Good News, Bad News, Fake News

An account is offered of the nature of fake news, and it is explained how this account differs from the main proposals in the contemporary philosophical literature in this regard. One key feature of the account is the idea that fake news is not a genuine form of news. In particular, fake news is to be distinguished from genuine news that is epistemically problematic. It is argued that this point is important because it entails that what is required to differentiate news with a sound epistemic pedigree from news that has a poor epistemic pedigree is distinct from what is required to differentiate genuine news from fake news. This has implications for how we should manage the challenge posed by fake news, at both the individual and the structural levels.

The Virtue of Epistemic Trustworthiness and Re-Posting on Social Media

Re-posting fake news on social media exposes others to epistemic risks that include not only false belief but also misguided trust in the source of the fake news. The risk of misguided trust comes from the fact that re-posting is a kind of credentialing; as a new kind of speech-act, re-posting does not yet have established norms and so runs an additional risk of “bent credentialing.” This chapter proposes that other-regarding epistemic virtues can help us mitigate the epistemic risks that come with re-posting—specifically the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness. It further considers how an epistemically trustworthy person should regulate her re-posting behavior in light of the psychological evidence that retracting false beliefs is far more difficult than might be supposed. Behaving in an epistemically trustworthy way requires being responsive to the real risks that our actions expose others to, as well as recognizing the real ways that others depend on us.

Introduction

News matters. Democracies need independent, fact-based news to provide a voice for a diverse range of people, to watchdog the powerful, and to keep members of a society informed. Much of the news surrounding us today does not, for one reason or the other, meet the standards of epistemically valuable news. Our media environments are polluted by fake news and other forms of mis- and disinformation. We have a problem of fake news. This chapter presents the motivations and challenges for giving an account of fake news that can be useful to science. It then argues that a specific epistemology of fake news is needed as a new branch of social epistemology. The chapter presents a rough sketch of how the contours of such an epistemology of fake news may look like. It also gives an overview of the chapters of this volume.

Enquiry and Normative Deviance

It is argued that science denialism brings about an aberrant form of enquiry that deviates in significant ways from the epistemic norms governing scientific enquiry. Science denialism doesn’t involve just a rejection of a scientific theory; it also challenges the practice of continuously and impartially testing research methods, theories, and evidential sources with the aim of improving the accuracy of our theories. This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the epistemic mechanisms at work. It develops a fine-grained framework to model a variety of normative deviances that may take place in enquiry. Through analysing two case studies, it is argued that fake news plays two pivotal roles in shaping epistemic norms operating within science denialism. First, it discredits a variety of (institutional) sources of evidence; second, it also plays a part in building the alternative explanation of the target phenomena.

An Epistemic Defense of News Abstinence

If we have reason to believe that by following the news, we acquire more false beliefs than true ones or we acquire true but irrelevant beliefs, then we may be justified in taking a newsbreak. We are propositionally justified in temporarily ignoring the news either in a domain or from a source if (i) we are in a fake news environment or are justified in believing that we are, and (ii) it is cognitively difficult or time consuming to discriminate genuine from fake news or to obtain genuine news. The defense of news abstinence rests either on reliabilism about justification or the defeasibility theory. When reliabilism is combined with epistemic consequentialism, news abstinence in a fake news environment is not only epistemically permitted but also epistemically required.

Facing Epistemic Authorities

Disrespect for the truth, the rise of conspiracy thinking, and a pervasive distrust in experts are widespread features of the post-truth condition in current politics and public opinion. Among the many good explanations of these phenomena there is one that is only rarely discussed: that something is wrong with our deeply entrenched intellectual standards of (i) using our own critical thinking without any restriction and (ii) respecting the judgment of every rational agent as epistemically relevant. This chapter argues that these two Enlightenment principles—the Principle of Unrestricted Critical Thinking and the Principle of Democratic Reason—not only conflict with what is rationally required from a purely epistemic point of view, but also further the spread of conspiracy theories and undermine trust in experts. As a result, we should typically defer to experts without using any of our own reasons regarding the subject matter

Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology

A familiar criticism of Donald Trump is that, in watching only Fox News and similar news sources, he is creating a dangerous echo chamber for himself. Echo chambers are said to be responsible for a host of today’s problems, including the degradation of democracy. This diagnosis is fundamentally incorrect, and this chapter examines the two dominant explanations of the distinctively epistemic problem with echo chambers and shows that each is wanting. Echo chambers, by themselves, are not epistemically problematic. Echo chambers are characterized in purely structural terms, but what is needed to capture what is wrong with Trump’s exposure to only Fox News is content-sensitive. It is not that Trump is relying on a single source for news, but that he is relying on one that is unreliable. Finally, the chapter calls attention to the challenge of social media bots and the role of non-ideal social epistemology.

How Vice Can Motivate Distrust in Elites and Trust in Fake News

This chapter discusses the vices of epistemic insensitivity and epistemic obstruction in special relation to contemporary political divides and contemporary habits of media consumption. It argues that both vices threaten to worsen political and social divisions between self-identified conservatives on the one hand, and those that the said self-identified conservatives themselves identify as “elites,” “liberal elites,” “experts,” “progressives,” or, “the left.” In turn, this worsening divide worsens distrust in news sources associated with “the wrong” political perspective. Partisans can become increasingly suspect of all news sources outside of their own political bubble; the entrenchment of the aforementioned vices makes persons more and more likely to deem any source outside their bubble “fake news.”

Fake News and Epistemic Rot; or, Why We Are All in This Together

Fake news poses an interesting test case to theories of the epistemology of testimony. If they are to illuminate the nature of the epistemic challenges and harms fake news poses to (members of) a community, the theories themselves must move beyond several overly simplistic models of communication. After developing and criticizing some of these, this chapter goes on to offer a more nearly adequate model. The distinctive feature of the theory presented is that it goes beyond the reporter (speaker) and recipient (hearer), postulating several other roles people (and technology) play in communication. The upshot of these reflections is a case for thinking of epistemic responsibility in distinctly social terms—in terms of what we owe to each other as creatures who are both information-seeking and highly social.

The Dissemination of Scientific Fake News

Fake news can originate from scientific fraud. An article can be retracted upon discovery of fraud. A case study shows, however, that such fake science can be visible in Google even after the article is retracted. Authors hypothesize that the explanation lies in the popularity-based logic governing Google’s foundational PageRank algorithm, in conjunction with the “law of retraction”: a retraction notice is typically taken to be less interesting and therefore less popular with internet users than the original content retracted. This chapter presents an empirical study drawing on records of articles retracted due to fraud (fabrication of data) in the Retraction Watch public database. It finds that both Google Search and Google Scholar more often than not rank a link to the original article higher than a link indicating that the article has been retracted. Thus, both Google Search and Google Scholar risk disseminating fake science through their ranking algorithms.