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friend posted insta story asking why we mock fact checks
rest of thread is my response (edited for format)
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can't speak for everyone but my own issue (and many others' I know) is that these "fact checks" are positioned as the Voice of Authority without acknowledgement of the subjective nature of knowledge production
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them being given a privileged form factor on these platforms is best interpreted as a form of adversarial epistemics; you are being told "we know better than you and are telling you what you should be thinking".
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not only is it lowkey disrespectful but it's also done in an opaque and unaccountable way; do you know how this epistemic supply chain functions? can you inspect its process for flaws or bias? do you have any real input to its produced claims and choice of frame?
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I personally deeply resent being told what to think, esp as my own framing & biases tend to differ from the mainstream; this is compounded by the seeming impossibility of discussing this w/ many who knee-jerk interpret criticism of these systems as evidence of sus fringe politics
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that being said for many people it is just unprincipled edgelord shit and/or just being contratian for the sake of it; but even then, I suspect many of them have an intuitive sense of this same bigbrain shit but don't know how to verbalize it
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this meme is shits less on the factcheck systems than self-congratulatory left-lib progressive, who, blind to these dynamics, uses their perceived moral authority from being on the "right side of history" to cudgel those deviating from dogma, perpetuating this silencing effect
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this last aspect is particularly important: the inherently contextual nature of fact. mainstream culture posits fact as objective substance plucked from the tree of knowledge, when in reality its an emergence of a complex production system w/ many actors, each w/ agendas & biases