“First-generation fact-checking” is no longer good enough. Here's what comes next
4 months ago"Fact checkers need to move from 'publish and pray' to 'publish and act.'" "The idea that fact checking can work by correcting the public's inaccurate beliefs on a mass scale alone doesn't stack up," write representatives from Full Fact, Africa Check, and Chequeado, in a manifesto of sorts published Thursday to all three sites. First, we move from just publishing to "Publish and act." We seek corrections on the record, pressure people not to make the same mistake again, complain where possible to a standards body. Secondly, we recognize that our fact checking provides a unique evidence base that gives us important insight into where misleading claims come from in public life and how they are spread. Thirdly, we work for system change. The pattern might be who's publishing something, where it's published, a particular subject that there's a lot of false information about, or something else. "It's a sweatshop in America." The Verge's Casey Newton published another horrifying story on working conditions for Facebook content moderators, this time at the Cognizant site in Tampa that is "Facebook's worst-performing content moderation site in America." The content moderators are contract workers, not Facebook employees. The story outlines the gross working conditions that the content moderators face and shows them horribly affected by the videos they have to moderate, especially those that feature animal abuse. The debunk of the organ harvesting was an update added to the story after publication: "This article has been updated to reflect the fact that a video that purportedly depicted organ harvesting was determined to be false and misleading." These videos have been debunked multiple times. Read more