Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-23T11:31:26.316Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fake News and Epistemic Vice: Combating a Uniquely Noxious Market

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2022

MEGAN FRITTS Open the ORCID record for MEGAN FRITTS [Opens in a new window]  and
FRANK CABRERA
MEGAN FRITTS
Affiliation:
THE COLLEGE OF ST. SCHOLASTICA mfritts1@css.edu
FRANK CABRERA
Affiliation:
MILWAUKEE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING cabrera@msoe.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The topic of fake news has received increased attention from philosophers since the term became a favorite of politicians. Notably missing from the conversation, however, is a discussion of fake news and conspiracy theory media as a market. This paper will take as its starting point the account of noxious markets put forward by Debra Satz and will argue that there is a pro tanto moral reason to restrict the market for fake news. Specifically, we begin with Satz's argument that restricting a market may be required when (i) that market inhibits citizens from being able to stand in an equal relationship with one another, and (ii) this problem cannot be solved without such direct restrictions. Our own argument then proceeds in three parts: first, we argue that the market for fake news fits Satz's description of a noxious market; second, we argue against explanations of the proliferation of fake news that are couched in terms of ‘epistemic vice’ and likewise argue against prescribing critical thinking education as a solution to the problem; finally, we conclude that, in the absence of other solutions to mitigate the noxious effects of the fake news market, we have a pro tanto moral reason to impose restrictions on this market. At the end of the paper, we consider one proposal to regulate the fake news market, which involves making social media outlets potentially liable in civil court for damages caused by the fake news hosted on their websites.

Keywords

fake newsmisinformationmarketsepistemic viceBayesianismmedia ethics
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , Fall 2022 , pp. 454 - 475
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We are grateful to the audiences at the 2019 meeting of Kansas Philosophical Society and the 2019 meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society. We are also grateful for comments on various drafts of this paper from Alexander Jech, Marcos Picchio, and Bill Glod. Finally, we wish to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of the American Philosophical Association for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

References

Allcott, H. and Gentzkow, M.. (2017) ‘Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election’. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3, 211– 36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alfano, M., Carter, J. A., and Cheong, M.. (2018) ‘Technological Seduction and Self-Radicalization’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 3, 298–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alfano, M., Fard, A. E, Carter, J. A., Clutton, P., and Klein, C.. (2020) ‘Technologically Scaffolded Atypical Cognition: The Case of YouTube's recommender system’. Synthese, 1–24.Google Scholar
An, J., Quercia, D., and Crowcroft, J.. (2014) ‘Partisan Sharing: Facebook Evidence and Societal Consequences’. In Proceedings of the Second ACM Conference on Online Social Networks. http://cosn.acm.org/2014/files/cosn033f-anAembTS.pdf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Association for College and Research Libraries. (2000) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. Chicago, IL: American Library Association. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency.Google Scholar
Aufderheide, P. (1993) Media Literacy: A report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, Communications and Society Program.Google Scholar
Battaly, H. (2016) ‘Responsibilist Virtues in Reliabilist Classrooms’. In Baehr, J. (ed.), Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (London: Routledge), 163–87.Google Scholar
Benkler, Y., Faris, R., and Roberts, H.. (2018) Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boudry, M., Paglieri, F., and Pigliucci, M.. (2015) ‘The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life’. Argumentation, 29, 431–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bulger, M., and Davison, P.. (2018) ‘The Promises, Challenges, and Futures of Media Literacy’. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 10, 1–21.10.23860/JMLE-2018-10-1-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burr, C., Cristianini, N., and Ladyman, J.. (2018) ‘An Analysis of the Interaction Between Intelligent Software Agents and Human Users’. Minds and Machines, 28, 735–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cassam, Q. (2015) ‘Stealthy Vices’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 4, 19–25.Google Scholar
Cassam, Q. (2016) ‘Vice Epistemology’. The Monist, 99, 159–80.10.1093/monist/onv034CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dentith, M. R. X. (2016) ‘The Problem of Fake News’. Public Reason, 8, 65–79.Google Scholar
Douven, I. (2011). ‘Abduction’. In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/abduction/.Google Scholar
Flick, D. (2017) ‘Combatting Fake News: Alternatives to Limiting Social Media Misinformation and Rehabilitating Quality Journalism’. Southern Methodist University Science and Technology Law Review, 20, 375–405.Google Scholar
Gelfert, A. (2018) ‘Fake News: A Definition’. Informal Logic, 38, 84–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottfried, J., and Shearer, E.. (2016) ‘News Use across Social Media Platforms 2016’. Pew Research Center. http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-acrosssocial-mediaplatforms-2016.Google Scholar
Habgood-Coote, J. (2019) ‘Stop Talking about Fake News!’ Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 1–33.Google Scholar
Heersmink, R. (2017) ‘A Virtue Epistemology of the Internet: Search Engines, Intellectual Virtues, and Education’. Social Epistemology, 32, 1–12.Google Scholar
Huemer, M. (2009) ‘Explanationist Aid for the Theory of Inductive Logic’. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 60, 345–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones-Jang, S. M., Mortensen, T., and Liu, J.. (2019) ‘Does Media Literacy Help Identification of Fake News? Information Literacy Helps, but Other Literacies Don't’. American Behavioral Scientist, 65, 371–388.Google Scholar
Larson, H. J. (2018) ‘The Biggest Pandemic Risk? Viral Misinformation’. Nature, 562, 309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lemish, D., and Lemish, P.. (1997) ‘A Much-debated Consensus: Media Literacy in Israel’. In Kubey, R. (ed.), Media Literacy in the Information Age (New York: Routledge), 213–28.Google Scholar
Levy, N. (2017) ‘The Bad News About Fake News’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 6, 20–36.Google Scholar
Levy, Neil. (2019) ‘Is Conspiracy Theorising Irrational?’ Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 8, 65–76.Google Scholar
Lipton, P. (2004) Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mason, L. E., Krutka, D. G., and Stoddard, J.. (2018) ‘Media Literacy, Democracy, and the Challenge of Fake News ’. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 10, 1–10.10.23860/JMLE-2018-10-2-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McIntyre, L. (2018) Post-Truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mercier, H. (2020) Not Born Yesterday. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Nguyen, C. T. (2018) ‘Epistemic Bubbles and Echo Chambers’. Episteme, 17, 141–161.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M. (1998) ‘“Whether From Reason Or Prejudice”: Taking Money For Bodily Services’. The Journal of Legal Studies, 27, 693–723. doi:10.1086/468040.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Connor, C., and Weatherall, J. O.. (2019) The Misinformation Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Pallavicini, J., Hallsson, B., and Kappel, K.. (2018) ‘Polarization in Groups of Bayesian Agents’. Synthese, 198, 1–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Psillos, S. (2002) ‘Simply the Best: A Case for Abduction’. In Kakas, A.C. and Sadri, F. (eds.), Computational Logic: Logic Programming and Beyond (Berlin: Springer-Verlag), 605–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rini, R. (2017) ‘Fake News and Partisan Epistemology’. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 27, 43–64.10.1353/ken.2017.0025CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saez-Trumper, D., Castillo, C., and Lalmas, M.. (2013) ‘Social Media News Communities: Gatekeeping, Coverage, and Statement Bias’. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2505623.10.1145/2505515.2505623CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Satz, D. (2010) Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverman, C. (2016) ‘This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook’. BuzzFeed News.Google Scholar
Sober, E. (1994) From a Biological Point of View: Essays in Evolutionary Philosophy. New York: Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sober, E. (2002) ‘Bayesianism: Its Scope and Limits’. In Swinburne, R. (ed.), Bayes’ Theorem: Proceedings of the British Academy Press (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 113:21–38.Google Scholar
Sosa, E. (1991) Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sullivan, E., Sondag, M., Rutter, I., Meulemans, W., Cunningham, S., Speckmann, B., and Alfano, M.. (2020a) ‘Can Real Social Epistemic Networks Deliver the Wisdom of Crowds?’ In Lombrozo, T., Knobe, J., and Nichols, S. (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 29–63.Google Scholar
Sullivan, E., Sondag, M., Rutter, I., Meulemans, W., Cunningham, S., Speckmann, B., and Alfano, M.. (2020b) ‘Vulnerability in Social Epistemic Networks’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 28, 731–753.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tanesini, A. (2016) ‘Teaching Virtue: Changing Attitudes’. Logos and Episteme, 7, 503–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, Lani. (2018) ‘Systematic Epistemic Rights Violations in the Media: A Brexit Case Study’. Social Epistemology, 32, 88–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zagzebski, L. (1996) Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar