The Outsider Perspective Issue 373 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Unless you’re someone whose name showed up in the unsealed Jeffrey Epstein documents. From NPR, we learned the names “David Copperfield, Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, actor Kevin Spacey, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, the late New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former Vice President Al Gore.” Fox News hit the celebrities, “Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruce Willis and Michael Jackson.”

Does this mean these people did anything? Of course not. But it’s hard to imagine a worse place for your name to pop up than Jeffrey Epstein’s various documents. I have a column up for CI talking about a second brothel bust in the DC area that’s hard to separate from the Epstein news, be sure to check that out.

This week, I’m going through what the fact-checking process looks like from behind the scenes and what shows about that broader industry – links to follow.

Quick hits:

The migrant crisis is deepening in several sanctuary cities like New York, Chicago, and others. NYC is suing Texas bus companies, attempting to stop migrants from arriving there. Ironically, the Biden DOJ is suing Texas to stop it from trying to block migrants from entering the country. Mayors in places like Chicago and Denver are looking for solutions, too. When these migrants are crowded under bridges in Texas, or kept in “cages” at the border, everything is fine for these Democratic cities. But when either red states or the migrants themselves flee to so-called sanctuary cities, suddenly it’s a problem. From a humanitarian standpoint, this is a straight-up disaster. The only way to stop the issue is to stop the flood at the border. The White House does not seem to care at this point. But the warning bells are going off even in the Democratic Party that this will be a hot issue come November. A thing to watch, the effort to impeach the head of homeland security over the migrant crisis is growing in Congress – and it wouldn’t shock me to see some Democrats get pulled into this move.

Where you can find me this week

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Fed Signals End Of Inflation, Even As It’s Unsure That’s True – Conservative Institute

Epstein Wasn’t Alone – There Was Another Brothel Sting – Conservative Institute

Venturing Into The World Of Fact Checking

For the last few months, I’ve had the chance to enter the world of “fact-checking.” One of the changes Elon Musk made to Twitter was to shift fact-checking from an internal team focused on “disinformation” to a community-based system based on a weighted voting system. From this, Community Notes was born.

There isn’t much to get you into Community Notes. If you have a premium account, you apply for the program and wait for approval. When you first start, you can’t write a community note. You can only vote for proposed notes up and down. If you vote for notes that get approved or vote for notes that get rejected, your authority level rises. Once you hit a certain level, you can start writing notes yourself.

My authority level hit the level of writing notes, and I’ve written a few. What I wanted to cover here is my impressions of the broader project of getting a fact right.

The “fact-checking” profession started in earnest when I was in college. I remember when PolitiFact and a few other sites began in the late 00s/early 10s. While there were a few instances of fact-checking from Presidential debates before 2008, the press decided they needed a separate arm of fact-checking starting with the rise of the Tea Party.

The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements were America’s first genuinely social-media-driven political movements. Before that, everything was mass media-driven.

As people shared ideas and news articles on Facebook and early Twitter, fact-checking sites started debunking the basic “chain letter” hoaxes. But with the explosion of social media, they quickly pivoted into political news. Before you knew it, everything was getting fact-checked. But, as usual, the fact-checking began with the Tea Party because the liberal lean of the press made them see “bad facts” on the right first.

That system had serious flaws, but it remained unchanged until 2016. The elevation of Donald Trump caused everyone to take a harder look at it for a variety of reasons. But the main shift was that fact-checking went from a thing the press did to a thing that social media companies began enforcing, regardless of what a fact-checker said. If you posted something deemed “wrong,” you were either blocked from social feeds or hammered by the algorithm.

The problem with this system is evident in places like Facebook, Google, YouTube, and others. You never know why you’re getting downvoted; it’s just that you are. And it’s often an automated system.

I’ll give you an example: during the height of COVID-19, I began to notice my posts on Facebook and elsewhere getting dinged with automated fact-check statements if I ever posted about the pandemic (which was often). You can look at any of my writing or posts from that period – I was, and remain – staunchly pro-vaccine. But I also posted things from the CDC website, like studies. When I vehemently disagreed with the decision to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, I got dinged with boilerplate vaccine/COVID statements.

One of the reasons I started writing this newsletter is because I wanted complete control of everything said. If I’m right, I’m right. If I’m wrong, you can tell me that. I don’t mind or care about negative feedback. It happens. But being dinged at the moment by automated systems – that don’t work – drives me nuts.

There’s a discrete need for fact-checking. For instance, one of the things that drove me bonkers during the 2016 election was the brazen fake content people shared. For example, during the primaries, I had friends sharing “gay pictures of Marco Rubio.” If you had two brain cells to rub together, you could see that these were clearly fabricated photos. But they believed it, and they continued believing it after the primaries.

I had an older lady once send me a YouTube video she claimed was Obama admitting all kinds of nefarious things. It took me ten seconds to realize this was a poorly edited video meant to convey that point.

You don’t have to convince me Obama was bad for the country. I can go chapter and verse on everything he got wrong – some impacting us today. But if you need these deceptive edits or false things to shore up what you think, it shows your weak set of beliefs.

I go through that long history to give you a sense of where things are before describing Community Notes. The current status of Community Notes is a perfect encapsulation of where things are now and how the concept of “fact-checking” is woefully off base (I blame the press for this).

Right now, the two most common things getting “fact-checked” on Community Notes are the War in Gaza and the continuing arguments over vaccines. Before writing this, I skimmed through the Community Notes section of X/Twitter (I still call it Twitter, I’ll never call it X), which asks users to vote. It’s just a constant stream of vaccine posts and arguments over Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

If you’ve used the internet at any point in the last three years, you can guess the COVID arguments: vaccine effectiveness or dangers, why ivermectin is the best thing ever (or worse), and why Trump/Biden got the issue right/wrong.

The critical part here is how the fact-checking happens. Let’s say you get POST A, and it’s a loud, boisterous post that’s pro or anti-vaccine. Invariably, the proposed Community Notes are people making opinionated arguments one way or another. In most cases, I vote down all the proposed notes and tell people to argue in the replies.

People want Community Notes to weigh in one way or another to validate their priors. They don’t care how it gets done – only that they get validated.

A post I voted on today was a video some random #ResistanceLib put on Twitter attacking Trump. The proposed Community Note shared its own video to argue with the liberal post. I voted down the note and told them to post it in the replies. Establishing facts does not mean dueling videos.

The reverse happens, too. Iran and Palestinians are trying to move American sentiment against Israel. What you’ll find, both in posts and in the Community Notes, are an array of “counter-facts” where anti-Israel forces try to “fact-check” anything related to Israel. I’ve voted down Community Notes that claimed Hamas didn’t rape women, that Israel is more brutal than Hamas, and that Israel is a genocidal state. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

They’ll often include “sources” too. I’ve downvoted posts with citations from Al Jazeera and opinion columnists in the NY Times. Needless to say, these are unreliable for a variety of reasons.

People aren’t trying to settle facts. They’re trying to shape reality itself. Community Notes are supposed to have authority because everyone voted and agreed on a given point in the notes. People want to use it to shoot down their enemies.

Now, I say all that not to attack Community Notes. I actually think Elon Musk has stumbled onto one of the most outstanding live fact-checking systems in the world. It’s similar to Wikipedia in that its open-source nature is both a strength and a weakness. But for all its pitfalls, the openness of the issues is refreshing. With the media, you’re left with the product and assumptions (usually correct) of bias.

But the broader point stands. Fact-checking has a place if defined discretely and used correctly. If someone has ever asked you, ” Is that true?” You can see the need for someone to verify information. But there’s a difference between fact-checking and narrative forming, and what we see in a typical day is much more of the narrative driving. Everyone wants to be able to say that the other side is dealing with the wrong facts. And they want an “authority” to confirm their suspicions.

And with the explosion of sites on the internet, there’s a surplus of people willing to serve up facts that scratch that perfect itch. And people are using those sites to turn around then and cite them as “crucial sources” to support facts.

The fights that happen in a Community Note are no different than what happens in a newsroom. You must ask basic questions like: Is this a fact-checking-worthy statement? I frequently see the press and Community Notes attempting to fact-check an opinion on how the world should work.

I’ll give you an example: right now, most Americans believe that inflation is awful and prices for most things are too high. I’ve read more than one “news story” trying to say that the American belief that the economy is poor is the wrong opinion to have. It’s easy to do: you point to solid job reports and easing inflation to drive a point home (it’s not all bad, folks!).

But there’s an arrogance here. When you ask people their opinion on the economy, you’re asking about their personal situation and outlook. Telling them that their outlook is wrong because “actually, things are great!” skips over many things (namely, that while inflation has eased, we haven’t had true disinflation, which means people still see the higher prices, which signals an inflation problem to them).

You see the point here, though. The goal is shaping the narrative and calling it fact. That’s where fact-checking has gone wrong.

Is there a way to change that? Probably not. Musk is right about the path forward, though. A community system of weights and balances, whether anonymous or transparent, is better than the old-media organizations playing gatekeepers to everything. And it’s far better than the faceless BigTech companies putting their thumbs on the scale.

Nothing is as it seems, especially when determining a “fact.”

Links of the week

My Father Is an Imam in Gaza. Hamas Kidnapped Him for Refusing to Be Their Puppet: Last weekend, twenty masked men dragged my father away. His crime? He refused to brainwash his people with their politics. – Ala Mohammed Mushtaha, The FP

‘Beyond Crazy’: The Liberal Jew Mugged by a Post-Oct. 7 World: French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur says the antisemitism in the U.S. following Hamas’ attack on Israel is not so surprising — and all too familiar. – Politico

How Texas A&M’s Deal with Qatar ‘Puts American Security at Risk’: The troubling ties between one of America’s top nuclear engineering colleges and the state that harbors Hamas. – Eli Lake. The FP

Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez accused of accepting bribes to benefit Qatar in superseding federal indictment: The New Jersey senator was previously charged with allegedly acting as a foreign agent and accepting bribes to benefit Egypt – Fox News

George Washington University Professor Accused of Antisemitism Leaves School, Heads to Qatar-Based Institute – The Algemeiner

Why the Media Hates Ron DeSantis: It’s one reason his campaign is sinking. – Rich Lowry, Politico

How to Fix Harvard: It’s time we restore veritas to my alma mater. – Bill Ackman, The FP

Conservative buyers eye The Messenger at a $60 million valuation – Axios

AP admits widely panned story on Harvard plagiarism didn’t meet standards: The original AP article claimed plagiarism was a ‘new conservative weapon‘ – Fox News

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week