I had some contact with an evangelical congregation many years ago, and I remember a woman saying something like, "Everyone has their different spiritual gifts, mine is just that I know if a message is from God." That creeped me out, obviously. She was basically claiming exclusive veto on anything anyone might say.
But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.
The New Testament instructs the elders of a church to evaluate the messages brought by people who share a message or claim to prophesy. We're also instructed to "test the spirits" to see if they are from God. And to search the Scriptures in order to see if what people say is consistent with the teaching that has been given from God.
If you don't believe in God, divine revelation, and God speaking to people in their lives, then I'm not sure why you'd find her assertion creepy, it might make more sense to just find her and the entire Christian belief system false and mostly irrelevant.
At any rate, I doubt she was claiming spiritual authority over everyone else as you put it, more like saying God gave her a spiritual spidey sense or BS meter to help her personally and to help caution her local congregation or the people in her life.
It's a le legitimate claim within Christian teaching but I can't speak to her use of the gift. People's use of spiritual gifts isn't autonomous, but prophecy, preaching, administration, hospitality, discernment, and so on should be regulated within the Church body by the oversight of other Christians.
Surely in these situations, the fact-checked information is more knowable than God. The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. The woman with a hotline to God cannot possibly provide any proof of her claims.
Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.
> The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position.
Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.
At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.
> Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.
> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts
Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.
Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?
> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense
I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
In the context this woman was, they DO take bible verses as justifications. Not "logical reason", for heaven's sake. Expressing it that way suggests you're stubbornly refusing to think about contexts other than your preferred one, how others see the world. That seems to happen a lot with techies online.
I'm not asking you to accept how someone else sees the world as truth, I'm asking you to understand that it's how they see the world. Seems pretty important to understand the impact of a policy like trying to elevate professional institutional fact checkers in the media.
> Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
That is not the question. The question is, was "citing" 60 anonymous authorities who claim to have evidence you're not allowed to see, going to convince anyone who wasn't already? If that was the attempt, I'd say it's a symptom of the usual "online techie autism" - people with bad theories of mind, bad ability to understand other's people thinking, who think they've got everything that matters worked out (those other people are just stupid anyway, don't you know).
You should ask, are the sort of institutional fact checkers we have now a useful institution? Or maybe more, the ones we used to have a few years ago. Even most of them have given up after the fiasco of Trump's second election.
> I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God.
I was talking about specific people. You don't know them better than me.
> However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
Ridiculous. That's like saying right-wing grifters like, what's her name, Candace Owens, or the one who recently jumped ship, Marjorie Taylor Greene, are brave and principled for breaking with their side's orthodoxy. They're not. They're just trying to be one step ahead of events, one hour ahead of their time (no more!) and are terribly bad at it.
Your poor harassed institutional fact checkers may deserve pity for the outcome, but they are not brave, they just bet on the wrong horse, and they may well swing back in power and authority soon anyway (though not for long, because they're part of the problem they imagine themselves the solution to).
But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.