[deft]

"fact checking" is bad. I'm not sure what the good version of it you imagine. By "fact checking in general" do you mean pointing out when someone is wrong? The parent comment sees fact checking as one thing: propaganda used to shut down heterodoxy. It has nothing to do with facts or truth.

[mitchdoogle]

Fact checking is simply applying some standards to information. People do this in their own minds every day. Outsourcing it to others can be dangerous, but it's not inherently so. If you choose to believe something you read, you're placing your trust in someone else - a news organization, government, friends, family, whoever. If an organization set up for fact checking has published standards and list the violations of those standards when they deem something to be false or misleading, then why shouldn't you trust them? To be clear, I'm not suggesting Facebook fits the bill here - you attacked the very idea of fact checking, which, when done right, is a valuable thing to have in society, unless you just literally trust no third parties that present information to you.

[SantalBlush]

If fact checking is bad, why are you wrapping it in quotation marks? Is there a difference between fact checking and "fact checking" implied here, and if so, what is that difference? Please elaborate.

[henrikschroder]

In 2020, talking about the lab-leak theory was labelled "misinformation" and brutally purged from social media by "fact-checkers". In 2021, major news outlets started talking about it, and then it suddenly became ok to talk about it on social media again, and the "fact-checkers" did a complete 180 on the issue.

They're not checking facts, they're just enforcing the mainstream view. The mainstream view is often correct, but sometimes it isn't, and then the fact-checkers are just horribly wrong, and suppressing actual debate on the merits of an issue.

[deft]

there is no difference, I put it in quotes because its newspeak.