"I consider myself fairly strong and self reliant."

"Okay well we are going to kick you off of every private website, try to make you lose your livelihood, and mock you relentlessly on most media broadcasting networks!"

"Well, I am going to attempt to stop you from doing those things, since I don't like them. "

"Ironic! You need coddling and aren't strong at all, haha, your ego is so fragile."

It's very tiresome.

One day you have kente cloths and taking the knee everywhere, and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.

This is no way to live, 80%+ of the population is neither committed progressives nor committed conservatives/reactionaries, but they rule (or ruled) the social networks and thus dominate(d) in elections.

By the grace of the algorithm, you majesty the king.

When you have to rely on indoctrination and censorship your beliefs lack merit.

Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...

Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic.

I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".

During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.

How are these at all comparable? One is a photo op at the Capitol, and one is leading a massive immigration raid campaign full of civil rights violations. Even if you believe these raids are lawful, they are not performative like the photo op stunt was - they are massive operations that greatly affect millions of lives.

If you are making a “both sides are bad” argument then that is a pretty poor comparison.

Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal.

And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.

Nothing's true anymore, everything's permitted... And at one point they'll get you to a point where you are unable to tell what's true or false. So you stop caring. And they win; your apathy is what they need.

Taking the knee to say what though?

1. Before: People warning about a problem of corrupt police forces of power-tripping fools and bullies that routinely get away with murder.

2. After: A corrupt police state has metastasized onto the national state age, with its own fools and bullies, including illegally imprisoning and murdering people.

I wouldn't label that a "pendulum swing" between opposite situations.

On one side, the right preparing by slowly taking over positions, on the other side people ignoring the problems of many.

Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, because instead of fixing the problems that people complained about for decades (costs, bureaucracy, rents, no vision apart from "consume and work") people are fixated on that right wing party itself.

When I did some skydiving in my youth I was fascinated by watching sooo many skydivers barely avoiding the lone single tree near the landing zone. Turns out, if you concentrate on something ("I must avoid that tree I must avoid that tree...") you end up steering towards it. The winning move is to instead concentrate on where you do want to go. There are precious little positive ideas in our politics, it's mostly about what we don't want, or distractions on things that while it sounds nice and it's definitely okay when it gets done should never be the main focus.

Plenty of people might disagree but choose to keep their mouth shut.

The "Fact Checker" title is is meant to describe the task the person seeks to undertake. The evidence and argument they provide gives their opinion weight.

The real problem here is that people read a title, or look at how confident someone is, or how well dressed, neat, polite, white, young, old, nerdy, worldly, good looking, well spoken or enthusiastic and think that is means anything at all as to the validity of what they say.

You aren’t.

Frankly this was inevitable. There is a reckoning that has been put off, within the groups that champion free speech. Mods happen to be the people who see how the sausage is made, but have no real ability to be heard.

The Zeitgeist is still happy to say “censorship bad”, thus moderation bad. The work of ensuring “healthy” communities or debate is left to the magic of the “market place of ideas”.

Except the market place is well and truly broken, captured and unfair for regular users. We have a dark forest for content consumers.

This conversation needs to be had.

Edit: tried to make the tone less frustrated.

This is in fact (no pun) what every fact checker I've ever consulted actually does. I assume a lot of people just read the conclusive "Lie"/"Truth", and don't bother with the paragraphs of reasoning and sources they're basing the conclusion on. If there are faults with sourcing evidence, logic, or anything in between, that's where the issue is, but the concept is fine.

What values are those exactly? Because the current administration doesn't seem to be representing the values expressed in the American founding documents, or the values held by a majority of Americans, very well at all. In many ways, they're diametrically opposed to those values.

Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM.

Voluntary actions including a protest against police brutality ..

> and before you know it, right-winger bloggers are running the law enforcement.

.. versus the pro-brutality side of the argument. Social media has made it more acute, but the same line runs through e.g. the pre-social-media Rodney King riots. I think people mistook a suppressed problem for stability.

Of course, suppressing problems works quite well for stability. We can see in Hong Kong how having several tower blocks burn down might be destabilizing. There were calls for accountability. Accountability would be destabilizing to the political and real estate elite, so that can't happen and now everyone is quietly agreeing that it was just a tragic accident, no need to investigate further.

Conservatives and reactionaries want to get their ideas into the mainstream but they know that just going straight out and saying race science or whatever will not get play in mainstream media. So they make the argument about how these ideas (which they claim not to hold) are being silenced by illiberal institutions. Then centrist organizations, who do at least want to believe that they ascribe to these principles, take the bait. Suddenly the New York Times is writing feature story after feature story about how universities are being oh so mean to the professor who writes "I don't shy away from the word 'superior'" and "everybody wants to live in the countries run by white people" (she didn't even get fired, by the way).

This convinces some center-left folks that various institutions have gone to far and they become participants in efforts to expel black people, women, and lgbt people from institutions of power.

But now people like Chris Rufo don't need the New York Times anymore, so they are happy to start saying that actually businesses should be allowed to only hire married men and that the civil rights act should be overturned.

Correcting desinfo is a legitimate goal and if you think there were errors made, well, fact check them.

I dont like this 'agenda' labeling because its the exact opposite of a factual discourse, it implies malicious intent.

It has the same flaws that plague the marketplace of goods and services, but fewer consumer protections.

Do the following exercise.

In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong.

Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories.

It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.

Case in point - full pardon for former Honduran president on drug trafficking, while at the same time they are trying to use drug trafficking as pretext on war with Venezuela.

Same thing with arabs/muslims/immigrants being bad (look at how they were during Mamdami campaign), though literal al-Qaeda members and murderers acting as arabian royalty are "great leaders" and "things (murders) happen".

Even on "simpler" issues like family values - they preach against queers, about "traditional family values", kids, etc. But most of them have 3+ divorces, multiple kids that they don't take care of, imported/immigrant trophy wives, numerous scandals of adultery, while destroying policies for children education/health/food, etc.

Just to be clear, who is diametrically opposed to these values, again?

An interviewer asked Trump in 2016 how people will know that America is great again. He replied: “cause I’m gonna tell em”. :)

https://youtu.be/6TuqNMIxMeI?si=oCkU2Rypuf9SOU8H

Such self-descriptions are not necessarily accurate and honest.

We have had quite a few debates around Chat Control here. It is sold as a tool to prevent propagation of CSAM as well.

Pope is not like Vance, despite Vance pointificating about by values and pope beong christan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

But the US system is far from generic. Instead it has several tweaks that make it tend towards extremism. The primary system is probably the biggest factor.

If that sentence from the article is accurate, the parent poster's response makes complete and perfect sense. You don't have to like the current administration, to like a specific thing they are doing.

Now is this actually what is happening? I don't know. And of course, that's a different conversation, and not what the parent poster was talking about.

I mean... This is HN... You should see people's reaction when Apple decided to do something about it...

He devised it, but Chuck was pretty clear—Tyler Durden wasn’t the good guy. So don’t take what he said as an endorsement by Pahlaniuk.

Political theatre by people who wouldn't be able to tell you who was the Prime Minister, how much does milk cost etc.

Even well-meaning US liberals overestimate the count of black people shot by the police by three orders of magnitude. That is some serious divergence from reality, and it was hyped by social networks.

Insofar as people are actually going over to AfD (and it's not just exaggerated hysterics, the sky is always falling these days...), it's probably got something to do with the issues which are conspicuously absent from your list, which AfD ostensibly addresses, at least more convincingly than the other parties. Namely, immigration. You may not want to admit that as a real problem at all, but that refusal to engage with the issue is the primary reason people line up for the politicians who at least pretend to care about it.

But the actual short-term jumps in policy are absolutely wild now. That wasn't the case in the 1990s.

It is understandable that Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933. In 2025 they have no excuse. When Germans get grand ideas inside their heads everything always goes bad.

It"s a stepping stone on the way to make it illegal to refuse to publish the "right" sort of lies.

Not only are they targeted, but so are many more.

It will, no doubt, be every bit as effective as the "thoughts and prayers" that follow the weekly school shootings that no other nation on earth have.

Every real problem can be made worse by putting histrionic personalities in charge, and the current digital environment promotes and rewards hysteria.

The government also funds projects from Correctiv (a common pattern for these "N"GO's).

[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/correctiv-verhandlu...

> It’s objectively an unnatural form of communication

I agree. Short bits quick hits and spunk spits lead to epileptic fits from social halfwits and, that's what we produce and consume. More so, when we imagine we are anonymous. The random emotional inpulse spikes that flit across so many of our untrained anonymized minds leads to a noise floor that threatens to completely obliterate any signal.

There is value in anonymity. But I would love to participate in a smaller subset of the internet, where every participant is known, identified and associated with their real-world self. Such that no one feels so obscured and anonymously free to grafitti; where everyone is careful and concerned with their affect on the environment; where publication is a precise responsibility; where effort must be made or authority is lost.

((Kinda sorta like HN, but with blue checkmarks)/s)

(Answer: they don't care about protected expression or pesky laws, they are lawless and reward other lawless types like themselves)

The New Testament instructs the elders of a church to evaluate the messages brought by people who share a message or claim to prophesy. We're also instructed to "test the spirits" to see if they are from God. And to search the Scriptures in order to see if what people say is consistent with the teaching that has been given from God.

If you don't believe in God, divine revelation, and God speaking to people in their lives, then I'm not sure why you'd find her assertion creepy, it might make more sense to just find her and the entire Christian belief system false and mostly irrelevant.

At any rate, I doubt she was claiming spiritual authority over everyone else as you put it, more like saying God gave her a spiritual spidey sense or BS meter to help her personally and to help caution her local congregation or the people in her life.

It's a le legitimate claim within Christian teaching but I can't speak to her use of the gift. People's use of spiritual gifts isn't autonomous, but prophecy, preaching, administration, hospitality, discernment, and so on should be regulated within the Church body by the oversight of other Christians.

In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers, and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking, why cannot everybody agree with me?

You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.

Perhaps we could jail people who post contradictory ones?

A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.

Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.

It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".

I am sorry but that's how it goes and that's how I see it in my country. Self proclaimed free-thinkers who eat everything that's on FB.

Attaching your real world identity to every interaction you have on the internet is no more objectively natural than doing otherwise, and more of a burden than we place on interactions in the real world. I don't exchange my drivers license and SSL with everyone I talk to.

We don't need to have the serious conversation, we've had it, and the false dichotomy you're presenting here is invalid. We don't have to choose one or the other. Anonymity has been well established in every free society as legally and morally defensible and a necessity for free speech and a free state for decades, to the point of including some degree of anonymity from one's own government.

Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable. Anonymity is also acceptable. 4chan can be 4chan, and other places can not be 4chan. Free speech does not guarantee you a platform, much less all platforms. It doesn't require me to put a target on my back, either.

Communication with people half the way across the globe at the speed of light is objectively unnatural too, should we ban that? There's no "we" calling for the end of online anonymity excepts for spooks and people who believe people should be identified and punished for expressing opinions they disagree with.

Snopes is one of the most beloved fact checking services, yet I have seen them make questionable claims. I remember they tried to say once many years ago that snuff videos don't exist. How could they make such a blanket claim? It would have been more honest to say that most of them are fake. Not only would it be possible to make such a video, there is considerable evidence that some have been made. Saddam Hussein and his son are said to have enjoyed watching videos of executions. Now that may be propaganda against Hussein, but he would have been capable of sourcing such material and watching it. At least one murder was streamed on Facebook Live and someone was arrested for it. I'd say that counted as such.

This is so vague as to be meaningless.

Like, of course it's "problematic", that's why you're talking about it. Be more specific or it sounds like an applause light.

To show the outside view: I'm thinking of a recent (pointless) discussion I had, it's akin to when people who hate asylum seekers say most of those asylum seekers are "fighting age": of course most of them are, very few others are fit enough to make the trip.

(If I judge you right from a very short comment, you'd describe the phrase "fighting age" as itself "problematic"?)

I pointed out to someone that the BBC was institutionally biased against Scottish independence, just by the nature of its funding. The BBC is funded by the TV licence, and if Scotland became independent, then the BBC would immediately lose 10% of its potential funding.

Other media outlets are the same. The question is who owns them, and how are they funded. State broadcasters have to kowtow to governments, or they can face trouble (as happened in Israel a few years ago when Netanyahu shut theirs down). Ones owned by major media conglomerates and corporations will reflect the interests of their owners. We have seen unions play less and less of a role in the political arena, probably partly because large profit-making corporations don't want them to be publicised.

The only way "an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship in the United States" would be if they were an employee of the US government and they somehow violated US law to enact censorship.

To review: censorship is when the government doesn't allow you to say things with your printing press. Censorship is not when private parties don't let you use their printing press.

Perhaps there's so much lying being spread on modern social media that one organization would be end up drowning in work:

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.[1][2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

How do you hold the truth? Even if there was only a single fact-checking organization, and they had no institutional or personal biases, they still wouldn’t own the truth.

Of course a fact checker has an agenda. How else do they decide which fact checking to prioritize? It's not like a single person or organization has the ability to fact check everything about every topic.

A fact checking group with an emphasis on correcting mistakes about Catholic teachings is very unlikely to provide fact checking about water rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nor fact checking statements about British tank production during the Second World War.

> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?

I can't make sense of that argument. Which organization could that even be?

> To me, it was just journalism in disguise

It can also be journalism. Newspapers, magazines, and even podcasts can have staff fact checkers. The origin story for The New Yorker's famous fact checkers was to avoid libel after printing a false story about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

That is, the clear agenda of the New Yorker's fact checkers is to minimize lawsuits and enhance the reputation of the magazine among its current and future subscribers.

I therefore see no problem in fact checkers having an agenda as I can't make sense of how it would be otherwise.

@ doesn't do anything on HN.

Almost all ice has mineral impurities in it, and is therefore a mineral. Therefore water is actually lava (molten ice) and should be referred to as such.

Your depiction of ice being merely "frozen water" as a fact, and not emphasizing it's equality with lava is classist and clearly agenda driven. /s

Please link it if you have found it, because as far as I understand this story, the directive was sent out as an internal memo and therefore neither you or me can simply read it. Plus the Reuters story you've linked also has an almost-identical paragraph:

> The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.

American mainstream media focusses far too much on personality politics rather than substance. It rarely questions the political binary either, and offers only tokenistic representation to any positions outside it. There are many issues and debates which are simply not mentioned on it.

On the migration issue, I have found that coverage tends to one extreme or the other — i.e. the open door or the closed door — when the probable solution is somewhere in between IMHO.

And the hole fact checking concept falls apart when you prematurely conclude a dialog. This is the most valid critique to any political participant and way more on point: botched online discourse.

I am not concluding that fact checker are bad by nature, they are at worst, incomplete, imbalanced ... biased like any other political participant. Shutting them down with visas or labeling them as malicious will not foster the dialog.

Part of what makes Hackernews enjoyable to read is the strong and very reasonable moderation. We aren't subject to walls of Viagra/Cialis ads or back-and-forth flamewars.

I'd argue it's because of content moderation that HN is an environment that generally promotes a marketplace of ideas.

>A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.

Ultimately, fact-checkers are just journalists who attempt to claim a monopoly on truth. Censorship does not work, and can only be tolerated in a free society in VERY limited circumstances, usually after due process. The censorship we've seen during covid and since "fact-checkers" entered public dialog in general is absolutely not acceptable in any way. I don't have a problem with the existence of so-called fact-checkers per se. The real problem is that it's false advertising and a blatant attempt to rally for censorship of wrongthink. If you want censorship, move to North Korea or China, and leave the rest of us alone.

Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?

There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"

The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.

At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.

- You trust experts, and the experts are right -> You are right

- You trust experts, and the experts are wrong -> You are wrong

- You do your own research and are right -> You are right

- You do your own research and you are wrong -> You are wrong

Now, if I had to guess, the people who are more knowledgeable on a subject would likely have a better idea on the truthiness of a statement regarding that subject. Your argument appears to be the opposite.

> It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".

I assume this is just an anecdote but could you extrapolate on this point a bit?Is there a study you could show me where they tested "do your own research" people's knowledge vs domain experts? What topics do you think have the highest chance of the "experts" being stupid and incorrect?

- The updated visa instructions

- we have had this conversation

- Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable.

I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.

Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.

That this was private censorship is no longer acceptable to the current regime, and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.

If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well.

If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.

Either way - people have to make that call and build a consensus on it.

I'm curious about that too. Is there an archive link or something you can provide? I can't seem to find that claim.

I agree with the enjoyable part but "reasonable" would require careful examination of the things that didn't make the cut and is highly subjective. I have no idea what "strong" means.

Most moderation seems to get done by the voting system (powered by weak and very unreasonable users?)

What is missing is a user manual to formalize this social credit system. I never knew that I have to upvote the correct posts. I thought the system was curious about my opinion. Quite preposterous in hindsight. Ill make more of an effort, who knows, in a few years we might go full North Korea retroactively.

wait, did I say all that out loud?

I did not mean that those 2 choices I mentioned are the only ones. I meant that the "deep legacy media"/"experts" are trying to convince you that only these two choices (listen to the "experts" or not to listen to anybody; "don't trust anybody else, trust me when I tell you that") exist. This leads to the 2 outcomes I painted: being not informed or being misinformed. Everything else that doesn't fit the current official narrative is branded with bad words.

Obviously, this is a false dichonomy and one should do the right thing (educating oneself with different sources, to form a full picture) despite the namecalling.

I don't have any study (I don't know if they exist) and was purely talking about the topic dear to my heart that I have following on for 25+ years: the Finnish expertise on Russia/Putin. It is horrendous. And I am not even talking about crazy expert opinions that one can disagree with, but core problems with logic and basic facts.

It is even sadder because Finland is trying to brand itself as The Russia expert in EU, is succeeding and this incompetence has real consequences.

The quality of expertise in this example is so terrible that we get the incredible situation when not informed people, using only their common sense, have a higher percentage of reasonable/truthful takes than people who are trying to be informed using "homegrown talent". This is an unbelievable consequence!

I am not saying that this is a general trend or that "experts bad". It's just in this particular case I know the topic and have the knowledge to access the correctness of people who are performing as experts on Russia. I have been having presentations on this topic.

Also, obviously, political "sciences" is different from actual sciences.

This reminds me of the Onion's expert panel on Nigeria, with the difference of journalists also being clueless (not their fault, they can't ask critical questions and challenge "experts", if their whole world view also comes from these "experts"). https://youtu.be/Pwom49awRKg

This is the funniest example of “Which views exactly? / Oh, you know the ones.”

The fact is that people were censored based on so-called fact-checkers. It's not as innocent as some jackasses online calling themselves "fact-checkers"... It is so far beyond that, I feel sorry for you for seemingly not knowing. Go start with the Twitter Files as reported by Matt Taibbi.

In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.

> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"

There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.

> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts

Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.

Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?

> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense

I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.

It has been had. But you seem to require some objectively correct and universally agreed upon consensus that will never exist.

>Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.

"censorial powers on private platforms" are and have been acceptable since the dawn of mass communications. Even Ben Franklin when he ran a newspaper refused to run stories he considered too libelous (although he just as often ran such stories, exercising personal bias in his decisions.) The entire rationale behind the First Amendment is that it binds the government from interfering with free expression, because that right belongs to the people, implicit as it is in the concept of the marketplace of ideas, and freedom of association.

Again, the conversation has been had, and the matter has been settled at least for most people. That the current regime disagrees doesn't prove anything any more than disagreement with anything else. People disagree that the world is round, that doesn't mean the matter is still in dispute beyond a reasonable doubt.

>and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.

If they commit crimes, have them arrested for those crimes. If they violate TOS (even if they happen to be a sitting President), ban them. Otherwise even criminals and traitors have the same rights as everyone else. Again, this is well established and shouldn't be controversial.

> If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well. > If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.

what kind of force is "must" implying here, and how is "well" being defined?

We do have legal frameworks in place intended to do what you're proposing, but people are imperfect and may make mistakes or act in ways you might consider to be in error, without falling afoul of criminality. But that's acceptable. We don't abandon rights because they can't be defined or defended perfectly.

My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE. Imagine if it was archived and available now?

I'm not asking you to accept how someone else sees the world as truth, I'm asking you to understand that it's how they see the world. Seems pretty important to understand the impact of a policy like trying to elevate professional institutional fact checkers in the media.

> Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.

That is not the question. The question is, was "citing" 60 anonymous authorities who claim to have evidence you're not allowed to see, going to convince anyone who wasn't already? If that was the attempt, I'd say it's a symptom of the usual "online techie autism" - people with bad theories of mind, bad ability to understand other's people thinking, who think they've got everything that matters worked out (those other people are just stupid anyway, don't you know).

You should ask, are the sort of institutional fact checkers we have now a useful institution? Or maybe more, the ones we used to have a few years ago. Even most of them have given up after the fiasco of Trump's second election.

> I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God.

I was talking about specific people. You don't know them better than me.

> However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.

Ridiculous. That's like saying right-wing grifters like, what's her name, Candace Owens, or the one who recently jumped ship, Marjorie Taylor Greene, are brave and principled for breaking with their side's orthodoxy. They're not. They're just trying to be one step ahead of events, one hour ahead of their time (no more!) and are terribly bad at it.

Your poor harassed institutional fact checkers may deserve pity for the outcome, but they are not brave, they just bet on the wrong horse, and they may well swing back in power and authority soon anyway (though not for long, because they're part of the problem they imagine themselves the solution to).

1) The conversation has been had

2) There are people who are making a concerted effort to overturn the status quo

3) They have decreed that content moderation workers are a category of workers which is not to be granted entry to the USA.

You can say the conversation has been had, as much as you want - which is your freedom and right. However some people have decided they don’t like the status quo and want to change it.

You are preaching to the choir here. I would love for you to convince THOSE people that they are party to this agreement.

Have they rewritten/erased all their erroneous fact checks?

If so, is that bad or good?

Are all the fact checks currently on the website valid?

Sorry but this completely misses the point. I can't speak for everyone who dislikes the whole fact-checking thing but I can speak for myself since I'm the OP. What I'm saying is that nobody is truly unbiased, not that fact-checkers are biased.

In fact, I go further and openly state that not only are they biased, but many of them even have an agenda. Yes, media outlets have an agenda, and that agenda may go against your interests - why is this a shocking point on this forum? @wakawaka28 has expressed this much more clearly than I have below, anyway:

Nobody is actually free of bias. That absurd pretense of impartiality is only in the conversation because "fact-checkers" claim to have it, and that claim is used to promote censorship. Though it matters when journalists are biased by personal views and their funding sources, that is inescapable and consistent with their rights to free speech. Censorship is not.

Nobody is actually free of bias. That absurd pretense of impartiality is only in the conversation because "fact-checkers" claim to have it, and that claim is used to promote censorship. Though it matters when journalists are biased by personal views and their funding sources, that is inescapable and consistent with their rights to free speech. Censorship is not.

It's a totally normal job at newspapers, magazines, and the like. You can easily find such jobs, and the publications themselves write about it:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/the-history-of...

That's a different and much more difficult problem, though.

Why do we keep electing fascists to power with an explicit mandate to undermine our freedoms, out of a categorical rejection of post Enlightenment values and democracy and a desire for ethnic cleansing and race war?

Why are we accelerating the normalization of theocracy and conspiracy theory while rejecting the validity of science, secularism and critical thought?

Why is the only truly inalienable right in the US the right to keep and bear arms, and why is it still so vigorously defended despite failing spectacularly at its one stated purpose?

There will always exist people who want to change that status quo. Unfortunately you can't force fascists to not be fascists, and the best answer I'm aware of is to not allow them to gain a foothold anywhere. But we've regressed culturally so far that fascism, racism, antisemitism and other formerly extremist right-wing ideals are now considered legitimate and credible points of view. We can't even agree on the existence of a consensus reality where facts even exist, much less that the Nazis are actually wrong.

I do think part of the solution is to preserve the right of anonymity on the internet and the right of private platforms to moderate content as they see fit, although that obviously has its own externalities and issues. I don't think that, say, repealing Section 230 and forcing all platforms to allow any legal content or requiring a license and legal ID to post online or any of the other "solutions" to the "problem" of free speech online would help more than they would harm.

Beyond that, I don't know. How do we get people to stop electing fascists and stop treating groypers and incels like intellectual sophonts and cultural leaders? How do we get people to take things seriously again?

People voted based on the information they had. The information system they had has been mapped out. If this were gaming, the “meta” is known. One group played the meta to the hilt. Others lament the failure of the spirit.

I get that people may be hesitant to leave the familiarity of known territory for what looks like malignant chaos. But there is a fight to be had, rules to be learnt and ways to counteract the tendencies you are concerned about.

I am sadly not at the point where I can both raise the issue, and point you to sources of information that are pertinent to the stage of your journey.

There’s actual work on misinformation propagation, efficacy of moderation, the mechanics of how the media environment is being used. Or there are places where you can contribute code and labor to learn/build as you go.

the only problem that can be directly attributed to immigrants is xenophobia. the solution to xenophobia is education.

really the problem is a lack of affordable housing

and that has to do what with immigrants? no, immigrants are not taking away affordable housing. whatever housing policy is responsible for the lack of affordable housing needs to be changed and can be changed in such a way that there would be enough housing for everyone, including immigrants.

I think people who are upset about immigration really are upset about the immigration itself, particularly from substantially different cultures.

as i said. xenophopia. excuse me if i don't take pity with that. the solution is education, to learn about compassion, care, tolerance, build communities, loving your neighbor, which btw, is a deeply christian value, so before people complain about different cultures how about they actually honor their own culture.

There is a prominent belief among anti-immigration people that their governments are trying to ethnically replace them

and you take this seriously? do you really think people are that dumb, to believe such nonsense?

I suppose you might think they're wrong to want this, we're all one race, the human race, etc. Whatever, all that ideological rhetoric doesn't change the way people vote when they begin to feel like foreigners in their own country.

what then is your proposal to address those issues?

i already shared mine: education, build communities, and fix whatever other real problems people have (housing, jobs, etc)

Remember, the context of this conversation is "Here in Germany I fear the AfD too may get into power, ..."

> muh education though

Do you really believe tha Germans of all people haven't had enough Holocaust Class in school? Get real. You either have to meet people where they are, or accept that they're going to be voting for people that you aren't comfortable with.

For a claim you are making, you seem to not be able to find a single piece of evidence. How did you ever find out there was an original article that they edited? Is this purely from personal experience?

People are working on these issues every day. I'm politically involved and my wife, who's a citizen, works on it full time. But as I said, the issues are many, systemic, and quite intractable. Systemic issues like the outsize influence of rural areas, the first-past-the-post system, the effective two-party system, the influence of money which has been ruled to be constitutionally protected, and so on mean that changing the system as a voter or even a large voting bloc is all but impossible. It's why some people believe that letting it burn is the only way forward - it's easier to motivate change when things are bad.

There are some positive signs recently, such as the election of Mamdani as NYC mayor, which is a much bigger deal than many people realize, being a member of Democratic Socialists of America, as well as a Muslim running in a city famous for a very strong Jewish constituency.

Mamdani ran as a Democrat, and powerful, well-funded elements of the party pushed back hard against that, or were weakly supportive at best. The previously Democratic ex-governor of New York ran a racist campaign against him as an independent. Hakeem Jeffries, the currently minority leader, didn't endorse Mamdani until very late, and said that he didn't view him as the future of the party. With political allies like that, who needs enemies?

The reality is that the Democratic Party is "controlled opposition", primarily serving capital interests. Mamdani's election did a good job of making that much clearer.

Having lived in four countries, in my experience, politics everywhere is messy. The countries that have it easiest are basically either relatively small (often with populations less than a single major global city) or else they're ethnostates that are often run by authoritarians.

If you look at Europe, the impact of immigration is fueling the exact same rightward shift that happened in the US. It's why some American billionaires, like Musk, Thiel, and the Murdoch family, are so interested in European politics - they see the potential for achieving the same success in much of Europe as they did in the US.

So unless you live in a country that's heavily multicultural as well as very democratic, you perhaps should be less quick to judge.

if people fear foreign cultures, then the only way to deal with that is to get them in contact with these cultures and learn that these are nice people too. like therapy. that is what i mean by education. not learning about the holocaust, but learning to get along. there is no other way to address this.

you keep telling me that my approach does not work, but i am still waiting for your proposal how to address the issue.

> My favorite was their check on masks in early 2020 - they said that masks do nothing to the airborne viruses and the government will never force you to wear one, people who are walking around with masks are dangerous lunatics who deprive medical workers of much needed PPE.

This is what I am asking about