{"id":1069,"date":"2022-07-15T18:58:20","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T18:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/?p=13632"},"modified":"2022-08-22T13:10:44","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T13:10:44","slug":"who-fact-checks-the-fact-checkers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/2022\/07\/15\/who-fact-checks-the-fact-checkers\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Fact-Checks the Fact-Checkers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>That\u2019s not so simple a question as it may seem, because although we are often rightfully warned against people who claim to have \u201cdone their research\u201d on some subject or other and to have discovered unbelievable secrets about it, we are also often asked to accept fact checkers as sources of absolute truth, when they\u2019re really not. They\u2019re just ordinary journalists who are being paid to do their jobs as best they know how while dealing with complex, specialized disciplines and concepts with which they are no more familiar than you or I. So in the end, what do fact checkers offer us? Their own subjective accounts of small slices of reality that they think they have understood and that we hope most of them are presenting in a responsible way\u2014in other words, a far cry from what is suggested by the categorical labels of \u201ctrue\u201d and \u201cfalse\u201d that all too often litter fact checkers\u2019 articles on complex subjects such as the human brain, or Covid-19.<\/p>\n

With regard to Covid, here\u2019s one anecdote to show how fact checking can go wrong<\/a><\/span><\/strong>. On November 2, 2021, investigative journalist Paul D Thacker, published an article in The British Medical Journal <\/em>(one of the most highly regard medical journals in the world). The article, entitled \u201cCovid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer\u2019s vaccine trial<\/a><\/span><\/strong>,\u201d revealed some dubious practices at a company that had been sub-contracted by Pfizer to conduct clinical trials for its Covid vaccines. The next day, a retired dentist from Israel posted a link to Thacker\u2019s article in a private Facebook group. One week later, the dentist\u2019s group received a message from Facebook, stating that \u201cindependent fact checkers\u201d had found that this article was \u201cmissing context\u201d. The fact checkers had not found any errors in it. They were questioning the understanding of the facts expressed in the article. In other words, Lead Stories, the company that Facebook had paid to do the fact checking, had come to different conclusions from an author published in what has been one of the most widely read specialized medical journals in the world ever since it was founded in 1840. And this company still stands by its story today<\/a><\/span><\/strong>, often defending its position with statements by spokespeople from \u2026 Pfizer.<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, the problem here is not so much that Facebook is arrogating unto itself the right to decide who is right and who is wrong and to issue warnings in what should normally just be matters for scientific debate. I know that Facebook\u2019s reason for existence is to make money, not to explain the basics of science to people. But considering Facebook\u2019s tremendous influence over our online discussions, that\u2019s the real problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That\u2019s not so simple a question as it may seem, because although we are often rightfully warned against people who claim to have \u201cdone their research\u201d on some subject or other and to have discovered unbelievable secrets about it, we are also often asked to accept fact checkers as sources of absolute truth, when they\u2019re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[414,415],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1073,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions\/1073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog-thebrain.org\/advanced\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}