Mark Zuckerberg may have done us all a favour by sacking Meta’s fact-checkers. He has clarified the difference between social media and what’s sometimes called traditional media.
“When we launched our independent fact-checking program in 2016, we were very clear that we didn’t want to be the arbiters of truth,” the Meta chief executive said as he wound down what was already a pretty weak defence against the promotion of sexist, racist and extremist content on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
It’s not that Zuckerberg has given up on truth entirely. His new plan is to monitor falsehoods and misinformation through “community notes”, the same model used by Elon Musk’s X. This will allow users of the platform to give different perspectives on a piece of content. These perspectives are then run through an algorithm to produce a note “adding context”, depending on circumstances, to an offending post.
Championing the move, Zuckerberg says it will mean “more speech and fewer mistakes”, as though both are automatically good.
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On the quantity of speech, let’s say you’re trying to evacuate a burning building – and 20 people are shouting obscenities at you, while another 20 are spreading falsehoods about the extent of the blaze. How would adding another 40 hecklers help?
As for mistakes, are these not integral to acquiring knowledge? The only way to avoid mistakes is to have no standards of inquiry – ie to have nothing to measure the quality of your investigations against.
Zuckerberg’s stance can be likened to what philosophers call “epistemological anarchy”. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and the anarchist – in this context – sees the rigorous analytical methods of an Albert Einstein as pretty much equivalent to the “deep dive” research techniques of a Russell Brand.
Epistemological anarchy is “an attack on what you might call the normativity of epistemology – that there are better ways of going about establishing the truth”, explains John Divers, a professor of philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.
The term is associated with Paul Feyerabend, an Austrian-born philosopher in the postmodernist tradition, who advocated an “anything goes” approach to intellectual inquiry. “An aspect of postmodernism is relativism of truth,” Divers notes. Postmodernists reject the idea that objective reality exists. Instead they see all truth as biased, historically contingent, or “relative” to the observer.
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“I think lots of this stuff is predicated on a weak methodology,” with postmodernists using “hard cases [to] make bad law”, Divers continues.
“The propositions we concentrate on in lots of these disputes – where we wonder if we’ve got knowledge – tend to be on very difficult and contentious questions about how governments ought to behave ... or whether there are universal human rights.
“These are all really important questions.” But, says Divers, “Let’s start with the easy cases. Let’s start with the idea that belief, evidence, truth and knowledge enter our most simple and ordinary judgments: when the bus comes, what day the paper comes out, whether ‘yer man is taller than the other one’,” says Divers, who is from Glasgow and hasn’t lost the accent since moving to Ireland.
When you consider a question like “What time did the bus arrive?”, relativity is nonsensical. If the bus arrived at 9.12am, it arrived at 9.12am for a postmodernist – just the same as for everyone else. Scale it up to something like climate science. Research shows about 97 per cent of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. There is room for doubt. But is it nearly as great as postmodernist sceptics – or your Facebook feed – would have you believe?
Focusing on the manner in which facts and beliefs are used in everyday life is the best way of “getting to grips” with theoretical questions about truth, Divers says. There is a difference between “what is true”, and “what you take to be true”. In everyday scenarios, “you’re trying to align” the two “but they are not the same thing”.
Divers sees postmodernists implicitly accepting this “minimalist view” of objective truth – even if they’re loath to admit it.
“When people disclaim objective truth ... quite often what they are disavowing is absolute certainty.” Under a minimalist view of objectivity, “I’ve already disavowed that,” says Divers, who is giving a public lecture on the nature of truth at TCD next month. “My notion of objective truth sits quite comfortably with the idea that, at no point, have we a guarantee that our inquiry has been successful.”
In aiming for objective truth, there is a constant dance between “modesty and presumption”, he says. “In my view, quite a lot of what’s happening in relativism and postmodernism is the fighting of straw men: set up notions of knowledge and truth to be so abstract and demanding that it becomes quite easy to shoot them down.”
Talking of straw men, Zuckerberg’s reference to “arbiters of the truth” is a classic deflection technique. No one is asking Meta to act as God in public debates. All that users of its platforms reasonably expect is that a $1.7 trillion (€1.6 trillion) company makes some serious effort not to pollute the public space with barefaced lies.
- Prof John Divers is speaking as part of TCD’s six-part Philosophy Today public lecture series which starts this week – now booked out but there is a waiting list: tcd.ie/philosophy/
