The phenomenon we're talking about here isn't one that causes profound ontological and ethical questions. We're talking about simple, obvious bullshit.
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Uhhh, not exactly. Take for instance this gem from Politifact, one of our esteemed fact checkers:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/...
Trump's statement is: "The National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion."
Politifact's explanation begins thusly:
> The numbers check out. And in fact, the total public debt has dropped another $22 billion since the Gateway Pundit article published, according to data from the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Care to take a guess as to what the "Truth-o-Meter" rating was for Trump's statement? True? Mostly True? How about "Mostly False".
They make a valid point that it's hard to read into numbers like this after such a short period of time, but that's not what's being evaluated here. Was the single statement Trump made true or false? It was obviously true, but if you play enough games and dig deep enough you can somehow make the argument that he made a false statement (oh excuse me, they were quite generous by calling it "mostly" false).
Now the question you have to ask yourself is this: if I have a Facebook page that shares a site that simply reports Trump's statement, would I be subject to Facebook's new policy? I mean after all, a fact checker said this was a "false" statement, does that make this fake news?
for now. people are unsettled because this is a classic slippery slope situation, or it has the potential to be anyway.
Slippery slope arguments are not particularly convincing. You need strong argumentative support to make it plausible and work.
Just saying “A may be harmless but will lead to the unintended consequence of B” is just not at all convincing, as are most of the times slippery slope arguments are used.
Make no mistake, slippery slopes do actually exist, but that’s not some kind of automatic mechanism that always kicks in. If someone makes a slippery slope argument I want them to show me that those consequences are actually plausible.