Social media posts inciting hate and division have “real world consequences” and there is a responsibility to regulate content, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted on Friday, following Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programme in the United States.
I’ve seen many denying the evidence which seems so obvious to you. Even my government is denying it.
Who decides about objectivity?
We have footage of them bombing schools, hospitals, shooting up aid convoys… What is there to deny?..
Schools, hospitals, and aid convoys that are hijacked and used by Hamas for conducting military operations, which makes them valid military targets under international law.
The “human shields” rhetoric is traditionally used as a reason why you can’t target a militant, not a reason why you can kill a civilian.
Israel has inverted the narrative, both by asserting that a dozen dead Palestinians are justified if one Hamas militant is killed, and by asserting that anyone in proximity to a Hamas militant is a collaborator.
The end result is a free-fire zone, wherein nobody an Israeli bomb or hit squad targets is exempt from the status of “military target”. This is a legal claim that Israel makes independent of international legal courts, and has resulted in the Israeli government being repeatedly sanctioned and threatened with prosecution by those same courts.
So no, they are not
Just the contrary. The IDF is implicated in war crimes by engaging in these rampant and lawless slaughters.
In principle, you don’t need anyone to decide. The facts speak for themselves.
In practice, people get the overwhelming majority of their information third-hand. So the people who decide on objective reality are the people who manage the media infrastructure that provides information of the outside world to their audience.
As audiences become more fractured and information streams more selective (particularly in political media), the different viewpoints provided by various news outlets and propaganda firms can create the illusion of multiple competing objective realities.
But lying and denial and selective reporting don’t change reality. Eventually, the reporting begins to produce contradictions - images and statements that don’t line up with one another, because they are so busy trying to reframe a momentary narrative or shape a shifting popular opinion. That dissonance is a big warning sign of an illusion at play.