General Discussion

You're suggesting that we should have "formal fact checking" on DU, but have not provided any practical suggestions for how this could be done.

Who does the fact checking? Are they volunteers or paid professionals? If volunteers, what are their qualifications? If paid professionals, how are they getting paid? (If you think DU has the money to afford such a thing, I'm sorry to tell you we don't.) What are the standards? What kind of post can be alerted for a fact check? If every post on DU can be alerted as "misinformation," how long will it be before every post which is just a normal difference of opinion is sent up to the fact checkers? (I can tell you that the answer to the last question is, "instantly." )

There are obviously numerous issues involved with the idea of formal fact checking on a community-driven discussion forum. That aside, I can tell you why the Jury system can't be used as a fact checking system.

The Jury system doesn't just "tend to be subjective" -- it is entirely subjective, and that's not a bug, it's a feature. It is intentionally designed that way.

The reason the Jury system is subjective is because we're asking for people's opinions on things that are difficult to quantify. "Is this a personal attack? Is this bigoted? Is this a right-wing talking point?" Etc.

Because the Jury system is subjective, that means it isn't going to give the result that you think it should 100% of the time. This can often lead people to think that the system is "broken," but again, that's not a bug. Of course not everybody here is going to agree with everybody else 100% of the time.

The main priorities of the Jury system are twofold. First it needs to work quickly, so that alerts can be handled promptly, and second, it needs to be easy to use, so that as many people as possible will feel comfortable using it.

When people suggest that the Jury system should be objective, they're not really considering the ramifications of actually trying to do that.

For example, we could attempt to make the system more objective by adding lots of explanatory material to each rule, giving much more detail about what is and isn't acceptable. You can say that someone is lying, but you can't call them a liar. You can say that someone's opinion is foolish, but you can't say that they're a fool. You can't call someone a fucking idiot even if you truly believe that they are one. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Unfortunately, that road leads to madness. It is not possible to "drill down" into every single possible variant of what a personal attack might look like. Instead, adding lots of additional explanatory information would do two things:

1) It would make fewer people want to serve on Juries, if they know they have to read tons of extra material every time they're asked to serve, just to make sure they're doing it "right." This would reduce the pool of jurors, slow down the process of handling alerts, and lead to results which would likely be less in line with what the community at large thinks.

2) Many people who participate on discussion forums want to know where the "line" is -- what can they get away with saying, and what they can't. Adding additional explanatory information allows bad actors to parse all the clauses to figure out exactly how they can be as mean as possible to other people without technically violating the rules.

Both of those problems are inherent in traditional moderating systems that use extensive rules and a small pool of moderators.

So instead we provide some guidance, but mostly we just ask people to go with their gut. Is this a personal attack, in your opinion? That provides a subjective outcome, every single time. But it also keeps things simple and allows everyone in the community to participate by serving on Juries.

The Jury system does not provide a bright line where "you can say this" falls on one side and "you can't say that" falls on the other. Instead it creates an aggregate, a broad "fuzzy line." Under this system, the more extreme your post is in relation to the rest of the community, the more likely you are to be dinged.

Anyway, the reason I write all of the above here, is to show that the Jury system cannot be used as a fact-checking system, because it is not built to handle objectivity.

Imagine getting called to serve on an alert which has been sent for "misinformation." If you want to serve on this Jury, you'll need to start searching the Internet for the truth of the matter. You might have to spend some time doing this. Since we're asking you to fact check, we should probably also provide you with a list of sources which are acceptable -- even though those sources might not always be accurate 100% of the time. If you want to serve on this Jury, we're asking you to leave DU and spend a good chunk of time performing a fact check which may or may not produce accurate information, on a post which you may or may not care about.

And we would need seven people to do that, every single time a post is alerted for "misinformation" -- which would be even more of a problem since misinformation alerts would immediately start flying on posts which are currently treated as a simple difference of opinion. Add in the fact that there's no guarantee that the Jurors would be objective anyway (what do you think would happen if someone sent a misinformation alert on a post which says, "Israel is committing genocide," for example?) and I don't see how it could possibly work.

I think all DUers should take care to make sure that information they bring to the site is factually correct, and I don't think people should be posting "fake news" which is presented as real news, and it does bother me when people credulously post information which can be objectively proven false. But the thing is, I think most DUers feel the same way I do. That's why the current system -- which is simply to have other people show up and post the truth of the matter -- works pretty well on DU, most of the time. Like all systems, it's not perfect. But I hope I've shown in some detail why trying to handle fact checking through the Jury system will not work at all.