If I understand you correctly, you'd apply the fact-checking to very obvious issues ("The president is a reptile", "X has said Y", though I guess that gets fuzzy quickly unless you're limiting yourself to quote-checking), but not "mostly opinion based" things? Would the case of this article fall in the "needs fact-checking" basket or the "mostly opinion based"?
I agree about society being less split at some point. My pet theory is 1) lack of leisure time to find out, b) needing more cooperation to make things work, enforcing more homogeneity c) no social media/forums to question the official view at scale.
>you'd apply the fact-checking to very obvious issues
Well, more simply, I would apply fact-checking to facts (versus opinions).
>Would the case of this article
I believe the article in question falls into the needs fact-checking basket as the issue at hand can be tracked back to verifiable facts. That is, this study was flawed by accepted scientific standards. I think where they dropped the ball is on the context side. That is injecting this kind of article into the current climate (that is filled with disinformation and conspiracy theories around the topic) can be itself misleading. I'm sure this is why Facebook was so eager.
So, Facebook should have been more specific in its warning, versus stating the claim was false.
>My pet theory
My take is less generous. I think it comes down to cynical politicians and adversarial nation states poisoning the well for the explicit purpose of driving this social divide.
I agree about society being less split at some point. My pet theory is 1) lack of leisure time to find out, b) needing more cooperation to make things work, enforcing more homogeneity c) no social media/forums to question the official view at scale.