Facts, opinions, context and fact checkers.
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Original Question
Im sure you've seen the recent headlines about how Facebook admitted in court filings that its fact checkers are just opinion, and therefore protected by the 1st Amendment. The clickbait headlines have been blasted all across fake news sites with glee.
Now, it seems that fact checkers are both factual and opinion to me. For example, the rating that fact checkers give to a post would be opinion, but the fact check would be factual. In that case, the fact checkers are still factually accurate. Also, when fact checkers say a claim is out of contest therefore its incorrect, would that be considered an opinion?
And perhaps FB said this for a legal strategy due to how the laws work?
Anyways, I have seen a ton of FB memes saying things like, "FaceBook admits fact checkers are just (leftist) opinion not facts."
This is helping the proliferation of fake news even more.
How can the subtle nuances of fact and opinion be better understood to people so that they dont see it in such a black and white lens?
If someone here is familiar with this case that had to do with deformation and climate change please let me know the nuances as I cant find them anywhere online at the moment.
Comments on Question
One may also look at this 2018 Pew Study entitled "Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News" which may provide some important context regarding how we interpret the information we receive.
Also, take a look at the article, "They Saw a game, a case study" regarding how two sides interpreted the exact same event.
Building on the same idea, athough this one regarding how a protest was perceived by different people, see, "They Saw a Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction
Is how Facebook defines fact checkers on its website, as follows:
“Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution…we…apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.”
Facebook uses the term “disproving the claim.” Opinion? Sounds like a statement of fact?
This may not be much of a contribution to the discussion, but I am currently reading "Bad News: Why we fall for fake news" by Rob Brotherton. It provides some much-needed context for these types of discussions.
Answers
1Anyways, I have seen a ton of FB memes saying things like, "FaceBook admits fact checkers are just (leftist) opinion not facts."
I'll deal with this since I think it's most pertinent - it's simply a misleading claim.
The statement implies that Facebook's fact-checkers did not even look at any scientific evidence or data - they just decided something was false, and flagged it (according to their 'leftist' criteria). This is not the case. While fact-checkers will nearly always have bias and can be abused, there's an obvious false dilemma between absolute objectivity and mere opinion being expressed here.
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Factcheckers are funded by government and other interested parties so we can have no confidence, a priori, in what they claim in their fact checks. It's always up to us to work out the facts ourselves by applying our own critical thinking abilities and canvassing widely.
An egregious example of fact-checking by a so-called factchecker is that performed by PolitiFact on the article COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless in their post, COVID-19 tests are not ‘scientifically meaningless’, to which the article authors issued a resounding rebuttal, Open Letter: Refuting Politifact’s “fact check” ... that remains unresponded to by PolitiFact or any other factchecker or scientist.