>A SMALL GROUP of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector is working tirelessly to remove content it says doesn’t belong on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside official channels, the project’s founder told The Intercept.
>The Intercept was unable to independently confirm that sympathetic workers at Big Tech firms are responding to the group’s complaints or verify that the group was behind the removal of the content it has taken credit for having deleted.
Stranger things have been admitted to news organizations.
People who don't agree with what their coworkers are doing and want to be whistleblowers.
Getting those people to reach out to you is a huge part of investigative journalism.
Virtually all information about the current conflict in the near east between Israel and Palestine might be considered "unverified rumor", whether the entity relaying the information is a state or a person with a camera. For better or worse, this is a standard of information we need to deal with.
Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept....
Edit: judging by the way the votes keep going up and down there's a yin to the gatekeepers of inflammatory content's yang. These are actions of a rogue state y'all.
The field of epistemology is ancient. The problem of what can be known and how we can know is even older. I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.
Telling the truth is going to always be against someone's interest. If that someone can control the medium, he will do it.
Does that still exist? If you do investigative journalism maybe you win the admiration of the public. If you align with the powers that be, no nasty things happen to you and maybe you earn some money.
Epistemology hasn't changed; but the engineering of how one ensures they are probably reliably informed sure has.
On the flipside, we have a lot more information about how brains tend to process and weigh information to form beliefs.
Even if it can't be confirmed as of yet, I have no doubt that they are working on or have actually achieved the connections to make this possible.
There are plenty of philosophers that rejected the idea that objective consensus is possible, even more so when faced with assigning a truth value to arbitrary phrases. Off the top of my head, both Hume and Kant noted the impossibility of true posteriori certainty. You're quite correct that this is well-tread territory, but you're wrong to think that there's some widely agreed-upon, well-defined theory of truth or knowledge.
Pragmatically, we're completely immersed in floating signifiers and appear to rely on them for fundamental communication, so I'm more arguing for a move to discussion of degrees of certainty & consensus rather than a binary understanding of knowledge.
(...and this is even before diving into gettier problems!)
The concept that needs revising is our understanding of social media posts as being automatically considered 'facts'.
If it can't be proven, if we can't trust any vehicle to independently verify its veracity, then we simply have to check as many sources as we can and consider it as a possibility, not a fact.