It's a trope in democratic decline that those burdened with the power to watch over and protect society from corruption or evil or moral perfidy are prone themselves to corruption, since after all, all power corrupts. And if your goal is corrupt, it makes sense to corrupt the watchers, so you can continue to operate without oversight.
Hence the question, Who watches the watchers? And while this question does often have concrete answers, such as having an OpenSociety because transparency invites PublicAccountability (sunlight is the greatest disinfectant), the question really says that because watchers are after all humans and corruptible, so too are those who watch the watchers.
The case of the British Medical Journal "hoax alert" on Facebook
In 2021, companies like FaceBook are relying on a contracted army of independent FactCheckers to flag and take down the PhonyFlood of FakeNews. This army has not been carefully chosen, but rather hastily assembled to deflect government oversight in Facebook's affairs and equally arms length to keep Facebook from being declared a news organization with editorial control, which would eliminate its safe harbor under Section 230 of the CommunicationsDecencyAct.
This can lead to absurd situations, like this one recounted by the British Medical Journal, one of the most reputable scientific publications on the planet, who found its highly researched and evidenced article [1] debunking Pfizer's vaccine trial during the CovidNineteen pandemic.
Quoting from https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635/rr-80..
> [After links to the article in BMJ were posted on Facebook,] Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.
> We find the “fact check” [2] performed by Lead Stories to be *inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible*. [ed: emphasis ours]
- It fails to provide any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong
- It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”
- The first paragraph inaccurately labels The BMJ a “news blog”
- It contains a screenshot of our article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or untrue in The BMJ article
- It published the story on its website under a URL that contains the phrase “hoax-alert”
Unfortunately since much of the anti-pandemic subculture is based on Facebook, its control of quality scientific publications creates serious problems in combating FakeNews.
One of the magic issues is as Bruno Latour explains eloquently in ScienceInAction, scientists themselves are in constant contention with each other, and thus there will be conflicting reports by credible researchers until what results and conclusions survive testability and falsification that they can be relied upon to build new scientific development. Lay organizations like Facebook and its contract fact checkers are not equipped to weigh in on this process.
That's what makes this case fascinating as an example of WhoWatchesTheWatchers. Sure, in the immediate situation Facebook hired an incompetent company as a watcher, and they were called out by a more competent organization. However, what makes the British Medical Journal competent isn't shear authority, but that it exists in a systematic methodology called science that has solved the problem of WhoWatchesTheWatchers by turning it (science) into a a) game with b) rules that generate c) progress by d) discarding false narratives e) definitively.
[1] Thacker PD. Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer's vaccine trial. BMJ. 2021 Nov 2;375:n2635. doi: 10.1136/bmj.n2635. PMID: 34728500. https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635
[2] Miller D. Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials. Nov 10, 2021. https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-british-medical-journal-did-not-reveal-disqualifying-and-ignored-reports-of-flaws-in-pfizer-vaccine-trial.html