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ABSTRACT
Our current understanding of ‘fake news’ is not in good shape. On the one hand, this category seems to be urgently needed for an adequate understanding of the epistemology in the age of the internet. On the other hand, the term has an unstable ordinary meaning and the prevalent accounts which all relate fake news to epistemically bad attitudes of the producer lack theoretical unity, sufficient extensional adequacy, and epistemic fruitfulness. I will therefore suggest an alternative account of fake news that is meant as an explication rather than a traditional conceptual analysis of the term and that understands fake news solely from the consumer’s perspective. I will argue that this new account has the required theoretical unity, that it is epistemically highly fruitful, and that it is still very close to the ordinary usage. I conclude with addressing some of the main objections to this view.
Acknowledgements
Early versions of this paper were presented as part of the CLIP Lecture Series at the University of Cologne in May 2018, at the Bled Epistemology Conference in June 2018, as part of the Lecture Series DenXte at the University of Düsseldorf in November 2019, as part of the Lecture Series EXTRA at the University of Bochum in May 2020. Very helpful comments from and extensive discussions with the following colleagues enabled me to work out the final version of this paper: Dominik Balg, Sven Bernecker, Elke Brendel, David Christensen, Daniel Cohnitz, Jan Constantin, Anna-Maria Eder, Cathrine Elgin, Branden Fitelson, Elizabeth Fricker, Axel Gelfert, Sanford Goldberg, Daniel Gutzmann, Rainer Hegselmann, Frank Hofmann, Joachim Horvath, Romy Jaster, Geert Keil, Jens Kipper, Steffen Koch, Igal Kvart, Jack Lyons, Giulia Napolitano, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Jakob Olhorst, Markus Schrenk, Erik Stei, Emmanuel Viehbahn. I am extremely grateful to all of them. I would also like to thank one anonymous reviewer of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 One notable exception is Mukerij (Citation2018, 929) who claims that the subjective requirement for fake news is sufficient.
2 Among the rare exceptions is Pepp, Michaelson, and Sterken (Citation2019a, 71): ‘Finally, our definition does not require any intentions to deceive or mislead on the part of those who originate or spread fake news. This makes it quite different from several other definitions recently advanced by philosophers.’ In contrast with my own definition, Pepp et al. suggest that fake news is counterfeit news that is treated as real news (p. 87). See also Levy (Citation2017, 20) who thinks that fake news is not always produced deliberatively.
3 In what follows I focus my criticism solely on the necessary subjective condition of the prevailing accounts. For this reason, I will not engage here with any of their further conditions.
4 Pepp, Michaelson, and Sterken (Citation2019a, 73) make the same point quite explicitly: ‘But its seems to us that neither intentional deception, nor deliberate use of a process designed to result in false or misleading claims […] should be built into the definition of fake news.’
5 In contrast to Fallis and Mathiesen, Pepp, Michaelson, and Sterken (Citation2019a) analyse fake news as counterfeit news without the need of deceptive intentions.
6 Fallis and Mathiesen (Citation2019, 16) suggest the following definition: ‘[I]t is best to simply define fake news as counterfeit news. That is, a story is fake news if and only if it has not gone through the standard modern journalistic process, but is presented as if it has, with the intention and propensity to deceive [about its source, TG].’ On this view, it is sufficient for being fake news that the reports are falsely presented as resulting from the relevant journalistic processes. This can hardly be true, as the following case may illustrate. Imagine a situation in which public reports are falsely presented as originating from standard journalistic processes. The motivation for this deception is that the information was in fact acquired from an illegal yet fully reliable source. According to Fallis and Mathiesen, this is fake news. However, even if it was fully disclosed to the public that this is fake news in this sense, no one would have a reason not to rely on it. To me, this sounds like a contradiction. It seems necessarily (and a priori) true that one should not rely on what is known to be fake news.
7 Notice that FILTERDECEPTION is distinct from the phenomenon of filter bubbles that protect the internet user from exposure to opposing views and disconfirming evidence. The latter need not deceive the user if she already uses reliable methods herself. For a comprehensive discussion and taxonomy of related phenomena, see Nguyen Citation2020.
8 When I presented this case to a large audience (> 100 people), more than 60% claimed it to be fake news. Of course, this is non-representative and purely anecdotic evidence.
9 In this paper, I cannot engage with the large body of literature on this topic. Let me just flag that I side with those who claim that conspiracy theories are, by definition, based on specifically improper epistemic methods. For one such account, see, e.g., Cassam Citation2019.
10 I do not want to suggest that fake news should be defined in terms of conspiracy theories. Reporting a conspiracy theory is neither necessary nor sufficient for disseminating fake news. It is not necessary since there can be other sources of fake news. Neither is it sufficient since conspiracy theories must be disseminated in a specific way, i.e. as news, to count as fake news.
11 Of course, things would look quite differently, if the term ‘fake news’ were used with a political function. Then one might argue that the motivational aspect behind fake news is highly important because we want to sanction or even punish disinformers and public liars.
12 For some more general doubts about the privative character of the adjective ‘fake’, see also Partee Citation2009.
13 In contrast with Fallis and Mathiesen Citation2019 and Pepp, Michaelson, and Sterken Citation2019a, I take the way of dissemination rather than of production to be essential to news.
14 One might worry that this definition closely resonates the following one suggested by Gelfert (Citation2018, 108): ‘Fake news is the deliberate presentation of (typically) false or misleading claims as news, where the claims are misleading by design.’ However, this is clearly a hybrid account of fake news, according to which the producer’s deliberate use of misleading claims as news is essential. Whoever deliberatively presents misleading claims as news accepts that these news may mislead the audience. This part of Gelfert’s definition is cut out in my definition.
15 One might be tempted to think that the news must have its effects on a clear majority of addressees rather than just a significant number of them. But this would require too much. Consider, e.g., the case of Pizzagate. This is clearly a case of fake news, but it did not mislead the majority of its consumers.
16 Not even denying this much would be a decisive objection to my definition. One has to keep in mind that the definition is introduced as an explication that need not reflect our ordinary case intuitions with 100% accuracy. It is a clear advantage of the explication strategy that it can sacrifice perfect similarity to the ordinary meaning in order to improve in the dimensions of theoretical unity and fruitfulness. This is exactly what happens here.
17 A related worry is that scientific publications generally lead to a significant amount of false beliefs in a significant number of the addressed consumers, since the majority of scientific theories are false. Given my account of fake news, scientific publications would thus count as fake news. This is hard to swallow. I am not sure how to answer this objection appropriately. However, it seems to me that we might be able to save scientific publications from counting as fake news by introducing some measure for being approximately true. What seems to be different in the case of (respectable) science publications is that most of their claims are at least approximately true.