by Regina Rini
The main focus of this paper is to analyze the ethical and societal impacts of fake news, and more interestingly, how partisanship shapes the way in which epistemic beliefs surface. The author, Rini, first starts off with what she believes are concepts that characterize fake news. She mentions that fake news requires intentional deception, whether or not that deception is purely a financial motive, or the creator’s intention is indeed to spread as much false information as possible. In either case, the fake news is known to be significantly false by its generators. Next, Rini highlights some reasons as to why ordinary individuals might be so inclined to believe this fake news. It is presented to people via testimony, and it is likely endorsed by trusted sources when turning up on personalized social media feeds. However, she argues that social media is a sort of “bent” testimony, in the sense that sharing information on social media platforms is a form of testimony, but it cannot be always assumed that this process directly links to the information’s endorsement. In other words, there is a lot of uncertainty about the relationship between the sharer and the content, and after the event, people often declare in defense that “a retweet is not an endorsement.” Additionally, many fake news stories are evidently ludicrous, blowing things out of proportion, yet people still choose to accept the testimony. Following this, she makes the argument that even though fake news is deceptive and can be harmful, the general practice that supports it upholds individual epistemic virtue (being responsible and using other respectable qualities when obtaining knowledge). Furthermore, she claims that partisanship makes certain practices reasonable and is consistent with epistemic virtue. For instance, people who have the same partisan affiliations also have a substantial amount of the same normative values (to some degree). Therefore, it is not unreasonable to trust the testimony of those who share similar viewpoints and morals on areas that involve these values, such as politics. Rini emphasizes that this is not to say that one is to believe all claims stated by their co-partisans, but that generally speaking, it is rational to allocate more reliability to them than others who testify. Finally, to combat the issue of fake news, she pushes for more institutional change, given that the other solution, insisting that individual epistemic choices are “corrected”, is not realistic. She states that fake news gets through due to ambiguity, so reducing this would ideally help reduce this problem. For example, if there was a norm that social media sharers endorse the content they share, then it would be less likely for them to share false stories in order to evade future blame for errors and causal damage. Rini’s primary proposal is a system where social media platforms display users’ testimonial reputations by tracking how often they share disputed stories. This suggestion differs from censorship because a platform would not stop anyone from sharing or receiving any story, users have the option to ignore reputation scores, and there is no prioritization order of the posts. The end goal is to foster an accountability norm and reduce the spread of fake news overall.
This issue from the Kennedy Institute of Ethics was a great read for me because I was able to learn so much about the modern effects of misinformation and fake news. Moreover, I really enjoyed this reading because it expanded my knowledge about epistemic virtues, and how certain forms of partisanship can be justified when concerning normative fields in a non-ideal world.