#fact-checking

[dduane]

...Hard not to laugh.

(Via @WardrobeDoor over at the ex-Bird place)

[gwydionmisha]

The danger of Meta’s big fact-checking changes

Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to cozy up to Trump have concerning consequences.

Hayes: Zuckerberg and tech execs cozying up to Trump is chilling—but 'very clarifying'

“It's chilling in its own way,” says Chris Hayes on tech barons like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook currying favor with Trump. “Bu

What LGBTQ+ people should know about Meta’s new rules

Exploring the consequences of rolling back Instagram and Facebook’s content moderation policies.

Meta blocked teens from seeing LGBTQ+ content on Instagram: report

The platform blocked hashtags that mentioned LGBTQ-related issues from the screens of teen accounts.

[tomorrowusa]

« [E]veryone should look at The Times’s sprawling, panting, verging-on-frantic fact-check of the speech. It necessitated a cast of thousands, and reading their attempts to correct and qualify Trump’s ludicrous assertions is like watching a team of workers in hazmat suits and mops trying to contain the spread of a toxic spill. They’re heroic and doomed. »

— Frank Bruni at the New York Times on the laborious task of fact-checking Trump's State of the Union speech. Comparing Trump to a toxic spill was on the mark.

No president gave a SOTU speech to Congress before Woodrow Wilson. The US Constitution (Article II, Section 3) requires only that a president "give to the Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient".

It may be a good idea to return to the pre-Wilson practice of a written report. If Democrats regain control of Congress in the midterms then they can pre-empt any future clown shows like the one which took place on Tuesday.

[marzipanandminutiae]

you know, the Horrible Histories "Victorian names were WEIRD!!!!" skit leaves out some important info on some of the names (assisted by Ancestry.com searches):

Lettice Berger: "Lettice" was an anglicization of the Roman name "Leticia." Berger is just a normal German surname. Yes, they had the word "lettuce," and I'm sure the similarities occurred to them. But nobody named their child "lettuce" like the vegetable.

O.K. Johnson: Probably just the kid's initials. "O.K." as a slang term was invented in 1830s Boston, but without any evidence of when little O.K. lived (they don't cite any sourced for these names, how convenient), it's impossible to tell whether it would have crossed the pond by the time he was born.

Never [they pronounce the surname Rookrook]: I found a LOT of Nevers in the UK with Indian surnames. So uh. There's that. And a lot of census records online seem to have notes written by the census-taker mislabeled as names- "never opens door" was one I noticed. Just saying. I also found multiple "NEVA Rook" census entries- which probably would have been pronounced "NEE-vah" but sounds like "Never" with a British accent if you tilt your head and squint.

Toilet: Surprisingly common modern misreading of "Violet" on 19th-century censuses with bad handwriting.

Baboon: Found one census where it's a misreading of "Barbara;" others were non-Anglo names like Baban, Babyon, Babboni, etc.

Susan Semolina-Thrower: That's just two unfortuate surnames, I'm guessing? I can't find their sources, again, but I do find a lot of records of "Semolina" as a surname in the UK during the 19th century. The poor parents had no control over that, did they?

Happy: ...yeah, it's a virtue name. And? How is that weirder than Faith, Hope, Grace, Patience, Prudence, etc?

Evil: Another census misreading- usually "Evie."

Minty Badger: "Minty" is short for Araminta/Aminta/Arminta. Still sounds like a Discworld character, but nothing would sound normal with "Badger" as a surname. Araminta Badger at least makes more sense to modern ears, though.

Freezer Breezer: Breezer was a real surname, and parents can be cruel. I don't doubt that- my dad went to school with an "Emily Memily." that being said...I did find a "Fred R. Breezer" born in 1873 in England; see above re: census misreadings. Just throwing that out there. I found it as a corruption/misspelling of "Fraser/Frasier" too.

Scary Looker: I actually found this one. It was a misreading of "Jeany" on a census- the girl's name was Jane Looker, born 1841 in Lancashire to John and Elizabeth Looker. Nice research there, team.

Farting Clack: Fasting Clack or Clark, born 1863 in London. Another lovely misreading from the census. True "Fasting Clark" is not NOT a weird name, but it's a lot less horrible than "Farting Clack" and it makes sense under the Hyper-Christian Parents category.

Princess Cheese was real, not a nickname, and not a misreading or misspelling. Princess May Cheese was born in 1896 in West Bromwich. She married one John T. Brookes in 1914- possibly eager to no longer be a Cheese?

Multiple people really have been christened Bovril, most notably one Bovril Simpson, married in West Ham in 1911.

Incredibly, Raspberry/Rasberry/Roseberry is a real given name, and Lemon a real surname. Most people named Raspberry seem to have been men.

So that's only three of their Wacky Victorian Names that are actually 100% real. Nice job, there, team. I love Ghosts, but get your collective act together!

(They did once have a skit insisting that Victorians called trousers "the southern necessity" when that's actually a phrase from the writings of famously terrible 19th-century author Amanda McKittrick Ros, whose work her contemporaries loved poking fun at. So I shouldn't be surprised)

[originalleftist]

Ran across a Deppie post on Reddit, claiming Amber Heard's Instagram account had followed JD Vance.

They were of course spinning wild conspiracy theories, claiming it was some plot by her to get to Musk, etc. The usual bullshit.

Still, the basic claim seemed easy enough to fact-check. I logged into Instagram, checked Heard's follow list, and... yup. Vice President Vance.

Well, that was disheartening, to say the least. If she turned out to be yet another white person who went full Nazi, it wouldn't change my opinion of the trial- even bad people have rights, and can be abused, and her OpEd flatly wasn't defamatory by any reasonable definition. But it would have forced me to lower my estimation of her as a person considerably, and stop supporting her work.

Still, it seemed odd- Despite her past relationship with Musk (before he became openly fascist), her politics has been mostly Left-leaning for years, particularly on feminism and LGBTQ rights as well as voting rights. Vance seemed an out-character choice for her to follow.

And then it occurred to me.

A few weeks back I saw a post reminding people to unfollow the official POTUS, VP accounts, etc, because those accounts changed hands after the election. I checked my Facebook, and sure enough, I was unwittingly following the Orange Felon.

Heard followed Vice President Harris on Instagram. It got some mean-spirited media coverage gossiping about Harris not following her back. Sure enough, the Harris account is gone from her follows list. So, assuming she was following the official VP account, it may simply be that Amber Heard hasn't updated her Instagram follows since before Inauguration Day (she posts about twice a year now).

Which feels like a weird thing to know about someone I've never met, but also kind of humanizing, for lack of a better word- the sort of simple mistake that any regular person could make (myself included).

Anyway, this is your reminder for the day that:

a) You should check your social media post-election to make sure you aren't accidentally following Nazis now.

b) Most of what people say about Amber Heard is probably bullshit.

c) It never hurts to dig a little deeper with your fact-checking before jumping to conclusions. I could have just read the Reddit post, or hell just checked her Instagram page, and impulsively denounced her as a turncoat and a Nazi. I probably would have, if it had been someone else I hadn't spent the last three years publicly supporting.

(It also is possible, of course, that she's suddenly decided to follow Vance (and no other notable MAGA figures) for whatever reason. Vance is the top of her follow list, which might suggest a recent follow, but I really don't know how that works if an account you were following before changed hands, and Instagram's algorithm for ranking follows is... obscure. Nor would I put it past Meta to tweak the algorithm to boost Regime accounts, given how hard they've been sucking the Regime's dick lately (try posting the Felon's mugshot to Facebook if you want to see this in action- every time I do, Facebook falsely labels it an AI-generated image.))

[alwaysbewoke]

[strangebiology]

Notes from the book fact-checking process

-Checking accuracy takes so much time. Like someone will say “this document has this” or “there is a study that says that” and I’ll spend forever confirming that (and sometimes it’s not really true so I have to find something else that is, and check that)

-Having an external fact-checker is expensive—it can be $10k to check a book! Advances run the gamut and could be $50k, $10k, or $0, so authors can’t always afford it. (There is only one publisher I recall who, I think, provides that service as part of their contract.)

-It’s really important to have one though. Luckily I got some great recommendations for fact checkers and my grant pays for mine, who has started working, and other grants do the same.

-I have asked ChatGPT to check a few facts, just to see if it could point me to where I should really confirm it, and to test AI’s fact-checking abilities. EVERY answer I got has been WILDLY WRONG. Oh my god.

-If you search FB for fact-checking groups it’s 100% groups for people who hate fact-checkers. (I poked around some public groups, and the content is mostly conservative memes with the odd "free- iPhone" scam.)

-There are a jillion ways that a study can be done wrong, it can be out of date, the scientists could have interpreted data wrong, the press release could have been wrong, the journalist/writer could have misunderstood something, or the reader can misunderstand.

-I'm still a little worried about getting things wrong! Hopefully, my book will be...quite accurate? Pretty accurate?

Here's a great article on fact-checking in books, the costs and benefits, and an argument that it should be standard.

(PS. I'm still working on the Afterword and the wildlife chapter, and then I'll have to do the acknowledgments. Wordcount is 63,963, and I'm still guessing it will end up around 70k. I've started the fact-checking process by sending the FC'er some of the finished chapters and I'm sure that will be plenty of work too.)