The fact check idea is simple enough. If the subject is climate, you get a bit of text defining terminology. You also get the terrifying news that “Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming.” from Wikipedia. (This is the current Wikipedia climate change page.) Posting this information also means you don’t have to wade through basic expressions, which is called “communication” for those wondering.
The other, overarching idea is to get the vast amounts of misinformation and disinformation off Google’s platforms. Nobody needs to be told that every damn noun in the English language is now the basis for a political conspiracy theory. This babble is invariably absolute 100% garbage, but it’s income for the people who produce it. Hence the vast quantities of totally unsubstantiated crap oozing out of every crevice and orifice online. Check out the current climate change denial news, all 124,000 search results.
Climate change denial, (aka the process of totally unqualified people making statements on a subject where they obviously don’t even understand basic high school thermal physics), is a money spinner. These guys can stand around fearlessly agreeing with each other while people die in massive heat waves, and get paid for it.
The denialists are calling YouTube’s new initiative “propaganda”. Sometimes you need that sort of validation. This is the way they react to every bit of climate data, too, so you know what’s actually being said. YouTube has been getting positive feedback from the actual scientific community, the one which can read and write whole sentences without neo con buzzwords, too.
Fake news vs fact checks
Fact checks are invariably called invalid by the conservative fake news hacks, whom I’ve come to refer to as ‘fakewits”, for some reason. Part of the reason is that everything which contradicts them is called fake. The bottom line here is that fake news is designed for fake people who glue themselves to political positions. For example – The sky is socialist. Your rose bush is a left wing conspiracy. The environment is a communist. Oceans are pedophiles, and pollution is good for you because it’s a policy decision.
Facts have no place in this psychotic drivel. Fact checks, therefore, are inexcusable. What use are facts, anyway, if you can’t monetize them? Exactly how anyone convinces themselves that fake news which they know they made up themselves is real is anyone’s guess.
Fact checks, however, unlike fake news, are backed up by hard information, in this case many terabytes of data over decades. History reveals facts, and fakes. YouTube has put itself on the side of facts.
