[karles]

Meta and factchecking - everyone outside US would see this as an impossible combination.

Meta is a business, and only does what benefits the business. That is why no one should rely on fact-checking done by Meta.

Not that facts matter much anymore anyway...

[ToucanLoucan]

> Meta is a business, and only does what benefits the business. That is why no one should rely on fact-checking done by Meta.

Correct, and in any kind of healthy society, we’d tell them to get off their dead corporate asses and stop enabling the boiling of people’s brains in a vat of political nonsense language for profit for the same reason we outlawed leaded gas and asbestos: because there are things about products that are more important than their profitability, and sometimes (at least in theory and at a time long past) we were willing to tell businesses “yes we know this makes you money but it’s also corrosive to our society and/or the people in it, so kindly knock it the fuck off.”

Nowadays we’re seemingly much more prepared to just feed everyone’s sanity to the industrial shredder that is the attention economy.

[anonzzzies]

Factchecking is often very difficult without hard and often very dangerous journalism on the ground. And now that large swaths of the population don't believe the journalists on the ground anymore (saw some post of some journalist standing somewhere in isreal and the commenters said it was AI generated; it wasn't as you can still see that, but INDEED in the future that will be impossible to know) or any proof that goes against their belief system.

I find myself more and more disappearing in software & math; at least these things I can factcheck and I happen to like them more than anything else anyway. Build stuff; test andor prove things. Discuss with others without the vitriol of politics.

[sim7c00]

all people shuld factcheck themselves rather than having some third party do this shit for them :S wtf happened to dont beleive everything everyone tells u?

i wonder how such ppl go through their daily lives. do they need a fact checker when they are at the barber making conversation? or in the pub? or are factchecks only needed on the internet because it someone is some kind of source of ultimate truth for ppl? i find this shit confusing as hell.

[anonzzzies]

A lot of facts you cannot check. I am going to fly to the westbank to see who is lying or not? How do I factcheck stuff like that?

[krapp]

It's impossible for anyone to verify every claim they come across, people just don't have the relevant domain knowledge, resources or time to do the work necessary to evaluate everything from first principles.

People who think they factcheck themselves more often than not just default to believing whatever confirms their biases. Which, nine times out of ten, just means blind cynicism towards whatever the mainstream or status quo says.

[thrance]

Clearly this doesn't work, seeing how America just elected a compulsive liar, with popular vote no less!

[xvector]

Fact checking is totally thankless work, because you'll get comments like this pretending it doesn't happen, and comments from both sides of the political aisle accusing you of prioritizing the other side.

Doing fact checking in a way that satisfies everyone is an intractable problem. I'd abandon it too. As a shareholder, this is just good business sense and I'm glad they did this. If y'all care so much about the facts you can contribute to Community Notes yourself.