Increasingly I think that "free speech" should apply to humans only, not to humans armed with a gas-powered bullshit spewer.

Thet want to make sure you do not have any choice and at that point You Will Like It.

Cute [1].

In the UK, we can rely on fact checkers from the BBC, who are impartial and would never be caught doctoring videos of presidents of ally countries [2]. The UK government would never send 100 current/past members of their party to interfere in a foreign election [3].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251111010701/https://aphyr.com...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/03/bbc-report-revea...

[3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/10/17/labour-sends...

While I like how the concept that fact checking has tried to respond to the social media age's flood of inaccuracies and disinformation, encouraging the idea that we should try to more thoroughly verify news stories and sources to make sure they are accurate, in practice I'm not sure if they've been a major net positive.

For the target audience, who is presumably someone who has fallen for some misinformation or propaganda, fact-checking often seems to come across as condescending to that person. "Actually, that thing you believed isn't real, here's some smarty-pants reasons why you were wrong."

Either that, or it's like the community notes system where it's an endless war of clever comebacks.

I don't really have a solution in mind, just these thoughts on the present state of things.

So it selects its sources according to their SEO-gaming proficiency?