Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

SnooPuppers1978 t1_jawy76z wrote

Reply to comment by fractiousrhubarb in On Facebook, Visual Misinfo Widespread. In the runup to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election visual misinformation was widespread across the platform, and that it was highly asymmetric across party lines, with right-leaning images five to eight times more likely to be misleading. by Wagamaga

You have to consider sarcasm, context, multiple interpretations, metaphoric meanings and in the end you would interpret any statement depending on your bias even before testing it against the "actual reality" of which rarely is black and white and easy to determine or validate.

10

mindfu t1_jaz4vi3 wrote

It's not that difficult if the misinformation is blatant. For example, anything implying vaccines don't work, or Fauci tried engineering covid with Bill Gates, and so forth.

1

SnooPuppers1978 t1_jb0215s wrote

> For example, anything implying vaccines don't work

Even this statement can be understood in multitude of different ways. What does "not work" even mean? Did the vaccines work in creating herd immunity? No. Did vaccines work in terms of reducing deaths and hospitalisations? Yes.

> Fauci tried engineering covid with Bill Gates

Can also be interpreted/understood in multitude of different ways.

So interpreter can choose to interpret those in any biased way to that interpreter. For example they can choose on the first statement to mean, that this statement implies that vaccine have had absolutely no positive effect at all which makes the statement false, while bias in other direction could interpret it that vaccines didn't do what was initially publicly advertised or promised which makes the statement true for them if they consider public advertising claiming that you wouldn't get infected.

Like you could go into this thought pattern of, "these crazies certainly mean that not work means that vaccines don't have absolutely any positive effect, non biased person can see that, so surely that's the correct way to interpret it. This statement makes them not get the vaccine so I'm definitely in the right in determining this statement to be misinformation", but it doesn't seem wholly scientific to me. Fact is pandemic still proceeded even after vaccine rollout, so in some sense they did work, but did they work enough? Does saying "not work" mean "not work to end the pandemic or not work at all"?

And you are saying "implying not work", which would be even more unclear, than a clear statement of saying "they don't work". Implying not to work, could be someone just claiming they got infected even though they took the vaccine and being frustrated about it.

If you determine that any message that would get people to vaccinate, is "true information" and anything that might make them avoid getting to do that is "misinformation", it might be more obvious. But is that what you are looking for? Because certainly you can say truths either way and definitely lie in any direction.

On the "not work" topic, you take this fact check as an example:

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-coronavirus-gates-idUSL1N2S7292

So you can see that all sides are cherry picking/biased here.

Reuters title said that the original statement is "Fact Check-Bill Gates did not say COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective"

  1. Where did anyone claim "Bill Gates said COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective". Maybe somewhere someone did, but in the examples, I'm seeing "not working well" which is clearly a subjective statement.
  2. Next ineffective in terms of what? Ineffective in terms of blocking transmission? Bill Gates did strongly imply that.
  3. etc, etc, etc. So all sides have at least some amount of bias here, either in how they interpret the claims, how they fill in the blanks, etc.
2

mindfu t1_jb10ad9 wrote

>Even this statement can be understood in multitude of different ways.

It's true that you can find ways to misunderstand it if you're looking to. That's separate from these kinds of statements having more than enough common understanding for this sort of social study.

If you were requiring this same level of resistance to alternate interpretation for all other well-known and generally agreed-upon terms in politics, pretty much no social study would be possible.

I think we've both laid our positions out pretty well, and know where each other stand. It doesn't seem like we're going to change each other's mind soon, so cheers and best.

1

SnooPuppers1978 t1_jb1vsy3 wrote

I do see issues with most social studies to be fair, and it often would feel like there must have been baked in bias affecting those.

Even with more concrete sciences there is a lot of possibility for cherry picking, and many other flaws stemming from biases. You could keep pre emptively checking for potential datasets that might be most likely to agree with your bias.

But again I personally, intuitively, based on what I have seen, would also guess that right side does a lot more misinformation, but then there is also a question of how much more and how much of that is coming due to bias from the study authors.

Because there is a certain point of interpretation where you draw the line and this could affect the results a lot. Where is the line drawn for any topics from either side to give benefit of the doubt.

And politics being such a subject worst in terms of biases.

I would like to see concrete random sample of how they classified the content, that would be interesting, but seems behind a paywall.

1