[popularwarfare]

What you have to come to terms with is that there is not a single 'objective' truth but multiple often contradictory truths. Individual Perception and psychology in addition to cultural and social norms play a large role as well.

[TeMPOraL]

> there is not a single 'objective' truth but multiple often contradictory truths

This is something that's usually said by people who want you to drop your defenses and believe in lies they concocted.

To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing we've seen so far that would suggest we aren't all inhabiting the same, shared, physical universe - so there is objective truth. There are facts about the world around us, and when you're reporting them accurately, you're reporting the truth. If you deny those facts, you are reporting falsehoods.

Now one of those facts is that we all observe the world through a limited and biased sensory and cognitive apparatus. We can't perceive the entirety of the universe, only a small fraction of it. This sometimes leads to "contradictory truths".

The best analogy I've come up with so far is projections. Imagine the universe as a 3D space, and anything of interest as a 3D shape - but what each of us is observing is 2D projections of it. So there is a cylinder in that universe, representing an issue. I can claim the issue is circular. You can claim the issue is rectangular. We've both identified the true aspects of an issue, but our views are incomplete. Our views combined can help us understand the full form of the issue. But what's most important, if someone comes in and says they see a spiked star, they're just wrong. There's no "multiple often contradictory truths here".

This is the way I like to think about the world and debates on issues. Each of us operates on a set of facts and intuitions that are a result of a heavy dimensionality reduction. We operate on projections. But there is an objective reality, of which our conflicting views are different projections, and that reality makes it so that only some projections are valid, and others are wrong.

And just because an issue is primarily social doesn't mean it's magically not about the observable reality. Human beings are physical, material objects. Just damn complicated ones.

[tsimionescu]

There are many types of events where there exists an objective truth. 'humans went to the moon', for example, is a statement whose truth is objective. You may choose to believe this truth or not, but you can't say 'the truth is more complicated than that'. Of course 'Americans went to the moon to further the human condition' is an example of statement for which there is likely not an objective truth - the terms themselves are fuzzy, people usually have multiple reasons and contradictory feelings about their reasons etc.

So if I post a story claiming Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza place basement, that is unequivocally false. If I run a story saying Hillary Clinton is an evil person seeking to lead the country astray, that may or may not be true depending on many different factors, definitions, personal beliefs etc. It would be wrong to label it as fake news,for this reason.

[AstralStorm]

It would be an opinion piece, not news. News have to bring new facts, by definition.

[dredmorbius]

I am very much at terms with that.

There are also deliberate actions, evicenced in documents and testimony, to obscure objective truths. There is a distinction between reasonable differences of opinion, and abject falsehoods.

The principle of anekāntavāda is of many sidedness. It is not of any sidedness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada