Good post. To add to this: As a vocal critic who has done a lot of work demonstrating the issues with media fact-checking, I’ve said since the early 2010’s that a lot of the problem could be solved by just getting rid of the ratings. I know readers want an easy one word rating, but that’s where a lot of the bias comes in. You would still have some bias related to what was being fact-checked, but much of the problem right now derives from “fact-checkers” selectively choosing to interpret facts in a way that benefits one side’s partisan arguments. I used to go through Politifact’s fact checks each week and what I found almost all the time is that the details/facts in the posts would usually be accurate (with some omissions), but the ratings would consistently interpret those facts in a way that benefitted the site’s partisan/ideological bias. And the issue there is most readers to never go beyond the headline, which became an even bigger problem when platforms would use those ratings/headlines to determine how content was presented. That’s part of why community notes works so well. The good community notes don’t say “false,” but instead just present additional information that allows readers to determine for themselves if that information undermines the original post. https://bird.makeup/@natesilver538/1877056602106146865
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