Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would end fact-checking on its platform. In the process, a partnership with the network of third parties that has provided review and ratings of viral misinformation since 2016 will be terminated. To some observers, this news suggested that the company was abandoning the very idea of truth, and opening its gates to lies, perversions, and deception. But this is wrong: Those gates were never really closed.The idea that something called “fact-checking” could be (or could have been) reasonably applied to social-media posts, in aggregate, is absurd. Social-media posts can be wrong, of course, even dangerously so. And single claims from single posts can sometimes be adjudicated as being true or false. But the formulation of those distinctions and decisions is not fact-checking, per se.That’s because fact-checking is, specifically, a component part of doing journalism. It is a way of creating knowledge invented… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.
7 days ago
