Wow, that really does deliver. Love all the pics, esp this one:

Someone please teach Sneaky Susan Collins what the word bribe means.

Ahh gaming the refs. Though as a lot of people pointed out, it's a mix of falling for right wing rhetoric and incentives, that sweet sweet Grandma meme ad money is a pot of gold and if Facebook has to let Conservatives play rule keep then so be it.


https://newrepublic.com/minutes/1511...ard-fact-check


So when Think Progress put out an article saying Kavanagh said that Roe v Wade was dead the Weekly Standard ruled it false because Kavanaugh didn't expressly say he'd overrule it, but rather he agrees with a ruling that has the possibility of overturning Roe and has said in the past that the mentioned ruling would imply overturning Roe. So he didn't say it directly, but X + Y = Z.

People haven't thought it through but having a non partisan fact checkers and then a conservative magazine makes Facebook de facto a conservative space because the Weekly Standard now holds veto power over any liberal truthful info while the non partisan fact checkers will let truthful conservative points through.

My bigger complaint about all this fact checking crap is that it's just become an avenue to post clickbait. Giving Snopes in particular the evil eye here.

The internet turns every good intention into a great big steaming pile of dog ****.

In hindsight, how did any of us ever think this kind of **** would work with real human beings? Some tribal at council at polifact.com decrees something to be true and we all concede the point that Obama's economy was better than Trump's? Man, as much as we rag on verrit.com, it's not substantially different from Snopes or Polifact or FaktChecky.Hillary.org or even the esteemed WaPo Pinocchio Guy who only last ****ing month decided that Trump actually lied about a thing once. It's 2018, the monoculture is dead, we don't have universally-accepted facts from trusted gatekeepers like Edward R. Murrow anymore. I'm not sure we ever really had them in the past, tbqh.

I guess maybe the snopes.com model works for inconsequential urban legends and **** like determining if that youtube of a guy doing a rubik's cube blindfolded is real or not, but there's no way you resolve political debates with Nazis this way. I'm not even giving snopes.com a stink-eye here, they probably did the best possible job of it. Snopes had a better run than the WaPo's fact-checker in chief.

tl;dr: the facts one gets from trusted news media don't need to be "checked." Its sort of implicit that news reporters are reporting facts --that's kind of their job! Hiring a Fact Check Bro to validate your news reporting does nothing for anyone other than give people a false sense of security. We know Trump's trade wars are bad, our in-house fact-checkers verified it. WTF man.

This is a good post ^^^

For real, if you're studying polysci or whatever, do a thesis on why and how snopes.com became such an authority for so long. There was an entire decade where you could say "snopes says Abe Vigoda isn't dead! That was a hoax!" and people would actually believe you because they trusted snopes.com. Snopes had an impressive business model for a long time and in hindsight, there's no way it should have panned out that way --it should have been obviously as goofy as verrit.com seems to us.

Snopes were generally fact-checking things that people weren't emotionally invested in, things where people had a story and weren't certain of the basis of it. They continue to be useful for that.

I don't think it was obvious from the get-go that political fact-checkers were doomed. You gotta remember that it was a simpler time, snopes was successful, "fake news" wasn't a phrase yet, and Colbert could do a The Word bit on "truthiness" and people laughed and were like "makes u think" instead of being like "yeah, no **** that's the way it works?". It's been obvious for a while now that they're pointless, though.

When you have one clock it's always right, when you have 30 clocks none of them are.

Eh even in 2012 it was useful to see which candidates were stretching the truth more or whatever but now with Trump lying 1000 times a day and Fox News acting as state media with the explicit intention of deceiving their viewers (or really reinforcing nonsense they already believe) it’s become pointless.

Idk why people like to dunk on fact checkers as if their purpose was to deliver a consequential defeat to the dishonest party. The information itself is worth knowing, and I also find it interesting to see how these myths grow and mutate as they pass through the derposphere.

♪ Come together ♫

That's some elite captioning right there.

“Go to Hillary.com and fact check Donald Trump!”

loooooooooollllllllll

Like who the **** is she listening to? Get out in the world and talk to actual voters. It takes about 5 minutes of perusing the chain emails from my racist relatives to realize that ain’t nobody got time for that in flyover America. Not one single persuadable voter exists whose vote rests on whether Donald Trump is a liar. Spoiler alert: they know he’s a liar!

Some of you are old enough to remember the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, isn't this essentially one of the things that led to the suit (favoring Internet Explorer over Netscape/other browsers)?

Why not, this administration can’t spell “antitrust,” no?

pretty sure Trump spells it A-M-A-Z-O-N

She was literally listening to the Verrit guy

I'm just glad he stopped there.

REAL LIFE

If the husband was still around after she wrote that essay, he probably deserved to die.

So it's not just a clever name.

Bound to hurt sales, you'd think.

Snopes probably gave us a false sense of security, this idea that you can organically create a trusted source of information without the groundwork and trust-building that went into making legacy news outlets work. Snopes is great for what it is, but it’s more of an anomaly than a business model that should be copied.