free speech.
It’s actually worse than that. The only side that will ever want to censor is the side that is in the wrong. Those who have truth on their side always want to debate, so as to demonstrate the ignorance, illogic, or dishonesty, of their opposites.
Thus censorship by monopolies will tend in general to foster the advancement of error and dishonesty, just as free speech is meant to prevent. So not letting monopolies censor is a correct criterion, in terms of the underlying free speech principles.
What about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? That liability protection requires that any censorship must be “in good faith.” Here is the relevant text:
“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or …”
Notice the open-endedness of “or otherwise objectionable.” Yikes.
But the clear meaning of “good faith” here is that when constitutionally protected speech is censored, that censorship must be incidental. The purpose cannot to censor one side of a debate, yet this is exactly what our internet monopolies are doing today (in coordination with the government, it turns out).
So I do not believe that section 230 actually does provide any protection for the censorship that CERES-science is suffering. The “in good faith” qualifier is violated.
This censorship is conspiracy to suppress civil rights. The legal recourse against this behavior is very powerful, both as a matter of criminal law and civil law (torts), with the latter being particularly important.
With the federal government involved in the censorship, they are obviously not going to be enforcing federal criminal laws against themselves, but CERES and others can still sue, and maybe win a few thousand years of funding for their effort. It’s worth a try.
I should be a little clearer on what I think “good faith” must require: … that when constitutionally protected speech is censored, any non-content-neutral censorship must be incidental.
Meaning they can’t just censor one side of a debate, as they are doing.
Dang I want in on this class action suit.
I fully agree with you, Mr Rawls. For decades, I have watched sceptics being lashed by the warmista mongrels using a plethora of slimy techniques … and all I have heard in response is a call to “rise above it”. Dammit, NO! It is time sceptic organizations grew a set of cohunnas and took them head on in public.
cojones
or that Hawaiian word Big Kahuna
If you watch the Tucker Carlson – Mike Benz interview, Benz says that fact-checkers are part of the national surveillance state run by the intelligence community and a government-funded network of NGOs. True? Stay tuned.
~ Evelyn Beatrice Hall (not Voltaire)
~ Votaire (not Evelyn Beatrice Hall)
Actually, Hall wrote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” (The Friends of Voltaire, S. G. Tallentyre, 1906, p. 199. S. G. Tallentyre was Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s pen-name)
Thanks for the note, I’ve always been frustrated with people using this quote, saying it has been mistakenly attributed to Voltaire, and then not saying who actually wrote it.
Writing responses to these miscreants is of little value … they will respond only when the writ is delivered to the office … See ya in court where you can defend your “fact-checking”.
But, preferably, not an American court – Canada or UK might be quicker and less costly.
I think we have to rewire our brains to the alternative meaning of ‘checker’
For too long the natural reaction to the word was to consider the ‘checker person’ was being cautious hopefully knowledgeable and able to confirm the item or process was correct. If it was not then it was scrapped or returned for reworking/rejigging the process.
The use of the word to define someone that stops others as on the sport field is more appropriate.
A Fact Checker, is someone that stops facts from progressing, stops them being used.
That is the way to see fact checkers, they are blockers not helpers.
Staying with Tucker Carlson his interview with Mike Benz relates to the effect the fact checkers have and why. It is a remarkably informative hour.
Speaking of the Tucker/Willie Soon interview, awaiting the “Richard Greene” WUWT commenter to chime in with his accusation about Willie Soon taking bribes from Exxon – sourced from Greenpeace – in 10… 9… 8.. 7…
No serious scientist would be involved in ‘fact checking’ for the obvious reason that they have something better to do and time is the one commodity one cannot afford to waste.
Therefore any self-proclaimed scientist involved in ‘fact-checking’ by definition will not be involved in serious scientific pursuit themselves. Which means that the fact checking is done by second raters and by non-scientists, arts graduates who are totally out of their depth.
I have always asked : “Who snopes Snopes?”
Any “fact checker” who closes the door to reply or debate is, in fact, just a propagandist. We are in dire need of regulatory and legal mechanisms to manage this phenomenon and punish abusers of public media and public debate while rewarding good behaviour as in free uncensored speech. In order to se such mechanisms we need to elect politicians who understand and support constitutional guarantees.
In the early 1960’s a very common parable I heard repeated often was “In the process of earning higher degrees in college the student studies and earns degrees more limited in both scope and knowledge. With each higher degree the student learns more and more about less and less to the point that, like a Black Hole, they know everything there is about nothing at all.
Malcom Muggeridge said, and I’m paraphrasing, “educated into imbecility.”
Similarly, journalists should be able to investigate topics, ask open-minded questions, and report their findings.
“Journalists” no longer care about doing any of that.
Narrative control.