Who is going to fact check the political ads on social media fact checkers? Big Brothers?

Sir, you opine: “The spread of political advertising on social media requires companies fact-check political ads in collaboration with trusted, independent organizations”, “Online political ads are in urgent need of regulation” November 1.

“Trusted, independent organizations”, does that not ring a bell with respect to trusting the human fallible credit rating agencies with so much power to decide on the risk weighted bank capital requirements?

I am reminded of an Op-ed I wrote in 1998 in which I argued, “In many cases even trying to regulate banks runs the risk of giving the impression that by means of strict regulations, the risks have disappeared” 

And in it I opined “in matters of financial regulations, the most honest, logical and efficient is simply alert to alert about the risks and allow the market, by assigning prices for these, to develop its own paths”

Sir, if I was concerned then, how much more concerned should I not be with the possibility of social media, fact checkers and Big Brothers entering joint ventures. 

So no Sir! Much better is a continuous reminder that: “Nothing advertised here has been fact checked and so even though it sounds interesting and correct, it is quite possible that it is all fake, even an outright shameful lye”

@PerKurowski

“Mommy, what’s worse, murder or Brexit?”

Sir, Bronwen Maddox writes: “Britain’s Parliament Square has returned to a kind of peace. MPs are off on their Easter break, thanks to the latest Brexit deadline extension. Most of the protesters are taking an Easter break too, it seems, and have suspended their pageantry of 12-foot banners and elaborate costumes, competing for the world’s attention. “Brexit has broken the political parties, not the constitution” April 16.

But Maddox predicts the peace is just temporary, because “the deadlock of Brexit is a political failure”.

Sir, I absolutely do not know enough about Britain’s constitution or political systems to opine on the article, but what I do know for sure is that in the Brexit vs. Remain type of deep divisions you are not alone. These odious divisions are happening everywhere, with all type of issues, as a result of polarization and redistribution profiteer being able, often anonymously, to send out their messages of hate, envy or fake news, on the web, at a marginal zero cost.

On April 13, briefly visiting London, while walking on Fleet Street, I heard a 7-8 years old girl ask: "Mommy, what's worse murder or Brexit?” “Thank God, in this case, the mother was at least very clear about the answer, but how could that question have popped in this girl’s mind? 

And I know that many children around the world might ask similar questions about for example: murder or Trump, murder or climate change, murder or filthy rich, murder or etc.

Sir, I do believe we should declare a worldwide emergency, before we lose all possibilities of a civilized social cohesion.

What to do? I don’t have a complete answer, but I would suggest the setting up parallel social media, in which no one that has not been completely identified can participate, so as that we can at least shame anyone producing excessive divisions.

To instate also a very small payment for each web contact produced by anyone that might be looking for some type of political funding, could be helpful.

PS. Yesterday I went to Speakers' Corner. There was no one speaking there.

@PerKurowski

If the Basel Committee was hosted in Singapore, could I be put in jail for 10 years?

Sir, you write “Singapore… would allow authorities to publish corrections to claims about public institutions which they deem false. Publishing such statements with “malicious intent” could incur fines up to S$1m (US$740,000) or up to 10 years in jail.”“Legislation against fake news is open to abuses”, April 8

So, if the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision was hosted in Singapore, could I be put in jail for 10 years for arguing that the regulators got it all upside down, when they set their risk weighted capital requirements for banks based on that what is ex ante perceived as risky, is more dangerous to our bank systems than what is perceived as safe. 

Of course Singapore would have to prove “malicious intent”, but perhaps for that they would consider wanting to shame the regulators as more than enough, and which is something that I would have to confess guilty of.

You write: “It [is] difficult for legitimate journalism to pierce such [fake regulations] bubbles”

Indeed Sir, but authoritarianism is also to be found here, there and everywhere.

@PerKurowski

Instead of looking out for fake news, which is a mission impossible, go after what motivates and facilitates it.

Pilita Clark writes that “Britain’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, later warned social media companies could be banned if they failed to remove harmful content [and] ministers were looking at new laws to force social media companies to take down false information about vaccines spread by ‘anti-vaxxers’”. “Facebook is not our friend, no matter what their adverts say” March 29.

Ok, they identified one fake-news. Congratulations! 

But let me assure you that for each one of these you are able to track down, at least one hundred new ones will be spreading like wildfire.

To stop fake news, as well as to stop that odious messaging of hate and envy by polarization and redistribution profiteers, you have to be able to identify who is making money on it, and make it harder for them to make money on it.

Two things are needed for that. First to set up a parallel social media in which only duly identified individuals can participate, so that they could be individually shamed; and then place a minimum minimorum access fee on each social media message, so that they can not operate with a zero marginal cost.

Where should that access fee go? Clearly to us citizens whose data is being exploited and not to some other redistribution profiteers, and much less to some on the web-ambulance-chasers.

Pilita Clark also refers to George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Rightly so, we need to read and reread it so as to fully understand that the worst that could happen to us citizens, would be these mega social media enterprises teaming up with Big Brothers here and there.

@PerKurowski

Lie Detectors, many journalists would also benefit from lessons on fake news.

Sir, Simon Kuper describes the experiences of Belgian journalist Valentin Dauchot when dispatched to discuss fake news with classes of 10 and 11-years-old in Europe. Lie Detectors, a Brussels-based NGO that sends journalists to do that, finds that “children are often internet-savvier than teachers, and probably more so than old people”. “A lesson in fake news”, February 2.

Sir, I wonder how those children would classify the following information:

“Since your teachers have decided that dark forests are much more dangerous for all of you to enter, than staying out playing in an open field, anyone of you who enters the darkness of such forest, will be forced to eat broccoli and spinach for a full month. Anyone of you staying in the sunlight of the open field, will be rewarded with chocolate cake and ice cream each day for a whole month”. True or fake?

The children would respond: “Of course we wish it was true of course but, unfortunately, it has to be fake. Who would give us chocolate and ice cream for staying where we want to be, and spinach and broccoli for not entering what we already find to be scary?

Correspondingly, how would adults respond when they hear that regulators have risk weighted the capital requirements for banks, allowing these to hold much less of it against safe assets than against risky assets?

Most adults would say surely “True” “Great!”, and this even if anyone who has read anything about bank crises know well that the worst of these always result from excessive exposures to something ex ante perceived as very safe but that, ex post, turns out to be very risky, e.g. AAA rated securities.

Of course bankers, in this case being the children, cannot believe their luck with such fake regulations being decreed true by the Basel Committee. Imagine, earning the highest risk adjusted returns on equity on what’s perceived as safe! Imagine being able to hold much less equity against what we most love to hold, which of course leaves much more for bonuses to us!

Sir, how could Lie detectors help the adults, including of course journalists, like many in FT, to be more alert to the truthfulness of news and regulations? A good place to start would be with a full explanation of confirmation bias… that here resulting from most loving much too much the populist message of: “We have risk weighted the bank capital requirements for you so as to make these safer” 

@PerKurowski

Imposing a marginal minuscule cost per web-ad-message could perhaps help level the playing field for the boring truths against the much more fun fake news.

Sir, Tim Harford expresses it clearly when he writes, “Fake news itself does not pose an existential threat either to democracy or the free press. What does pose such a threat is a draconian response from governments.” “There is no need to panic about fake news” January 5.

Indeed but Basic Skepticism 101 courses are still much needed. I have for decades objected to that draconian response from regulators that states: “We will make your banks safer with risk weighted capital requirements”, which they based on the loony idea that what’s perceived as risky is more dangerous to our bank systems than what is perceived as safe. 

Of course that is as fake as a regulation can be. Not only does it distort the allocation of credit to the real economy but it also puts bank crises on steroids. As for now, that only guarantees especially large crisis, because of especially large exposures, to what is especially perceived as safe, against especially little capital.

Hartford also worries about “that there is far too little transparency over political advertising in the digital age: we don’t know who is paying for what message to be shown to whom”. I agree but one important cause for that is that there is no marginal cost to be paid by those spreading news and ads on the web.

If every ad messaging on the web forced the messenger to pay a minuscule amount per message, then we would be more carefully targeted, meaning wasting less of our limited attention span, and it would be less easy for fake-more-fun-news messengers to compete with “real” not-as-fun-news outfits, if there now is such a thing.

PS. If those revenues help fund an unconditional universal basic income, then it would be even better. 

@PerKurowski

How naïve were we when regulators told us “We will risk weigh the capital requirements for banks to make these safer for you”?

Sir, Simon Kuper in reference to Brexit writes “It’s hard now to fathom how naive we were in 2016. I thought…you couldn’t just stick a false slogan on your campaign bus, could you? “Trust, lies and videotape” October 20.

Sure you could! Like when or bank regulators told the world that what’s perceived as risky is more dangerous to our bank systems than what’s perceived as safe, and the world, including Simon Kuper, and the Financial Times, believed that to be true.

Kuper holds the popular gold standard of truth being, “I saw it with my own eyes.” Well not in this case! 100% of the assets that caused the 2007-08 crisis were assets that because these were perceived as safe, allowed banks to hold especially little capital, and that has yet to even be formally noticed.

Kuper quotes Umberto Ecco: “The genuine problem . . . does not consist of proving something false but in proving that the authentic object is authentic.”

Yes, like the problem I have had surpassing that seemingly unsormountable barrier of “what is risky is risky”, in order to warn regulators that what is “safe”, is even more dangerous… at least to our bank systems.

@PerKurowski

Give us a “Family and Friends' Facebook” and a “No Man’s Land Facebook”

Sir, John Thornhill “Several proposals for “fixing” Facebook are flying around; none looks wholly convincing. Maybe Financial Times readers have some smarter ideas.” “How to fix Facebook” August 6. Here follows a response to that challenge:

If I use Facebook strictly with my friends and families, fake news, or obscene behavior would not be a major issue, since I have quite a clear idea who in my circle would want to engage with that, and I have therefore my own powers to contain it.

The problem is when suddenly a third unknown, or by me uninvited party gets access to my circle, in order to peddle us a news or an opinion, in which he has an interest and quite likely we don’t.

So one alternative would be to have a family and friend Facebook, in which the only thing third parties could do was to advertise products and services, not post opinions, nor of course try to sell us political pamphlets. Would I be happy with such a Facebook? If the number of those ads, in consideration to my limited attention span, were limited to two or three per hour why wouldn’t I? 

Then there could be an open access Facebook to which any person, not a family and friends circle, can subscribe to and that would resemble the current Facebook. A sort of “Throw anything you want at us” Facebook.When on it, we would all be quite clear with that we will be fed fake news, and odiously polarizing opinions, and that in all essence we are on our own, running under fire, in no mans land. 

Would such split hurt Facebook’s profits? Not necessarily but, if so, it would also reduce the general risks for Facebook (and alike) to be subject to fines, since it would be much harder to hold it responsible for any misbehaviors occurring in the No-Mans Land’s Facebook. 

That said, to also diminish the amount of “odiously polarizing opinions”, something that behooves us all, Facebook should try developing algorithms that, using the whole web, tries to establish and then keep out, those who are looking mostly for some monetary enrichment. That could get about half of the polarization profiteers, the other half being of course much harder to identify, since they are mostly looking for political enrichment.

Talking with a knowledgeable friend he expressed curiosity about how much Facebook used linguistic experts when trying to identify fake-news or other bad behavior. He’s got a good point, though my first reaction was, in this world with constant changes in how we express ourselves, how on earth do we identify a qualified linguistic expert? And if Facebook is able to identify a qualified and diversified linguistic expert team, with perhaps Oxford professors, hip-hoppers and young street wise kids, how do you get them to work together and keep them united? 

And how do you in general avoid fake-news experts being gamed? Perhaps randomly picking fake news identifiers out of a large universe of volunteers, and changing these every couple of minutes, paying them well for their few moments of dedication could be an alternative. An Uber for Fake-News hunting? Sir, it’s a hard knock web!

PS: Sir, what do you think Facebook’s experts would say about the Basel Committee’s news: “That which is perceived risky, is more dangerous to our banks than that which is perceived safe”? True or Fake? 

@PerKurowski

Our need to concern ourselves about the use of our personal data goes much beyond what’s in the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica entanglement

Sir, I refer to Hannah Kuchler’s “The anti-social network” March 24 and all other reports that will pop up on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica entanglement.

For a starter, why should we be so concerned with Facebook losing control of data to third-party developers, when Facebook has all that data and even more on us, and on which we have handed over the control to Facebook?

Then, if there is something that should be of the greatest concern to us citizens, that is the possibility of Facebook and similar teaming up with governments in “Big Brother is watching you, and makes profits on you all” joint ventures.

In fact that seems already to be happening as Brussels wants in on the ad-revenues.

I pray there are no secret negotiations going on between Venezuela’s Maduro and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. I mean if Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein could finance such an odious human rights violating regime, without any important social sanctioning of him, why should not Zuckerberg thinks about selling data to it too?

Sir, it is clear that we have need for independent entities such as central banks, then an ironclad independency of an Agency Supervising Our Personal Data Usage, seems to me to be the mother of the needs for independency.

Down with all "Big Brothers are watching you". And it does not matter whether these are Public, Private or PPPs (Public Private Partnerships)!

Of course the usage of our data supervisory agency must be managed by wise and common sense possessing individuals and not by dummies like those of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision who are so not only convinced that what is perceived as risky is more dangerous to our bank system than what is perceived as safe, but also so easily manipulated by the banks.

PS. I forgot the first tweet I made on this, namely: How do we know this is not all fake news created in order to provide some polarization profiteers with new marketing material?

PS. Sir, I could be adding new comments to this post… so you might want to come back now and again to have a look at what’s in it.

PS. We must keep the ambulance chasers and the redistribution profiteers out of the business of fining the social media. All fines should go to fund a citizen’s Universal Basic Income

@PerKurowski

We need a contact-tax to make sure social media profiles us more adequately, and leave us some time-off to think.

Sir, Tim Harford writes: “fake news entrepreneurs have realised that it is far more profitable to invent eye-catching fables than to research and confirm the everyday truth”, “How to poke Facebook off its perch”, November 4.

The real reason for that, a bit hard to acknowledge, is that most of us (me included) find it much more amusing to read eye-catching fables than blah-blah truths.

So given our weaknesses of falling for fables; and given our de-facto limited attention span, 60 minutes times 24 hours per day; and given our need for some time-off so we do not forget how to think and reflect on what we are being fed with, we must put up some very high walls or dig some very deep moats as self-defense.

At this moment Facebook can send out a message to two billion users at basically zero marginal cost!

So one way could be forcing social media and their colleagues to pay a minuscule fee for any message sent to us that does not originate directly from our private friends; call it a contact-tax.

That would at least force Facebook to target us more carefully. “Profiling us more carefully”? That might sound awful, but being wrongly profiled should be worse… or perhaps not.

But of course the revenues of any contact-tax should not go to increase the redistribution profiteers’ franchise value, but be shared out among us all by means of a Universal Basic Income.

PS. This does not mean I give up on my right to strive for an intellectual property right, a copyright on my own preferences, in order to have something more to bargain with in this data driven world.

@PerKurowski

Our biggest problem with Internet, Google, Facebook, Twitter, is that our attention span scarcity is not duly valued

Sir, you write: “It is clear that Google, Facebook, Twitter and a few others have become an important part of the social fabric. The dissemination of fake political news around elections in the US and Europe has illustrated as much”, “New realities confront a maturing Internet” September 12.

I don’t get it. If there was any “fake political news around elections in the US and Europe” that was that Hillary and Remain were shoe-ins. And although the dissemination is important the fact is that others produced these news… mostly the political correctness clans.

But let me get to the real issue here. We humans do not have more than 7 days a week with 24 hours each with 60 minutes each and 60 seconds each. That’s all! And social media is claiming more and more of that limited attention span and there is little we can do about it, if we do not want to disconnect entirely.

Perhaps if anyone outside our circle of friends would want to send us a message, like a fake news or an irresistible click-ad, had to pay us something, then we could perhaps align the incentives better. Some could charge one cent per message, others one dollar and perhaps a Nobel Prize winner or an important politician 100 dollars for 30 seconds.

If it were so, many more would think differently about losing their time with their silly useless messages… and we would all live happier.

@PerKurowski

Why would today’s journalist be more capable than others of teaching our children to spot and root out fake news?

Everyone who know something about banking, and bankers, would know that what is perceived as risky never poses the same dangers to the banking system as what is ex ante believed as very safe but the ex post turns out to be risky. Even 17th century’s Voltaire, with his “May God defend me from my friends, I can defend myself from my enemies”, would understand that.

But the pillar of something as important as bank regulation, the risk weighted capital requirements for banks, is currently based on some fake news, fake input, namely on the fake theory that what is perceived as safe is safe for the banks, while what is perceived as risky, and which is therefore in reality quite innocuous, is what poses the real dangers to the banking system.

Sir, on this monstrous regulatory mistake; one with disastrous implications for the so vital allocation of credit to the real economy, I have written you and your journalists about 2.5 k letters over the last decade… but you have decided to ignore these.

That is why I do not feel too optimistic about it all when Roula Khalaf reports that “journalists from Le Monde, the French daily that has developed a readers’ tool to weed out fake news [have] started volunteering at schools, teaching teenagers how to distinguish between responsible journalism and fabricated news” “Journalists enter the classroom to root out fake news in France” March 23.

Khalaf also writes that Tom Boll, an instructor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse school of journalism “argues that a literacy effort that warns against falling for fake news should become part of a civics course and every citizen should take it.”

Sir, FT’s lack of response could be a very valuable case study in those civic courses. That because failing to denounce fake news, is just as bad as propagating these.

@PerKurowski

FT, is not withholding truths, for any reasons of your own, as fake, as fake news pushed for any reasons of its own?

Sir, I refer to Tim Harford’s “Hard truths about fake news”, March 4.

Given the fact that juicy/irrelevant or fake news/stories are usually so much more “interesting” for readers (like Harford and I) than many real fact based news/stories, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg clearly faces a tremendous conflict on interests. That of course because Facebook makes most (if not perhaps all of its income) when its users (like Harford and I) click on the ads attracted by these juicy/fake stories/news.

But is Harford someone to discuss this matters as an outsider? He writes in the Financial Times, and one of the greatest true financial real horror stories/news ever, must be about how bank regulators could get it so wrong so as to in Basel II assign a tiny 20% risk weight for what is so dangerous for the banking system, the AAA rated, and a huge 150% risk weight to the totally innocuous below BB- rated. But, has FT picked up on that? No! 

Because of some unexplained internal reasons FT knows best of, notwithstanding my soon 2.500 letters on subprime banking regulations, notwithstanding its motto of “without fear and without favour”, FT has kept mum on that story.

Sir, is not withholding truths, for any reasons of your own, just as fake as fake news pushed for commercial, political or any other reasons of its own? 

PS. Harford writes: “as a loyal FT columnist, I need hardly point out that the perfect newspaper is the one you’re reading right now”. That is an interesting point, which begs the question: Is columnists’ loyalty to their own newspaper something crucial for good journalism or good newspapers?

PS. Harford writes: “Reading the same newspaper every day is a filter bubble too.” Oops, careful there Tim, you are entering into the very delicate theme of groupthink and intellectual incest.

@PerKurowski

I don’t envy editors nowadays being forced to flexibilize journalistic ethics more than ever, in order to survive

Sir, John Thornhill describes many amazing innovations. “Bold claims for AI are hard to compute for economists” of February 21.

Without expressing the slightest doubt about Thornhill’s integrity one could still ask: are these innovations true, fake-news, or just one of those stories designed to sell you an investment? 

Sir, how extremely difficult it has to be an editor nowadays. If you’re too severe with the facts, you might loose the juiciness of your stories that your readers might demand; if you’re too generous, you will loose your paper’s reputation sooner or later. I surely don’t envy you.

But when Thornhill refers to that a “Master Algorithm”, named so by Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington “will be the last invention that man makes. And that “It will be able to derive all knowledge in the world — past, present, and future — from data”, then I have to reply, as I often did to the former President of the World Bank James Wolfensohn, one who loved to refer to the bank as the “Knowledge Bank”, that knowledge means nothing if it is not tempered by wisdom.

@PerKurowski

If those with good “3bn biochemical letters of human genome” ask insurance companies for rebates, what about the bad?

Sir, in screaming silence I read what Clive Cookson writes about “technologies advancing at extraordinary speed to make possible ultra-precise manipulation of the genome” “Engineered evolution takes another step forward” January 18.

In March 2000, after reading “the government plans to allow insurance companies to use DNA testing to assess whether people are at risk of inheriting serious illness and should pay higher premiums”, I wrote an Op-Ed titled “Human genetics made inhuman”.

In it I expressed many of the concerns about the discriminatory implications of DNA mapping and expressed the view that something needed to be done before any release of DNA information caused irreversible damage. I there suggested “that all insurance companies design a plan which obligates them to issue policies for all of those who undertake a genetic examination. This policy should cover the negative impact and consequence that could arise from anyone getting access to such information.”

But I also admitted: “I know this is only a Band-Aid, but what else can I do? I am not among those that resign and lie down to cry, even though this matter actually would justify just that.”

Now, 17 years later, I have no idea on whether something, anything, has been done to save humans from a release of the information contained in a “DNA sequencing, which reads out all 3bn biochemical letters of an individual human genome [and which can be done] in a few hours for less than $1,000”.

Sir, I ask, if with only $1,000 investment, I can get a test testifying I have a good DNA, and which perhaps allows me to for instance negotiate special favored rates with an insurance company, how will that affect those whose tests indicate a not so good or even a very risky DNA, something that in fact could include me or the ones I love?

Environmental challenges, 1st class robots, 3rd class robots, intelligent artificial intelligence, dumb artificial intelligence, terrorism, nuclear weapons, fast and cheap DNA testing, crazy bank regulators, structural unemployment… and the list of challenges goes on and on. How will a world that spends so much of its very scarce attention span glued to so very attractive juicy fake/irrelevant news stories cope?

@PerKurowski

To those who argued Geocentrism, Heliocentrism would have represented fake news.

Sir, Timothy Garton Ash writes: “The real challenge for the craft and business of journalism is to bring those facts to people who have fallen prey to emotionally appealing populist narratives — and may not even be interested in learning the boring truth.” “What to do when the truth is found to be lies” December 24.

Indeed, Garton Ash is right, but let us not forget that quite often there are also those very interested in that the truth is not learned.

For instance in apportioning the blame for the 2007-08 crisis, how much has been laid on bankers and how much on regulators, 95% - 5%? What would then happen to a post that argues, as I truthfully do, that regulators, by setting up irresistible temptations, were more to blame than bankers? Would it be banned as fake-news? Of course you could argue that is an opinion, not news, but the frontier between these is not that clear.

Sir, trying to sort between truth and falsehood, puts us on a slippery road, but must of course anyhow be tried. One possibility would be to ask social media to refrain from linking to any news not signed by a real person; or to any site that specializes in obvious scandalous news. But to ask much more from social media would be naïve, since these derive a lot of their income precisely from generating ad-clicks. I mean just as naïve as when bank regulators allowed banks to calculated their own risk-weighted capital requirements.

@PerKurowski

Current bank regulating technocrats posing as scientifically knowledgeable are just vulgar impostors.

Sir, Anjana Ahuja refers to how Galileo was imprisoned by the Roman Catholic Church for his conviction that the Earth went round the Sun, and warns scientists may well feel the heat from those in power once again, referring here clearly to Donald Trump. “Echoes of Galileo in the populist retreat from reason” December 7.

Sir, careful there, often those in power masquerade as scientists. For instance bank regulators of the Basel Committee and the Financial Stability Board, behave much more like theologians than the scientists they purport themselves to be. Their creed is: Assets perceived ex ante perceived as risky are ex post risky, and so banks should therefore hold more capital against these.

And if a third, or much lesser class Galileo like me, dares to argue that what is perceived as risky, becomes less dangerous precisely because of that ex ante perception; while what is perceived as safe becomes more dangerous precisely because of that ex ante perception, then he has to be ignored and his questions should not be answered. 

Sir, you want further proof about these fake scientists? Ahuja writes: “Why is science under siege? One possible explanation is that it favours objective evidence over subjective experience.” Well, the Basel Committee never even researched in order obtain objective evidence of what has caused all previous major bank crises, before adopting their own subjectivity as their guiding light.

Lately I have been wondering whether I need to go on a hunger strike or take similar extreme actions, in order to get some response to some very basic questions from the impostors. But perhaps I should refrain from doing so, since I could be burned at the stake… and without the science respectful FT, perhaps also feeling alleviated, not even reporting on the incident.

Like Martin Luther I might just nail my questions on some Church door in Basel, and take it from there.

PS. Let us not forget that Galileo's views were at one moment considered "alternative facts" or "fake news"

@PerKurowski