Btw I'm part of a minority and these kind of posts don't make me "feel worse." Please don't speak for me, thank you very much.
Is spreading a hoax to make a point ("raise awareness") not post-truth too?
It would be if there was a hoax, hence my questions about what the OP actually tried to say. If it meant to say that reports about everyday racism are one huge hoax, I'd like to see some evidence to back that claim.
There's a difference between being skeptical and making a blanket statement that most/all of the reports are fake. The latter itself is a claim that puts the burden of proof on you.
You did call them hoaxes, which is pretty much the same thing.
Maybe the problem is that you think everyday racism is as unlikely as the existence of God?
No matter how likely I believe everyday racism to be doesn't change who should carry the burden of proof for claims about it.
My mistake. You defended that claim by saying it doesn't carry its own burden of proof.
There can be different claims carrying their own burden of proof without taking away the other side's burden. I think it's reasonable to ask for evidence for incidences, while acknowledging that presenting evidence may often not be viable. At the same time I think it's reasonable to ask for evidence for the claim the reports are "a hoax." This is not the same as disproving God. You can actually go through the list of incidences and try to do research about every single one of them, although you won't necessarily come to a conclusive answer. (FWIW, you'd likely see that some of the reports actually come with credible evidence, pretty much already falsifying the blanket claim that they're a hoax.)
I wasn't ever trying to defend his claim that it's all a giant hoax, I was just jumping into the conversation and asking why do we even believe these claims in the first place without a good reason to do so.
And even if we are charitable and assume that they are grounded in facts they might still be exaggerated because they are more vivid in the memory of the one reporting them than what actually happened.
Granted, the identities of those random individuals could be fake, the reports could theoretically be orchestrated etc., but unless you have proof for this, that's just a conspiracy theory.
Lies are cheap on the internet.
And since those stories are a claim that something happened and there is noone to argue the other side my position is that the burden of proof that anything happened at all is on the poster. Otherwise they might be crying wolf.
Look, saying some reports may be fake, some may be exaggerated, some may be inaccurate is something entirely different than saying they're all bullshit.
we don't know:
* which reports are fake
* which percentage of reports are fake
* which side of the argument creates more fakes than other
Maybe it's almost entirely a propaganda war with a few traces of facts. Maybe it's mostly real, who knows. This is far away for many of us. So without some hard evidence we don't have much reason to believe any of it.
"Someone said something" is not good enough. Even pictures can be easily taken out of context. Hell, some fake stories even use photos from unrelated news, so even photographic evidence needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
So really, why should I believe anything that gets reposted over 3 corners in the form of unattributed, cropped screenshots?
But if reasonable skepticism tells us that an unknown percentage might be then then they do not "raise awareness".
It just tells us something between "one side is just virtue-signalling, things are mostly peachy" and "things are actually getting worse".
In other words, I'm not getting much useful information out of random clipped images on facebook. The error bars are way too large.
You're sure about that? The OP was referring to a "vile post of total incendiary bullshit." I don't know what led to this rather vague statement, but to me one possible reading seems to be that all or at least the vast majority of the reports are false (and are spread knowing that they're false.)