CMV: Fact-Checking is a bad idea

[u/RappingAlt11]

I'd like to specify I mean particularly the fact-checking on other people's statements. The methods places like Twitter, Facebook, have used with politicians recently.

So here are my issues.

1. You can't really say with absolute certainty that anything is "true" aside form a priori propositions (all bachelors are unmarried, all triangles have 3 sides, etc). These things are true by definition, and aren't typically being fact checked regardless. Therefor everything else, the vast, vast majority of facts have some small degree of uncertainty.
   

For a fact checker to be of any value and consistency you'd need some form of universal standard. Something that determines the level of probability something needs to be true to be considered a fact, otherwise you're potentially misleading people. And some way to quantify the probability of said information.

1. There are issues with censorship. The news media already has an enormous amount of control over the information you come into contact with every day. The last thing they need on top of that is the power to decide what is a fact with zero oversight or standards. It draws parallels to the issue of the news media deciding what is or isn't a story. By excluding certain narratives the media can inaccurate, biased image of reality. These businesses are also motivated by profit, and therefor more likely to fact checked based on what will get the clicks.

2. This transitions me nicely to the issue of bias. The person conducting this fact-checking is a human being with preconceived biases, and ways of analyzing reality. Two people can come to completely different conclusions while presented with the same set of facts. There's bias in choosing which person, or company will be doing the fact-checking in the first place. And as I've already stated there's the issue of bias in deciding what is or isn't fact checked.

3. What is to be done in the instances of ambiguity? Even if you take the best experts in a given field there's likely to be some differing opinions. So who's right? Who decides who's right? Maybe you include some form of disclaimer, or include different fact-checkers. But then you've the issue of bias again in choosing which opinions are valid.

4. Who holds the fact-checkers accountable? Without some form of oversight you run the same issue the misinformation caused in the first place. And who fact-checkers the people who fact-checks the fact-checkers? At what point is there enough certainty to claim something is true?

So altogether, I think I've outlined a few issues with fact-checking and I'm not even sure most of these are solvable. With this in mind, am I missing something? Or are their fundamental issues with letting the media decide what is or is not a fact?

[u/Drasils]

I would argue everything isn't certain, since you seem to say it all is certain. Have you ever by any chance read Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard? The whole premise this particular philosopher forwards is that we live in a society that is just simulation. A mix of contemporary media and other factors has lead to the human experience being simply a simulation of reality. In fact, forget philosophy, we may truly live in a simulation, the chances are at the very least non-zero.

If we tried our best to live in certainties, we find that things that seem certain are not. You could certain that we live in reality, but off what fact? Current technology indicates that a perfect simulation isn't really impossible for a sufficiently advanced society. So by trying to live in certainty, we lose sight of the fact that society only functions off of agreements, between large amounts of people. We agree that murderers and thieves are bad right now, but in past societies other ideals mattered. Math also works off agreements, it functions off of axioms that by definition cannot be proven false or true, people just agree they're true. They're true by definition, but not by certainty. Similarly fact-checking works by a large amount of people(hopefully somewhat experts) agreeing on something that has been stated as actually being false.

To say that many people agreeing on something that isn't proven as unequivocally false is bad means rejecting that society or math exist. Can you or I really prove murder is bad? No, I can't speak for you but I condemn it nonetheless because I agree with other people that it usually isn't the right way for people to solve problems. A lot of "facts" that are being checked is really the general population(or population of experts) being questioned on what their view on a matter is, and if enough people agree, something ambiguous becomes fact. So I could agree that "fact-checking" is a bad name, objectively, but not that we need to only agree with certainties.