Society is going through a moment of epistemic collapse. We don't know what knowing is anymore. Do you have facts, I have facts that invalidate your facts. Twitter provides live feeds to events but then you're relying on eyewitness data and is incredibly easy to manipulate sentiment there and in other similar sites. [1]
Comedians are trusted as sources of truth because they can squirm away from being too specific, and algorithms feed you what you want to hear. It is indeed a postmodern moment we are in right now.
The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
I agree, I actually often criticize people in the right (and I do consider myself conservative) for dismissing postmodernism when they clearly misunderstand it. A tipical argument in the right could go: 'big pharma funds the studies so what comes out of these studies are not objective truth, because of the social, economic, and cultural dynamics at play'. It's a Latourian argument.
I have a suspicion that Finland is able to do well against fake news mostly because it is Russian fake news and people know them very well.
I can also confirm that Ukrainians are doing amazingly well compared to the rest of the world in this regards.
The problem I see is that the west _loves_ russian propaganda. Listening to any popular US podcaster feels like they are taking their hot takes directly from the Olgino troll factories.
The US definitely has a global target for disinformation. I've lived in Latam and the propaganda was far more easy to spot. The link I gave a lot was concerted efforts by the democratic party but I do acknowledge there is Russian, North Korean, Chinese, and probably other propaganda that is looking to destabilize. However, I do think that we are at a moment where the idea of objectivity is loosing its foundation. That's a cultural philosophical moment we're having, and I don't know if you can say that Finland is above this epistemic shift.
Comedians are trusted as sources of truth because they can squirm away from being too specific, and algorithms feed you what you want to hear. It is indeed a postmodern moment we are in right now.
1.)https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...