It’s strange that Polly doesn’t really understand politics.

Or perhaps it’s how power - working through politics - works that is eluding Polly Toynbee:

The day after Trump’s election victory was certified by an electoral vote tally in Congress, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that, starting with the US, the company would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.

A similar hammer blow has just struck Full Fact, the exceptionally valuable UK factchecker whose word is a gold standard for honesty. Google has pulled its £1m funding. Along with the possible ending of sizeable donations from Meta, the charity tells me this amounts to a loss of a third of its funding.

Here’s the specific problem with this very idea of “factchecking” via any centralised body. We can - and possibly should - argue about whether the people doing the factchecking currently are biased. But that’s not the point at all.

Nullius in verba is the point. We simply should not, ever, take someone’s declaration that “This is the truth and no other” seriously. Everything is always to be questioned, probed, rethought through and tested. That’s what science means.

One of us, in the distant past, had this argument over a series of articles with the then editor of Encyclopedia Britannica. Was Wikipedia better than Britannica? The gentleman whose income depended upon the answer was difficult to convince until it was pointed out that the very person the argument was with had actually forced Britannica to change an entry - the voice of authority was wrong and there we are. An early outbreak of the now famed pendantry* perhaps.

But this is not the actual point here at all. Rather, the way power works. Whether or not the current factcheckers are biased one way or another is an irrelevance. It’s that as soon as there is the one definitive truth to be declared then those who wish to gain power will do so by working to become those who declare the truth. In that manner they will be able to shape society to their ends. This is true whatever those views, whatever those ends - both fascists and communists used to censor after all.

MPs are insisting that “online misinformation” must be controlled. Who owns the Telegraph must be controlled unless “the right” gains a mouthpiece. If you control the information flow, control what is “the truth” then you control the society. Which is exactly what is being argued, society must be controlled by banning those awful ideas. Because that’s what happens if there is some central control of the information space.

That’s the danger with factchecking that is centralised. That those who wish to control will now have a central point - one they can vie to control - from which to define that famous old question, “What is truth?”

Diffuse and free - as with Galton’s Ox we’ve got to allow the truly weird to have their say too - discussion of what is true is vital. A central declaration of the truth is a denial of the very point of liberty itself.

Abolish the factcheckers and let freedom’s delusions, frauds, modest suggestions and polite coughs of “Well, acshully” ring to the very welkin. Because that’s how we find out the truth.

Tim Worstall

*A title endowed by La Toynbee herself and still carried with pride.