this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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you seem to think that this would be some arbiter of truth with no recourse, but we have courts that deal with defamation all the time, and the scientific method… these are all tools we use to, as a collective, come to conclusions about objective (or as realistically close to) truth as we can get
And we keep the government out of finding scientific truths for good reasons. Independence of science is crucial. Also scientific trith is not absolute. No scientist worth his salt will say "x is true and y is false". They would say "we have strong evidence to support x and we have strong evidence that y is not the case under all tested circumstances."
Courts move slow and only in acvordance with the lae. For instance in my country politics decided to define Afghanistan as a secure country of origin by law, to make it impossible for people to seek Asylum from there. That was the legislative opinion of "fact". And that also was while the Taliban was retaking large swaths of the country and months later took full control. Iirc. it was only stopped when the constitutional court decided much later, that clearly this is wrong.
I am not against fact checking. But if you mandate it by law, you must observe the adherence to the law. And for that you ultimately need to grant the government the definition of what is true and what is not, simply in order to measure the adherence to the law by.
in australia we have the CSIRO, in the US there’s NASA and NSF, in europe there ESA and CERN and i’m sure there’s plenty more.
true, however under claims that vaccines cause autism there should be labels stating that this is misinformation, if not straight up removed
okay - i didn’t put this up as the way we should do it, i put this up as an example of how we already allow the government to arbitrate truth to some degree - being the judge in an adversarial process… the bar is “beyond reasonable doubt”, with processes for appeal etc
you need to grant some entity the ability to run the process that arbitrates. this does not mean that there is an arbiter of truth; this means that there is a process that arbitrates truth, and that process can ensure independence; just like we can guarantee elections with proper process