A recent method of combatting propaganda has been to create fact checking sites. Every time a politician or media hack opens his fat mouth, countless people run to the internet to find someone who has fact-checked things on that topic.
Would it not be smart to fact check the common propaganda out there? Shouldn’t it be searchable as factchecking?
Perhaps it would be a good idea for any writers to pick a single narrow topic and present a fact-checking answer. The title of the post should indicate that it is a fact-checker. Then, when any hack spouts off, people can use their search engines and land on Isaac Brock and receive a properly-researched fact check.
Many of the Brock researchers are capable of this. There are also a number of writers available who are capable of taking up previous research and summarizing it and making it public-reading-friendly.
Pick a narrow topic and summarize the REAL facts. For example: “All expats are rich” or “People are leaving America to avoid taxation”. Take only one topic, manage your time, and publish.
Just make the title search-friendly, focusing upon the media myth or media propaganda, and include such things in the title and body as Fact Check, FactCheck, #FactCheck, and such.
You may choose a generic topic, or pick a particular current propaganda piece and address it. One day, there might be a base of generic writings which can be used as references for any specific media or political hack that spouts nonsense.
Take a look at the approaches of
http://www.snopes.com/
http://www.politifact.com/
http://www.factcheck.org/
and the others.
IS ANYBODY GAME?
This sounds like a great idea. You mean a resource centre where we can find a good come back to the myths we hear out there?
Fact checking FATCA … Brockers like Badger, for instance, do this all the time so it would be nice to see this information consolidated into one place. Just recently the reciprocity of FATCA IGAs was fact checked … again. No real reciprocity on the part of the USA is setting up the nation of FATCA as a prime location for asset storage by citizens of other countries and pretty much the only option for its own citizens (the ones who can’t afford high-priced consultants). Was this intentional or just another lucrative happenstance for the USA? I think I know the answer.
correct. Much research. It becomes publicly visible only when search engines can key into it on words “Fact Check” “Myth busting” “snopes” etc in the title and repeated in the body
@ All,
This is an excellent idea! Brockers debunk myths frequently and do it really well – but it’s scattered across many sites on the internet. So, that’s a great idea to have such info in one accessible place which could get picked up by a search engine.
Sound like a big job? Two suggestions:
Start small. You could focus on one aspect of one myth.
Why not take a comment you posted (here or elsewhere) and use it, perhaps setting it out as “Myth: xxxxxxx. Fact (or Facts): xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx …….”
You could post as a comment or we can upload a Word document, and we can transfer it to a page or pages. We could link to these with a Myth vs Fact link in the sidebar.
As well as internet users coming across these mythbusters when googling, they’d also serve as good reference materials for other Brockers when engaged in commenting on blogs and media websites or spreading the word in general.
@ Mark Twain,
Or, this just struck me, were you thinking of setting up such a site? If so, I don’t want to derail your plans. If that is the case, if people post mythbusters on Brock, we could either have them on both sites and/or we could have a link to your site. Whatever — it’s a really great idea!
This was a call for anyone to write something that is searchable–originally meant for this site. Most of the relevant info lies here and there on different posts.
But, a huge section of the population reads a dodgy article and immediately goes to a search engine to search for (insert topic) + myth + bust or factcheck or snopes
So, any narrow topic could be analyzed and just include “myth busting” and “factcheck” in the title
A few other search words could spice up the body such as “snopes” or “pantsonfire” and such
But the same thing can be accomplished by independent bloggers on their own sites, also
The reason why I wrote this is that one person has the capacity to write one article at a time, but many people together have the capacity to write many articles