Ok, the main concern when people start “fact checking” is who checks the fact checkers…
Having said that, there are certain things that are generally accepted and, while these may change over time, there’s a problem when people set about to deliberately mislead.
For example, when I ask you if you support Peter Dutton’s decision to send troops to help in the fight for Greenland, the first question you’re likely to ask is: “What’s the fight for Greenland?”
All reasonable so far… well, apart from the fact that Peter Dutton hadn’t said anything about Greenland, but we can’t let a little thing like the truth get in the way of the point I’m wishing to make.
So when I answer your question with a statement announcing that President Trump has deployed troops to liberate the people of Greenland because the vote to join the USA was rigged and the Greenlandish voted overwhelming to become part of the MAGA group because there’s one thing that any thinking person would want and that’s to join a country which doesn’t speak the same language, and surely those Greenlanders would want to Make America Great Again, you’ll probably think that I should be fact checked in some way.
Mm, while it may not be true today, the worrying thing is that everything I’ve written might be true before the end of the year…
Notwithstanding my Nostradamus-like capacity here, the fact remains that there has been no vote and Trump hasn’t deployed any troops yet, so everything I’ve written might be described as inaccurate and needing substantiation. At the point where people are asked to prove anything, anyone who believes in free speech is likely to get upset because surely free speech includes the right to lie and any fact-checking is the sort of censorship that communists love and we must resist that woke ideology by stopping any of those lefties saying anything that contradicts the proponents of free speech. And, of course, it’s doubly hard to substantiate something if it’s a lie and surely liars have just as much right to free speech as anyone.
Whatever one thinks about the whole Facebook fact-checking, misinformation, disinformation and me being recently voted the greatest thinker since Einstein, one has to say that the whole Donald Trump thing has to be one of those times when historians will entitle the chapter on the era as: “What The Fuck Was In The Water To Cause This??”
This is not simply an arrogant Australian thinking that I know more than everyone else and that anyone who disagrees with me must be a lunatic. I can accept that I’m not right about everything. However, what I find strange about the world of 2025 is the idea that so many people can listen to what Trump is actually saying and go: “Well, we’re not sure what his strategy is yet, but we presume that it must be something different from what he’s saying because he couldn’t possibly be serious about what he’s saying!”
Occam’s Razor suggests that when looking for an explanation it’s best to go for the simplest… Ok, that’s not exactly what it suggests, but I thought that I’d go for the simplest explanation of Occam’s Razor. In the case of President Trump, the simplest explanation is that he’s bat-shit insane and actually means nearly everything he says but may change his mind and say something completely different tomorrow… or not. It may be that he has no more strategy than a person explaining their plan to become a billionaire after said person has consumed too much alcohol or smoked too much marijuana. To be fair, said person may be quite right and nowhere near as incoherent as Donny.
There’s a thing called the halo effect where we presume that because a person is highly competent in one area, then they must be competent in other areas. For example, Bill Gates made billions through Microsoft so he must be a good person to ask about personal relationships. Or Elle MacPherson is good at being photographed, so I should take her advice on cancer treatment.
In Trump’s case, however, it seems that the only things he’s succeeded at are being elected president, and convincing people to give him money even though nearly every business he’s started has gone broke. The idea that these will mean that he knows what he’s doing and he’s got a well-thought out list of options for how to take over Greenland, the Panama Canal and make Canada a state of the USA…
Yes, yes, I know that some of you will be saying, “But he doesn’t mean that last one. He doesn’t seriously think that he’ll be able to make Canada a US state.”
Let’s forget that he talked about injecting bleach, called the January 6th riot a “day of love”, talked about sharks and electric motors, and… Ok, I suppose everything I list will just be another example of his jokes and I’m showing that I don’t understand the weave…
I can’t help but think of the time when I posted all those photos from a site that was entitled: “This Is Why I’m Voting For The Coaltion”, where people held up written reasons on a sign like they were in “Love, Actually”. The reasons ranged from the puerile to the frightening. I know it was a geniune site because one of the people on it demanded that he be taken off and not ridiculed by… well, by showing what he’d written. There was also another site parodying these people which had reasons that were even sillier, though not by much. A few people commented that I was stupid because they’d seen the parody site and presumed that I’d grabbed the pictures from there. The frustrating thing was that the site I’d taken them from suddenly disappeared a few days after my post, so I couldn’t even direct people to “real” site.
The people assuring me that it was parody just couldn’t believe that anyone would say anything as asinine as some of the things on the signs. And this is not to say that some people may not have had sincere reasons for supporting Tony Abbott, it’s just that they weren’t the ones holding up the signs.
I don’t know why Trump makes me think of that, but somehow, he does.
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I hear that Dutton is not ruling out taking Tasmania by force !
Who needs fact checkers anyhow – there are always alternative facts.
Slightly off-topic but here goes.
I was “fact-checked” by FB a couple of months ago when I posted on an amateur astrophotography page, an article about the Bortle light pollution scale.
For those not in the know, this is a well known 1-10 scale where 1 is no light pollution (typically high altitude and very remote places), and 10 is inner city night sky (really nothing much visible at all).
Apparently my post was “misleading” despite the scale being widely used as a rough idea of what is out there.
In their great wisdom, I was prevented from posting anything at all on FB – including my personal page and other pages I’m an admin of – for a week, as “punishment”
Let’s see what happens with the new incarnation of fact-checking! I’m not holding my breath. And no, consensus does not mean true – or even accurate.
Rossleigh, I’m guessing that you watched Cunk on Life not long before posting “After Pressure, Zuckerberg Announces Philomena Cunk To Be Sole Fact Checker!”
Never mind the (never there when you really need them) fact-checkers; I want to know whether Zucckyboy is also firing the nipple police.
Love this. Go Philomena! Such bizarre times. Trump and Musk, both of them look like parodies of human beings. Are we being fooled. Are they some kind of ai creation, Miss Piggy meets Dr Strangelove?
David,
I think Miss Piggy would rather be turned into a side of bacon than being associated with those two creatures from a dork dimension. Dr Strangelove’s right hand would strangle him before he had a chance to contribute to their creation.
What is truth?
In trying to have a rational discussion regarding Israel/Palestine, regarding Christianity/Judaism/Islam and all manner of different interpretations of mythologies, we are confronted more often than not with hatred which denies the humanity of those different than the one spewing the hatred.
Truth it seems, especially in matters of race, ethnicity, religion is in the eye of the beholder, in the part of them that defines them as being better than others because their god has told them so.
So fact checking is a waste of time, people will believe what they believe. The dogmas they follow reduce their capacities for critical, analytical thinking. Have you ever tried to tell a ‘true believer’ that autism is not caused by all the injections we have used to eradicate diseases such as small pox, polio, tetanus, diptheria….. and etc.?
That has been fact checked countless times but it seems the fact checkers don’t know what they are doing, and that those diseases have effectively disappeared is more a matter of chance… but look at all the autistic people!
Using many requests for documents of local government under Right to Information I was flabbergasted that the Internal documents did not support their official public statements. If governments have no issue with lying how can we the public rely on anything they say or do?
It seems that Meta’s move away from fact checking is a strategic risk management device to distance the group from being identified as a ‘publisher’ and thus exposed to legal remedies such as defamation for telling lies or creating conspiracies : as solely a platform with no engagement in fact checking, editorial oversight, moderation or the other attributes of a publisher, they may not be able to be sued in the way that FOX and Murdoch were in the Dominion case.
The question we must then ask is, who, if anybody, is responsible for telling the truth or have we abandoned that concept when it comes to the dissemination of information ?
Dangerous times !