Debunking the debunkers

   What's wrong with fact checking the news? Nothing in principle until you check more specifically what the debunkers do and how they do it and suddenly it all sounds like support for a major conspiracy theory: Someone is trying to hijack the narative!

   It all started in the early 2000s following the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York. Quite a few, in fact if you check carefully almost all the explanations of the authorities made little sense or were full of holes so people started to ask questions and mention "inconvenient truth" to mis-use a popular word of those days. Clearly something had to be done about what news were trending on the net or soon the governments would lose control of the narrative and lo, fact checkers were born. 

  Like censorship in Europe which first targeted neo-nazis and pedophiles, (Who can legitimately support these people?) they went easy at the beginning, targeting mostly politicians for exaggerated claims, missing context and distorting facts. Well, isn't it what politicians do? And so over the years under the radar, they trained. How do you prove a point even when it is flimsy? How do you establish authority or conversely destroy credibility?    

  But the point of all this was not philosophical but practical. You can debate for a long time what is the truth, especially in science where you almost never have all the facts but this leads nowhere and it certainly never was the goal. The goal as mentioned earlier was to establish guidelines to control the narrative on a new platform where new tools had to be built. And built they were.

  In many respect, the fact checkers were very similar to the Federal Reserve which is neither federal nor a reserve of anything and slowly built their authority by doing the right things and checking the right way. 

 So what is the right way of doing fact checking? Well going against the authorities is definitively a no go except for trivial matters to prove your neutrality. The UN, WHO, CDC and other alphabet soup of organizations are also almost god like in their statements. So much so that if infallibility could be declared, Vatican-like, it would already have been done. It can't but never mind, the fact checkers will act as if it was the case. As for information, once the "truth" has been set, almost instantly every time, no variation is allowed less it confuses the message. Although this doesn't work over time as 6 months later you can broadcast the opposite of what you just said without concern of contradiction. Social memory is short and fact checkers are there to check "other" people against your message. Not if what you say is consistent over time.  

  So that's about the mission, now about the method. Here, it's a little more complicated as you need techniques. Here's a good one which works well in science: Select the most absurd statement you can find like "The Earth is flat!" and conflate it with other statements you want to discredit like "The Earth turn around the Sun!" Now destroy the credibility of the flat-earth and "other" esoteric believers while saying as little as possible about any solid arguments they may have. And lo, the job is done. Who are you going to believe? The authorities or flat-earth believers? There are many other such techniques. The point here is not to describe all of them, just to explain what is going on.  

  Once the goals are set and the method is honed, you can slowly expend the scope of the fact checking which is exactly what we have seen over the years. From politics to science and from there later to whatever social discourse will need to be controlled. (Note that nobody is fact checking if you believe the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, or more, or less. That, nobody cares!)

  Fact checking works by discrediting and shaming the heretics. Most heretics are nuts or fanatics of one sort or another so mostly it works. But some heretics are more credible than others. They use facts which are difficult to refute and ask dangerous questions. These are the Luthers and Calvins of the World. More control is needed!

  The first line of defense is the Internet GAFA which were originally asked to censor their platforms and more recently are being coerced to do so by laws such as the recent one from the European Union. The heretics will have fewer places to hide. 

  The second line of defense are these new laws which are suppose to control speech in a broad way but is fact are so wide that they can be interpreted however the inquisition decides to do as explained by  CJ Hopkins in my previous article.

  And that is how fact checkers and debunkers have found their place in the ecosystem of intolerance and will play their role on the way to totalitarianism. 

  From a truth point of view, they are not necessarily always wrong (or right). But that's not the point. From their mission point of view, they are always right. They can't be wrong with the right message! And in the circular logic of people who are always right, the rest, anything else is by definition "wrong"! And that's how you deny the enlightenment and destroy science. We are almost there!