Facebook said my article was false – now the fact-checkers admit they were wrong
&gt;&quot;Climate Feedback, a subgroup within Science Feedback, labeled two of his climate change–related videos as &quot;misleading&quot; and &quot;partly false.&quot; Stossel&#x27;s situation is similar to mine in that the fact-checker attributed to him a claim—&quot;forest fires are caused by poor management, not by climate change,&quot; in this case—that his video never actually made.&quot;
......<p>&gt;&quot;Stossel eventually succeeded in getting two Climate Feedback editors to admit that they had not watched his video—and after they had watched the video, they agreed with him that it was not misleading, having noted that both government mismanagement and climate change have contributed to forest fires. But Climate Feedback still did not &quot;correct their smear,&quot; according to Stossel.&quot;<p>This is the new regime we have created for ourselves.  Many of you folks reading this are extremely high IQ, and yet you have supported this system that delegates the responsibility for the ideas you are allowed to consume to knuckle-dragging morons.<p>Somebody should stop and think about the kind of people that a job like &quot;fact-checking&quot; will attract.  It&#x27;s not high-paying, is inherently boring, and reminds me of a security guard kind of position.  I can think of two categories:<p>1.) Hardcore ideologue hall-monitors who passionately believe in a &quot;cause&quot; and, based on my extensive interactions with activists and religious fundamentalists as a kid, have thinking patterns based in tribal, overly-emotional narratives and tend to be quantitatively illiterate.  (You will not find many people who ever took calculus&#x2F;statistics in either a Pentecostal church OR a social justice protest.) My father is one of these activists, has surrounded himself (and by proxy, me) with these people for decades.  The ends always justify the means, and the only information they accrete from the digital firehose is content designed to monetize their confirmation biases.<p>2.) ne&#x27;er do well types, often from privileged backgrounds.  You know the type:  That person who has travelled to all sorts of very interesting places all over the world (on their parent&#x27;s dime), provided they had a beaches, nightclubs, and hordes of other western hedonists.  They kind of fall into these relatively unsupervised, non-demanding, low-paid but not low-status jobs at non-profits.  (I used to do pro-bono work for various DC non-profits, and more often than not my work would be wasted because teaching one of these trustafarian idiots how to use the web apps I built for them was harder than writing the goddammed app ever was.)<p>We can&#x27;t trust these people to be in charge of what is true.  We can&#x27;t trust ANYONE, and that&#x27;s the entire point of the Enlightenment era philosophy from hundreds of years ago.  We&#x27;re just relearning these lessons now.