Fact-checking politicians with technology is actually just the appetizer.
Fact-checking media corporations with technology is the main event.
And boy do they need independent fact-checking!
Fact-checking media corporations with technology is the main event.
And boy do they need independent fact-checking!
I don’t think Twitter & Facebook should be in the business of filtering out “untrue” statements from their networks.
But the deeper question is whether they can confidently say something is false even if the New York Times says it is true.
Because this does happen.
But the deeper question is whether they can confidently say something is false even if the New York Times says it is true.
Because this does happen.
If the New York Times Company is the sole arbiter of what is true, and if it can leverage that power to filter the feeds of its direct competitors, then it becomes the de facto editor of Twitter & Facebook.
After WMD and 2016 and COVID, that’s not the right outcome.
After WMD and 2016 and COVID, that’s not the right outcome.
More generally, tech cannot concede the ground of determining what is true to media.
We have NLP, computational epistemology, knowledge graphs, consensus algorithms.
We have tools to parse, to reason, to determine truth in an adversarial environment.
We haven’t tried yet.
We have NLP, computational epistemology, knowledge graphs, consensus algorithms.
We have tools to parse, to reason, to determine truth in an adversarial environment.
We haven’t tried yet.
