HACKER Q&A
📣 TechBro8615

Anyone working on a fact check database?


We all know there's been an abundance of "fact check" articles over the past 5 years – some useful, and some built on a web of logical fallacies and deliberate misinterpretation of the statement being checked.

Unsurprisingly, comments are never enabled on any of the fact checks.

Does anyone know of a good aggregation of fact checks? It would be nice if there were an effort to fact-check the fact-checkers with moderated discussions.


  👤 Datenstrom Accepted Answer ✓
I don't know of any, and I do not think doing so would solve the problem, but I do think misinformation is one of the largest problems that humanity faces. I feel like it is the root cause of most of the worlds problems.

👤 readonthegoapp
all the fact check sites i know of are overtly right wing, or just right wing through funding and institutional configuration.

most of the journalist ethics-type orgs like Poynter have been bought by Koch.

the museums have been bought by the likes of Koch and Bezos.

Wikipedia has been whitewashed for the last 10 years at least, and never was much for giving accurate accounts of actually-important things/people/places/ideas.

i think you might need to just think about the logical conclusion of your ideal site -- what does it look like? a bunch of statements with tens/hundreds/thousands of comments? by whom? robots? gtp-3? russia? china? koch? would that actually be helpful to anyone? how to deal with 'trick questions'?

right now, we also have the #bothsides narrative for every fact. alternative facts, for instance. good people on both sides. all that stuff.

i would be interested in something like....a moderated place to go for facts -- published with editors -- paid for by ???? -- and experts coming to some consensus as of 'current date'.

think of one example question, and how it might look, and how it should look.

Was the American Civil War primarily fought over slavery?

Who gets to comment? I suspect 'serious historians' would say 'Yes' at about a 95% clip.

But how do you pick those 'serious historians'? Do they have to be at Berkeley? What about a Koch chair at Hoover Institute?

I know a lot of the top experts of any particular topic can often be spread out -- lone wolves at varied institutions, sometimes smaller colleges, even state schools.

To be interesting, I think you'd have to declare your political allegiance -- in part because right now the right wing in America is dedicated to fake news, fake history, anti-science, anti-intellectualism, etc. They truly live in their own manufactured reality.