Fauci now admits that the percentages regarding herd immunity are all a "guesstimate" ?

This plays into everything that has gone wrong with society because of this pandemic..

So there is an article out today that suggest that disinformation about Covid, the election, and other 2020 issues forced Twitter, Facebook, and the internet to become "arbitrators of the truth". While this might sound on the surface to be a fine idea, the reality of the situation provides us with a fairly significant problem with that. Nobody really knows the truth and thus providing authority to social media to arbitrate or decide for is simply a matter of elevating certain opinions over others.

Take Dr Fauci for an example. His opinions have been all over the place and in many cases have directly disputed themselves. 

• Claiming in March to not needing to change any travel plans, to advocating total lock downs a few weeks later.
• Not wearing masks because they don't work to wearing masks everywhere, even while outside.
• Herd immunity requiring as little as 60% versus now claiming it will take 90%.
• Demanding that no vaccine would be available at least until next summer, fall, or even beyond that. Obviously wrong.
• The entire thing being over by Memorial day, then suggesting 150,000 dead, and now saying that the worst is still to come, even as we passed up 300,000 deaths. 

Meanwhile the CDC projected 200,000 deaths in December due to a Thanksgiving day spike that never happened. Now they are projecting that might be even worse for January (due to a Christmas day spike that will likely never happen) in spite of overstating December deaths by about three times. 

If we cannot take Fauci or the CDC at their word (and obviously we cannot) then how are we supposed to arbitrate the "truth" when we are relying entirely on opinions from people who have largely gotten most everything wrong. We still have no evidence that much of what we take at face value is actually "the truth" and we likely will not know the real truth for some time.

This is the general reason why most every generation of the human species has understood that there is a difference between fact and opinion and allowed for a different manner to judge both. But in what seems to be a major shift in reality is that 2020 has helped usher in a growing sentiment that fact is less important than opinion and that the correct opinion might not always be what was once considered factual. 

What Facebook and Twitter are doing is not arbitrating "truth" in any conventional use of the term. Generally I would associate "truth" with "fact" much more than I would associate "truth" with "popular opinion of certain people". But that is exactly what social media is doing. They are simply picking and choosing which "opinions" can be considered "truth" while demanding that opposing "opinions" be censored and or otherwise flagged and called out as not being the correct "truth". 

Take the general issue of the vaccines. There was obviously a dispute between the President and Dr Fauci on the time period needed to create a working vaccine. The President said he was working closely with several private companies and expected a vaccine to be delivered by the end of the year. Dr Fauci demanded in a variety of media settings that such a vaccine would not be ready until at best next summer and possibly not until later in the fall. He demanded that the President was pretty much out to lunch and nothing short of a miracle would prove the good doctor wrong.

So who do you suppose was provided with the tags of "fact" or "truth"? 

Obviously not the President who was working closely with the private company people working on the vaccines. Rather the "fact" or "truth" was allocated to Dr Fauci, who in spite of getting most everything else wrong was provided the benefit of the doubt on something he was quite obviously woefully underinformed about. 

The actual "truth" or the "fact" in this case was that Trump was correct and Fauci was wrong.

The bigger truth or fact in this situation is that predictions were just that, predictions. They were opinions whose ultimate judgement would only be arbitrated when the vaccine was completed and provided. It was literally "impossible" by ANY and ALL standards for anyone to advocate that there was something factual or truthful about either opinion. But yet, they demanded that they as the arbitrators of truth and fact could find a truth and fact in this situation, because they would simply disagree with Trump in favor of someone "they" trusted more. More to the point, they apparently felt it necessary to tell us what opinion was ultimately the truth, as if we are not to be trusted to think for ourselves or do our own research on the subjects. 

But the bottom line was that they were wrong. Their arbitration of the facts and of the truth in this situation is that Trump was being factual and truthful, while Fauci was being unactual and may or may have not been totally honest in his assessment. 

The simple concept of real actual factchecking would never allow a factchecker to every be wrong in this manner (or any manner). In a real factchecking situation only widely known, established, and universally recognized realities that were static and unchanging would be considered facts. No "opinion" (regardless of who it came from) could ever be considered a "fact" because the simple definition creates a difference between the two words (fact vs opinion).

Our media and especially our social media needs to get out of the fact checking business, since they are obviously more interested in choosing opinions over actually checking facts. We are supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. A society where people come to America for freedom and hope and opportunity. We should be mature enough to handle an opinion we disagree with and we should be smart enough to make up our own minds about these opinions. 

If social media wants to flag someone who says 2+2=5 or that the Holocaust never happened, I have no problems with that. But to flag an unpopular opinion or even a popular opinion that is disliked by certain people is not what our country is about. In fact, I might go so far as to say that it's not what the human species in general is about.