Getting Fact-Checked

Mr Holdsworth discusses the ethics of 'fact-checking' and the censorship that can result from its use.

We live in the age of information, but as any reasonable person can appreciate, most of the information that is available to us, is pollution and noise. Most of it does not educate or illuminate our minds. Plenty of it is misleading. This is a consequence of unflinching admiration for technological advance. It blinds us to important ethical questions like, "Should we do this?" And since we've refused to ask those questions, we now find ourselves in the age of fake news and having to try to fight back against it. But instead of revisiting those important ethical questions that we've neglected, we've decided to technologize a new solution to fix the old: enter fact checking! But the phenomenon of fact-checking has introduced more problems of its own. The authority that it brings is too tempting and intoxicating to not breach its own requirements and now we find ourselves getting censored for conclusions that cannot be easily called into question because... you cannot fact check an argument. That requires counter-arguments, but that isn't fact-checking, yet the self-appointed fact-checkers aren't willing to admit that what they're doing is argumentation because they're too used to the unquestioned authority that fact-checking has brought them.