Is a notable discussion/debunking of a claim enough notability to ask a question about the claim itself?

Question

If a question only cites a notable news report, a debunking, or some other discussion about a claim (rather than someone making the claim), is that enough to satisfy our notability requirement and ask whether the claim is true?

Inspired by this recent question, which asks about recent claims from some anti-vaxxers who say that the covid vaccines can cause magnets to stick to their skin. When I first read that question and saw that it just linked a news report about a claim, my initial thought was that it was off-topic but I wasn't sure: it didn't cite the claim it was asking about, rather it cited a news report about how people were making that claim and how obviously ridiculous it was.

For this particular question, since the report contains video snippets of people making the claim it seemed straightforward to bring it on-topic by timestamping/quoting the parts of the video that have snippets of the actual claim.

However, let's imagine that the news report linked in that question didn't have snippets of people explicitly making the claims, but it did still have notable people saying that the claims were being made (and suggests that they're widely believed). Would it be acceptable for a question to ask about the claim and link the report to show it's widely believed, or should it be considered off-topic for lacking a link to the claim actually being made?

• For example, if that 'vaccines cause magnetism' question only linked a notable person claiming that a lot of people believe that vaccines cause people to be magnetic: would it be on-topic to ask "do vaccines cause people to be magnetic", or could they only ask "do people believe that vaccines cause people to be magnetic"?
• Most of the questions like this just get edited to directly cite the claim and make the question here moot, but there are few existing questions that I was able to find that sort of fit what I'm asking:
  • What was the real reason for India pulling out of the 1950 World Cup? - Closed for lacking a notable claim, since it only linked three articles debunking the myth it was asking about.
  • Is this graphic depicting Trump and Hitler accurate? - Open but downvoted, only cites a Snopes article saying the claimed quotes weren't accurate.
  • Can we find water with wood sticks? - Only cites a Wikipedia article saying it isn't true, but we had a question about dowsing already so it was closed as a duplicate instead of for lacking a claim.

So, is it considered on-topic for a question to ask about some claim if it only has a cites some sort of notable discussion about that claim? I.e., do notable discussions of claims transfer their notability to the claims themselves?

Answer 1

(Just to be clear: The linked question is up to Revision 5 at the time of writing this, and I think the shortcomings have been resolved. So this is addressing the hypothetical question posed.)

I think in such cases, it is worth going back to first principles: Why do we demand notability references?

Several reasons have been identified:

1. As a proxy to demonstrate that this is widely-believed. It isn't a good use of our answerer's time to settle drunken bar-bets about whether a zebra could beat a mongoose in a fight. We want to spend our time more wisely, by looking at widely-believed claims. It is hard to show that, so we accept widely-read as a proxy for that.

   So the question becomes: Does this hypothetical indirect source link successfully show that many people believe the claim?

2. To check that the OP has understood the claim. Sometimes, we get people asking questions about claims were the OP has missed an ironic joke, accidentally misunderstood the claim or perhaps has deliberately misrepresented the claim. The result is that the question is about a "strawman" no-one actually believes. Having the link helps us to resolve this.

   So the question becomes: Does this hypothetical indirect source link successfully demonstrate that the claim is being correctly represented?

3. To check the context of the claim. (This point is related to the previous one.) Sometimes the truth of the claim depends on which definitions of the terms in the claim are used.

   As much as OPs are often keen to define the terms in a way they would accept, the fairest interpretation would be use the definitions the claimant would accept (perhaps with a caveat if they use unusual definitions.)

   My go-to example for this is the financial self-help author, Robert Kiyosaki claims in his books that if you live in your own own house, it is not an asset. This is true, but only if you accept his rather peculiar, but explicitly provided, definition of asset. If you use definitions that appear in accounting and economics dictionaries, the claim is false.

   By looking at the original source, we can see if they explicitly defined the terms. We can also see if there is context to help resolve ambiguities. (e.g. Oh, they are a Texan lawyer talking about defamation? They are probably using the definitions found in the Texan lawbooks.)

So, I haven't got a simple yes/no answer for you, but these are the principles that we should use to decide.

I would suggest that generally the answer to these questions would be "No, this isn't good enough" but that isn't a blanket statement.