• MudMan@fedia.io
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    11 hours ago

    You need far less info to reach a bar for journalistic veracity than you do for a meta analysis paper. The question is where in the process the effort is being aggregated.

    If a journalist phones a couple of sources, hears from them the same thing they are seeing somewhere and publishes that information, then the fact-checking has been done once and reaches thousands or millions of people.

    If the way the information is disseminated requires those thousands or millions to do the fact-check themselves using the same process, then that is entirely impractical, which was my original point. Crowdsourced fact-checking is always going to be less reliable and exponentially more work than properly verified broadcast news sources. Even if many of them share their fact check, we have plenty of data to suggest the reach of that correction will be much smaller and it will still require a lot of private effort to correct the original info.

    That’s the point of the entire “it’s a real job” argument. Journalists are doing a lot of legwork once and we’re all relying on that job to acquire a lot of our information instead of all of us doing the same legwork again. The two problems we’re facing are 1) that this trust opens us up to propaganda from activist or opinionated journalism, and 2) that we’re no longer just getting neatly processed info that has gone through a journalistic process, we’re also getting a firehose of misinformation from many individual content generators over the Internet.

    Those are both hard problems to manage.