Community Notes and Fact-Checking

 Community Notes are better than you may think

    I think that everyone has heard of Zuckerberg's plans to discontinue fact-checking cooperations in favour of Twitter-like community notes to delegate the service to the users of Meta services[1]. Many have complained that he thus gave away responsibilities for the paddling of misinformation and disinformation, more specifically its combatting, to the users, implicitly conceding to incoming POTUS Donald J. Trump. To be fair, on that latter point, I agree to some degree, although I also believe that he tries to play it cool with him as he may remember that he threatened to imprison him on the basis that is either pure retaliation or an unofficial lèse-majeste[2]. Whatever the reason may be--perhaps Ms. Telnaes was right and gradually more wealthy entrepreneurs and businesspeople kneel before the authoritarian president not only to be left alone but to appeal to him for personal or corporate benefits[3]--, but what I want to focus on is to take up the cudgels on behalf of community notes as a means of fact-checking. They are much better than their reputation gives them credit for.

Murder is bad

 On the Murder of Brian Thompson by Luigi Nicholas Mangione

   I am currently thinking about staying off Facebook for a while until the community here has found another issue to bad-mouth. You could imagine what I am thinking of at the moment, and to be honest, I find the title of Robin Hood attached to Mr. Mangione quite appropriate, because unlike those who attached it, I have read at least the Pyle book; while I haven't read the older English ballads of Robyn Hood and his posse, the theme doesn't really change, and he fit the predicate of chaotic evil. The same applies to Mangione.
   Luckily, the feuilletons have been saner than the online communities that found their new 'folk hero' in the bourgeois computer science graduate who couldn't help himself looking briefly into a camera to consequently be identified at a McDonald's. The police have later found what was called a 'manifesto' but is actually just a short handwritten note in whiche proved that he didn't understand how the healthcare system works¹ . As the above-cited Economist piece writes: