But could you actually get any money from suing Wikipedia? They would just deflect blame to volunteer editors.
Why do you think facebook is ending fact-checkers now? Editors are hired by facebook, facebook is the publisher. If facebook publishes "fact" and people get harmed as result, Facebook gets sued to bankruptcy. There is no protection from government anymore!
> If facebook publishes "fact" and people get harmed as result, Facebook gets sued to bankruptcy.
What a nice reality would it be where Facbook could be actually sued to bankruptcy for whatever reason, let alone such minor one. Sadly it's not our reality.
In the U.S. (relevant because it is home to the Wikimedia Foundation), you can sue anyone for any reason at any time. You might get immediately dismissed, sued back ("abuse of process" or similar), or something along those lines, but there is nothing structural that stops you.
The structural reason that you can't sue email is that email is not an "anyone", it's an abstract concept. How would you even e.g. notify "email" that it is under litigation?
"fact-checkers were authoritative source of the truth"
There is no such thing. If your understanding of truth is so flat, you're incredibly ignorant and dangerously foolish. Biases, perception, and propaganda influence the "truth" you see in the world. And no one is immune to it. Even large groups of very smart people are not immune to it. In fact they're even more often prone to groupthink.
The whole point of science is to eliminate human authority as a source of truth. Every claim must be peer reviewed, should be replicated by independent parties, and open to falsification by new evidence.
“Appeal to authority” is always the wrong approach if you are seeking truth.
« I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other and I think all these matters are full of doubt and the rational man will not be too sure that he's right; I think we ought always to entertain our opinions to some measure of doubt » (Russel)
> Community notes are just opinions of random people on internet.
No. Community Notes is an open-source peer review-like system but designed in a way to limit bias: When sets of note contributors (the peers in this case) who normally strongly oppose each other’s views on Topic A strongly agree on a point made re Topic A, we’re likely getting closer to the truth.
> Facebook fact-checkers were authoritative source of the truth. There was trillion dollar company behind this authoritative source. If they corrected something, it was the fact. And if their correction would not match reality, reality would soon be corrected, and fact-checkers corrections would become reality.
I’m sorry but this statement is just nonsense.
Since ~2016, we’ve watched as the so-called “fact-checkers” working with mainstream “news” outlets have used the [dis/mal/mis]information labels to discredit legitimate information that was unfavorable to their ideological views. The Twitter Files investigation fully exposed how these social media companies ended up using these false signals to censor unfavorable views.
A basic example of this was when we were told right before electing Joe Biden that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation” and a bunch of CIA liars signed a document pushing that narrative in order to serve as authoritative sources.
Or how about when we were told for over 3 years by “fact-checkers” and mainstream “news” outlets that our sitting President was a Russian agent, effectively accusing him of committing treason? As someone who was, back then, strongly opposed to Trump, I actually initially believed this lie, because I still had some level of trust in some of these institutions, but after watching years go by without ever seeing any evidence of this extraordinary claim, I had to accept I had been too trusting and that these institutions don’t care about facts at all—they’re just institutions being used to push propaganda that align with their ideological views.
By the way, not a single one of these institutions have ever apologized for lying to us Americans.
Well the most mainstream "news" source Fox news had to pay out almost a billion dollars for dis-information, so the biggest mainstream 'news' (though they did claim in court no one could possibly think they are news so it's ok for them to lie) institution kind of had to apologize.
> Well the most mainstream "news" source Fox news had to pay out almost a billion dollars for dis-information […]
The case in question did NOT go to trial, so your claim isn’t entirely correct, but yes, all mainstream “news” outlets (including Fox) abuse our trust by constantly lying to us—I don’t watch or trust any of them.
I remember when Rachel Maddow told us, “Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus? The virus does not infect them; the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else.” [0]
Also I saw an interesting interview with Marc Andreessen recently where he mentioned about how the Dems would fund "Disinformation Research" units at universities.
These research units would (shockingly!) be staffed by 100% Democrat supporters and (even more shockingly) would tend to view everything the Dems disagree with as "disinformation". These groups would then apply pressure to media/social media companies to suppress content. So they were able to breach the first amendment by using censorship by surrogacy.
The Democrat censorship industrial complex was ugly and insidious and leading us to a very dark place indeed.
> The claim that the president was a Russian spy was never made afaik. But if you have evidence of a fact checker saying this, I’d appreciate it.
I didn’t save the links, so no, I don’t have evidence ready to show you, and it’s not like I can just go to their websites and see an accurate history of their conclusions on specific claims, given that many of them have a history of simply burying their original conclusions once it becomes obvious they were wrong (e.g., [0]).
