Take fact checking out of that intimate, human setting, turn it into an industrial program of outsourcing, crowdsourcing, or automation, and it falls apart. It becomes a parody of itself. The desire to “scale” fact checking, to mechanize the arbitration of truth, is just another example of the tragic misunderstanding that lies at the core of Silicon Valley’s entire, grandiose attempt to remake society in its own image: that human relations get better as they get more efficient. A community, we seem fated to learn over and over again, is not a network.
UPDATE: A typically thoughtful note from Leah Libresco Sargeant prompts me to add that I think Carr’s general point here about scale is absolutely correct, but Community Notes just may be a step towards the re-humanizing of fact-checking. I’m writing an essay on some of these themes and in it will develop my thinking at greater length.