The truth is they have outsourced fact checking to the "International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter" who has to uphold standards not just freely enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy.
Knowing one low-level employee of one of the subcontractors involved; it works something like this:
1. An article is posted to Facebook/Twitter/etc and is automatically flagged based on keywords or manually flagged based on user reports of misinformation.
2. Fact checking organizations take up fact-checking of the article for a small fee.
3. In this case for the organization I am personally aware of, the fact checking company has a large number of independent contractors who can research a "batch" of claims/articles.
4. Usually the jobs are broken up into simple questions.
5. You along with many others provide answers and must provide pertinent factual sources supporting the veracity of your assessment that this is either true, partly false, or false along with other categories such as if it is clearly and obviously satire.
6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future.
7. The fact checking organization once it has enough answers for confidence has higher-level employees double-check the answer and source information.
8. The fact checking organization submits it's formal assessment on the article/opinion to the IFCN.
9. Companies like Facebook use multiple IFCN assessments and perhaps other fact check assessments to provide pertinent information that corrects misinformation that has spread rampantly over the last year like "Joe Biden wants to defund police departments across the US" with corrections like "After being asked if "We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counselling, and affordable housing." Mr Biden has answered "Yes" to a question about whether he agrees with this redirecting of funding.
I may be slightly off in how this works but the overall program is the same for most social networks that care about misinformation. There is more information in the sources below:
Sources:
> 6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future.
And if it later turns out that the final determination was wrong, do they go back and reverse this?
I'm sure that there's any amount of process in place, but ultimately if you rely on comparing people to the consensus of their peers then you're going to get the politically approved answer rather than the truth.
I am fairly certain they aren't naive about setting up their fact checking organization. They want to be taken up by anyone trying to verify facts so it's not in their interest to integrate bias.
Yes, there are revisions and the fact checkers fact check the fact checkers. They aren't colluding to implement left or right bias here. They are just making matter of fact statements like "it's false that the pfizer vaccine modifies your DNA" and providing sources that verify the claim and "no, politician X did not say Y"
There's no explicit collusion, but they operate in a particular social culture and the biases of that culture will permeate everything they do. The news organisations that they're fact-checking have the same reasons to become reputable suppliers of truth; I don't see how a fact checker would end up any less biased than a newspaper, since they're ultimately subject to the same incentives.
> They want to be taken up by anyone trying to verify facts so it's not in their interest to integrate bias.
Yes, there are revisions and the fact
This isn’t true. It’s easier to get business if you’re a “fact checking” organization that always fact checks in a favorable direction to a major political view.
The people who want truth is a much smaller group than the people who want their views reinforced.
The truth is they have outsourced fact checking to the "International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter" who has to uphold standards not just freely enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy.
Knowing one low-level employee of one of the subcontractors involved; it works something like this:
1. An article is posted to Facebook/Twitter/etc and is automatically flagged based on keywords or manually flagged based on user reports of misinformation.
2. Fact checking organizations take up fact-checking of the article for a small fee.
3. In this case for the organization I am personally aware of, the fact checking company has a large number of independent contractors who can research a "batch" of claims/articles.
4. Usually the jobs are broken up into simple questions.
5. You along with many others provide answers and must provide pertinent factual sources supporting the veracity of your assessment that this is either true, partly false, or false along with other categories such as if it is clearly and obviously satire.
6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future.
7. The fact checking organization once it has enough answers for confidence has higher-level employees double-check the answer and source information.
8. The fact checking organization submits it's formal assessment on the article/opinion to the IFCN.
9. Companies like Facebook use multiple IFCN assessments and perhaps other fact check assessments to provide pertinent information that corrects misinformation that has spread rampantly over the last year like "Joe Biden wants to defund police departments across the US" with corrections like "After being asked if "We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counselling, and affordable housing." Mr Biden has answered "Yes" to a question about whether he agrees with this redirecting of funding.
I may be slightly off in how this works but the overall program is the same for most social networks that care about misinformation. There is more information in the sources below: Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=6...
https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196