Is there a way to add another alert reason for posting untrue information?

[EarlG]

30. Unfortunately there is not a way to do this, at least not the way you're imagining it

I'll preface this by saying that while it seems like a no-brainer suggestion to disallow "untrue information," part of my job is to think of all the ways that something like this won't work. And I'm afraid there are lots of ways.

First, sending fact checks to Juries would be a bad idea, because the Jury System is almost the opposite of a fact checking machine. It is a subjective system, not an objective one. When we ask a Jury member, "Is this a personal attack?" we are asking them for their subjective opinion, because there is no way to objectively define a personal attack. So we take the aggregate of people's subjective opinions and use those to decide whether a post breaks a rule or not. We can't do this with facts.

Second, if we did send fact checks to Juries, most people would not be interested in taking part. The vast majority of DU members are willing to take a minute to give their opinion on whether a post that has been put in front of them violates a particular rule, but I cannot imagine that the vast majority of DU members would be willing to go and hunt down whether, say, a quote by some famous person that was posted on Twitter is actually true or not.

Third, if we sent fact checks to Juries, the system would be flooded with "Don't post untrue information" alerts on every single post that anybody was having an argument about. Imagine a post that says, for example, "The current situation in Gaza is Israel's fault." That's definitely going to get alerted on by somebody as "untrue information" -- so is the answer true or false? More to the point, will anyone be satisfied with the answer that the Jury gives? Or will it just set people off on a round of meta discussion, complaining that the Jury system is broken because it did -- or didn't -- remove that particular post?

Fourth, what about satire and humor? The Onion only ever posts untrue information, yet it is perfectly fine to post content from the Onion on DU. If we had a "Don't post untrue information" rule, then anyone who posted content from The Onion, or Andy Borowitz, or any other satire source, could have their post alerted on and removed.

(I'll mention here that if you're thinking, well, we could just add a satire exception to the rule, I'll say now that adding lots of explanatory text/verbiage and/or introducing conditions/exceptions to the rule would likely only serve to further confuse Juries and posters alike. Rules need to be as simple as possible to understand, follow, and adjudicate.)

Fifth, once the system gets flooded with alerts for "untrue information" and Juries are responsible for deciding what's true and what isn't, nobody will be satisfied with the results. Lots of people will have posts removed for posting "untrue information" when in fact what they posted was entirely debatable (this is a discussion forum after all). They will appeal up the chain, and then ultimately the role of fact-checker-in-chief will fall on me. I'm afraid I do not have the time (nor the inclination) to be responsible for dealing with dozens of fact checks every day, the vast majority of which will turn out to have been removed incorrectly because Juries were acting subjectively and not objectively.

Sixth, perhaps you're thinking that if Juries aren't the way to go about this, we could have a team of people whose job is to check the facts. Well, those folks would also get flooded with fact check requests on mostly subjective posts. It would be a significant amount of busywork for very little return. We'd have to marshal volunteers and create a new software system to handle fact check requests -- and even after all that, I would still end up being the person ultimately responsible for signing off on all the fact checking.

So what is the solution?

In my opinion, while the system that we already have is not perfect, it's better than anything else I've been able to come up with so far. Currently, we simply crowdsource the problem, organically. Rather than having an alert that sends a fact check request off to a small team of fact checkers -- which would be laborious and highly inefficient -- it makes way more sense to me when people just show up right there in the thread and say "Ahem, this is wrong, please correct it."

When I see an OP that seems too good to be true, and I scroll down and a number of the replies say something like "Just so you know, this quote is false -- here's the true story," or whatever, that's good enough for me to disregard the info in the OP, or at least double-check it. This system is fast, and makes use of all DUers (because anyone who happens to know the truth of a matter can just drop into a thread -- no special fact-checking team required). It is also public facing -- sometimes, even fact checkers get it wrong, and so it's fine to have a debate within threads over whether something is true or not. That debate does not need to take place behind closed doors.

This has obviously come up because recently we had a member who repeatedly posted false information and then refused to correct it when challenged -- even after the incorrect information had fooled dozens of people into recommending their posts.

To be clear, I do not consider individual instances of posting false information to be a serious issue. These days, anyone and everyone can be fooled by something they read or saw on the Internet, and in their excitement to share it, can post it without checking. If you do this by accident, I do not consider it to be a very big deal, and I do not want to punish people for it via the alert system (along with introducing all the problems described above).

But if you are informed that you've posted something that is essentially "fake news", you really should take the time to double-check it, and then correct it. And if you post "fake news" over and over again, but are not willing to edit or remove the false information even after being informed of the truth, then I consider that to be deliberate trolling.

To conclude, I'm not saying that there isn't a way to improve the current system. But I'm saying that it's not as simple as just adding a new rule and saying "problem solved." I'll continue to think on how we can improve things in this area, but at the same time I hope everyone understands that I have put quite a lot of thought into it already...