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Misinformation
Edited by Vladimir Krstic (United Arab Emirates University)
About this topic
| Summary | Predominantly (but not exclusively), the contemporary philosophical analysis of information and misinformation has focused on animal signalling and specifically on contexts analogous to Lewisian signalling games. ‘Sender’ and ‘receiver’ are players in Lewisian signalling games. In their simplest version, the two players face a set of situations (‘states’), only the sender can observe these states, and each of them gets a certain payoff depending on the response given to these states. Considering his potential payoff, the sender chooses a signal, observed by the receiver, who then chooses a response (based on his potential payoff). Typically, it is considered that the sender determines the content of the signal in this situation. However, in these settings, what counts as misinformation is notoriously difficult to define. The reason is that whether a signal counts as information or misinformation depends on many factors, such as which measure of accuracy one decides to use, or which partition one uses to determine the content of the signals (in determining the content, we ‘partition’ i.e., divide the possible states of the world), or whether one understands signals as having propositional content or changing probabilities of states, and so on. It is no wonder, then, that this sets grounds for a very fruitful and interesting philosophical debate. |
| Key works | Skyrms 2010 |
| Introductions | Skyrms 2010 |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Conceptions of Information (520)
- Databases (53 | 49)
- The Information Economy (45)
- The Infosphere (38)
- Information Theory (264)
- Information Ethics (263)
- Physics of Information (94)
- Information-Based Accounts of Mental Content (174)
- Ontology of Information Artifacts (19)
- Genetic Information (34)
- Biological Information (272)
- Biomedical Information (55 | 10)
- Quantum Information (266)
- Logic and Information (233)
- Philosophy of Information, Misc (154)
Contents
94 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 94 |
- Epistemic vice predicts acceptance of Covid-19 misinformation.Marco Meyer, Mark Alfano & Boudewijn De Bruin - manuscriptWhy are mistaken beliefs about Covid-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only a part of individual differences in the susceptibility to Covid-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be more susceptible (...)
- Misinformation, observational equivalence and the possibility of rationality.Maarten Van Doorn - manuscriptUnder review at Philosophical Psychology. E-mail for draft -/- A recent trend in philosophical psychology is to construct environmentalist explanations for seemingly non-normative epistemological observations. On such accounts, these outcomes arise not because of – and so are not evidence for – motivated irrationality (as vice epistemology claims). In this paper, I offer a systematic analysis of the explanatory merits of environmentalist accounts and contrast them with explanations offered by vice epistemology. I show how this allows us to make progress (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Against Publishing Without Belief: Fake News, Misinformation, and Perverse Publishing Incentives.Rima Basu - forthcoming - In Sandy Goldberg & Mark Walker (eds.), Attitude in Philosophy. Oxford University Press.The problem of fake news and the spread of misinformation has garnered a lot of attention in recent years. The incentives and norms that give rise to the problem, however, are not unique to journalism. Insofar as academics and journalists are working towards the same goal, i.e., publication, they are both under pressures that pervert. This chapter has two aims. First, to integrate conversations in philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaphilosophy to draw out the publishing incentives that promote analogous problems (...)
- Nudging and Social Media: The Choice Architecture of Online Life.Douglas R. Campbell - forthcoming - Giornale Critico di Storia Delle Idee.This article will appear in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, is (...)
- Beyond belief: On disinformation and manipulation.Keith Raymond Harris - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-21.Existing analyses of disinformation tend to embrace the view that disinformation is intended or otherwise functions to mislead its audience, that is, to produce false beliefs. I argue that this view is doubly mistaken. First, while paradigmatic disinformation campaigns aim to produce false beliefs in an audience, disinformation may in some cases be intended only to prevent its audience from forming true beliefs. Second, purveyors of disinformation need not intend to have any effect at all on their audience’s beliefs, aiming (...)
- A Functional Analysis of Human Deception.Vladimir Krstić - forthcoming - Journal of the American Philosophical Association:1-19.A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants engage in deception, and most of them are not capable of forming intentions. Accordingly, (...)
- Manipulation, deception, the victim’s reasoning and her evidence.Vladimir Krstić - forthcoming - Analysis.This paper rejects an argument defending the view that the boundary between deception and manipulation is such that some manipulations intended to cause false beliefs count as non-deceptive. On the strongest version of this argument, if a specific behaviour involves compromising the victim’s reasoning, then the behaviour is manipulative but not deceptive, and if it involves exposing the victim to misleading evidence that justifies her false belief, then it is deceptive but not manipulative. This argument has been consistently used as (...)
- We Should Move on from Signalling-Based Analyses of Biological Deception.Vladimir Krstic - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-21.This paper argues that extant signalling-based analyses cannot explain a range of cases of biological (and psychological) deception, such as those in which the deceiver does not send a signal at all, but that Artiga and Paternotte’s (Philos Stud 175:579–600, 2018) functional and my (Krstić in The analysis of self-deception: rehabilitating the traditionalist account. PhD Dissertation, University of Auckland, 2018: §3; Krstić and Saville in Australas J Philos 97:830–835, 2019) manipulativist analyses can. Therefore, the latter views should be given preference. (...)
- Misinformation and disagreement.Ritsaart Willem Peter Reimann & Mark Alfano - forthcoming - In Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Disagreement. Routledge.This chapter addresses the relationship between misinformation and disagreement. We begin by arguing that one traditional bogeyman in this domain, ideological polarization, does not account for the many problems that have been documented. Instead, affective polarization seems to be the root cause of most of these problems. We then discuss the relationships between moral outrage, misinformation, and affective polarization. We next turn to the political implications of affective polarization and conclude by discussing some potential solutions to the problems that arise (...)
- Knowledge and Disinformation.Mona Simion - forthcoming - Episteme:1-12.This paper develops a novel account of the nature of disinformation that challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions, such as that disinformation is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. The paper defends a view of disinformation as ignorance generating content: on this account, X is disinformation in a context C iff X is a content unit communicated at C that has a disposition to generate (...)
- Effects of health misinformation on misbeliefs: understanding the moderating roles of different types of knowledge.Weirui Wang & Susan Jacobson - forthcoming - Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society.Purpose Health misinformation poses severe risks to people’s health decisions and outcomes. A great deal of research in this area has focused on debunking misinformation and found limited effects of correctives after misinformation exposure. The research on prebunking strategies has been inadequate. Most has focused on forewarning and enhancing literacy skills and knowledge to recognize misinformation. Part of the reason for the inadequacy could be due to the challenges in conceptualizing and measuring knowledge. This study intends to fill this gap (...)
- Misinformation, Content Moderation, and Epistemology: Protecting Knowledge.Keith Raymond Harris - 2024 - Routledge.This book argues that misinformation poses a multi-faceted threat to knowledge, while arguing that some forms of content moderation risk exacerbating these threats. It proposes alternative forms of content moderation that aim to address this complexity while enhancing human epistemic agency. The proliferation of fake news, false conspiracy theories, and other forms of misinformation on the internet and especially social media is widely recognized as a threat to individual knowledge and, consequently, to collective deliberation and democracy itself. This book argues (...)
- AI or Your Lying Eyes: Some Shortcomings of Artificially Intelligent Deepfake Detectors.Keith Raymond Harris - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (7):1-19.Deepfakes pose a multi-faceted threat to the acquisition of knowledge. It is widely hoped that technological solutions—in the form of artificially intelligent systems for detecting deepfakes—will help to address this threat. I argue that the prospects for purely technological solutions to the problem of deepfakes are dim. Especially given the evolving nature of the threat, technological solutions cannot be expected to prevent deception at the hands of deepfakes, or to preserve the authority of video footage. Moreover, the success of such (...)
- Conspiracy theories, epistemic self-identity, and epistemic territory.Daniel Munro - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-28.This paper seeks to carve out a distinctive category of conspiracy theorist, and to explore the process of becoming a conspiracy theorist of this sort. Those on whom I focus claim their beliefs trace back to simply trusting their senses and experiences in a commonsensical way, citing what they take to be authoritative firsthand evidence or observations. Certain flat Earthers, anti-vaxxers, and UFO conspiracy theorists, for example, describe their beliefs and evidence this way. I first distinguish these conspiracy theorists by (...)
- Ethics of a pandemic of deliberate health misinformation: From abortion care to vaccines.Udo Schuklenk - 2024 - Bioethics 38 (2):93-94.<no abstract - brief excerpt> "...efforts at manipulating vulnerable populations into acting in particular ways that may not be in their best interest, has a history going back much longer. Arguably the internet turbocharged some of these efforts, but this has been happening for a long time.".
- In Defense of (Some) Online Echo Chambers.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (3):1-11.In this article, I argue that online echo chambers are in some cases and in some respects good. I do not attempt to refute arguments that they are harmful, but I argue that they are sometimes beneficial. In the first section, I argue that it is sometimes good to be insulated from views with which one disagrees. In the second section, I argue that the software-design principles that give rise to online echo chambers have a lot to recommend them. Further, (...)
- Misinformation and Epistemic Harm.Brandon Carey - 2023 - Social Philosophy Today 39:89-100.Standard accounts of misinformation require that it is either false or misleading, in the sense that it leads people to false beliefs. But many examples of misinformation involve true information that leads people to true beliefs. So, I propose a new theory of misinformation: misinformation is information that is epistemically harmful in the sense that it is disposed to reduce the overall quality of a subject’s epistemic position. This includes not only causing the subject to form a false belief, but (...)
- Thinking more or thinking differently? Using drift-diffusion modeling to illuminate why accuracy prompts decrease misinformation sharing.Hause Lin, Gordon Pennycook & David G. Rand - 2023 - Cognition 230 (C):105312.
- Capturing the conspiracist’s imagination.Daniel Munro - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (12):3353-3381.Some incredibly far-fetched conspiracy theories circulate online these days. For most of us, clear evidence would be required before we’d believe these extraordinary theories. Yet, conspiracists often cite evidence that seems transparently very weak. This is puzzling, since conspiracists often aren’t irrational people who are incapable of rationally processing evidence. I argue that existing accounts of conspiracist belief formation don’t fully address this puzzle. Then, drawing on both philosophical and empirical considerations, I propose a new explanation that appeals to the (...)
- Advancing the debate on the consequences of misinformation: clarifying why it’s not (just) about false beliefs.Maarten van Doorn - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1.The debate on whether and why misinformation is bad primarily focuses on the spread of false beliefs as its main harm. From the assumption that misinformation primarily causes harm through the spread of false beliefs as a starting point, it has been contended that the problem of misinformation has been exaggerated. Its tendency to generate false beliefs appears to be limited. However, the near-exclusive focus on whether or not misinformation dupes people with false beliefs neglects other epistemic harms associated with (...)
- Waarom we beter denken dan we denken.Maarten van Doorn - 2023 - Noordboek Uitgeverij.Genomineerd voor de Socratesbeker 2024. De mens is irrationeel. Verliefd op zijn eigen gelijk. Doof voor feiten argumenten. Verblind door honderden denkfouten. Een makkelijke prooi voor nepnieuws. Gevangen in filterbubbels. Zo is het heersende idee. Maar klopt het wel? In dit boek verweeft filosoof Maarten van Doorn de jongste inzichten uit de psychologie, communicatiewetenschappen, filosofie en politicologie. Hij neemt ons mee op een reis langs verrassende onderzoeksresultaten en scherpzinnige filosofen en geeft nieuwe antwoorden op dringende vragen: Waarom geloven we wat (...)
- The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation.Valentina Vellani, Sarah Zheng, Dilay Ercelik & Tali Sharot - 2023 - Cognition 236 (C):105421.
- Machine Learning, Misinformation, and Citizen Science.Adrian K. Yee - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (56):1-24.Current methods of operationalizing concepts of misinformation in machine learning are often problematic given idiosyncrasies in their success conditions compared to other models employed in the natural and social sciences. The intrinsic value-ladenness of misinformation and the dynamic relationship between citizens' and social scientists' concepts of misinformation jointly suggest that both the construct legitimacy and the construct validity of these models needs to be assessed via more democratic criteria than has previously been recognized.
- Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help.Bence Bago, Leah R. Rosenzweig, Adam J. Berinsky & David G. Rand - 2022 - Cognition and Emotion 36 (6):1166-1180.Misinformation is a serious concern for societies across the globe. To design effective interventions to combat the belief in and spread of misinformation, we must understand which psychological processes influence susceptibility to misinformation. This paper tests the widely assumed – but largely untested – claim that emotionally provocative headlines are associated with worse ability to identify true versus false headlines. Consistent with this proposal, we found correlational evidence that overall emotional response at the headline level is associated with diminished truth (...)
- The Singular Plurality of Social Goods / La singolare pluralità dei beni sociali.Marco Emilio - 2022 - Dissertation, Université de NeuchâtelAccording to some philosophers and social scientists, mainstream economic theories currently play an unprecedented role in shaping human societies. This phenomenon can be linked to the dissemination of methodological individualism, where common goods are interpreted as reducible to aggregates of individuals' well-being. Nonetheless, some emergent difficulties of economics in coping with global institutional issues have encouraged some authors to revise that paradigm. In the last three decades, there has been a parallel growing philosophical interest in investigating social sciences' epistemological and (...)
- Scientific Misinformation and Fake News: A Blurred Boundary.Anna Elisabetta Galeotti & Cristina Meini - 2022 - Social Epistemology 36 (6):703-718.If political fake news is a serious concern for democratic politics, no less worrisome is scientific news with patently distorted content. Prima facie, scientific misinformation partially escapes the definition of fake news provided by empirical and philosophical analysis, mainly patterned after political disinformation. Most notably, we aim to show that people are often unaware not only of disseminating, but also of producing false or misleading information. However, by leveraging the philosophical and psychological literature, we advance some reasons for keeping scientific (...)
- Real Fakes: The Epistemology of Online Misinformation.Keith Raymond Harris - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (3):1-24.Many of our beliefs are acquired online. Online epistemic environments are replete with fake news, fake science, fake photographs and videos, and fake people in the form of trolls and social bots. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the threat that such online fakes pose to the acquisition of knowledge. I argue that fakes can interfere with one or more of the truth, belief, and warrant conditions on knowledge. I devote most of my attention to the effects of (...)
- Consequences of Online Misinformation on COVID-19: Two Potential Pathways and Disparity by eHealth Literacy.Hye Kyung Kim & Edson C. Tandoc - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.The COVID-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented threat to global human wellbeing, and the proliferation of online misinformation during this critical period amplifies the challenge. This study examines consequences of exposure to online misinformation about COVID-19 preventions. Using a three-wave panel survey involving 1,023 residents in Singapore, the study found that exposure to online misinformation prompts engagement in self-reported misinformed behaviors such as eating more garlic and regularly rinsing nose with saline, while discouraging evidence-based prevention behaviors such as social distancing. This (...)
- Inconvenient Truth and Inductive Risk in Covid-19 Science.Eli I. Lichtenstein - 2022 - Philosophy of Medicine 3 (1):1-25.To clarify the proper role of values in science, focusing on controversial expert responses to Covid-19, this article examines the status of (in)convenient hypotheses. Polarizing cases like health experts downplaying mask efficacy to save resources for healthcare workers, or scientists dismissing “accidental lab leak” hypotheses in view of potential xenophobia, plausibly involve modifying evidential standards for (in)convenient claims. Societies could accept that scientists handle (in)convenient claims just like nonscientists, and give experts less political power. Or societies could hold scientists to (...)
- Memes, Misinformation, and Political Meaning.Michael P. Lynch - 2022 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (1):38-56.Are most people sincere when they share misinformation and conspiracies online? This question, while natural and important, is difficult to answer for obvious reasons. But it also applies poorly to one of the main vehicles for misinformation—memes. And it can be ambiguous; as a result, we should be mindful of two distinctions. First, a distinction between belief and a related propositional attitude, commitment. And second, the distinction between the propositional content of an attitude and what I will call its political (...)
- Manipulative Machines.Jessica Pepp, Rachel Sterken, Matthew McKeever & Eliot Michaelson - 2022 - In Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.), The Philosophy of Online Manipulation. Routledge. pp. 91-107.The aim of this chapter is to explore various ways of thinking about the concept of manipulation in order to capture both current and potentially future instances of machine manipulation, manipulation on the part of everything from the Facebook advertising algorithm to super-intelligent AGI. Three views are considered: a conservative one, which slightly tweaks extant influence-based theories of manipulation; a dismissive view according to which it doesn't matter much if machines are literally manipulative, provided we can classify them as so (...)
- Wrong on the Internet: Why some common prescriptions for addressing the spread of misinformation online don’t work.Isaac Record & Boaz Miller - 2022 - Communique 105:22-27.Leading prescriptions for addressing the spread of fake news, misinformation, and other forms of epistemically toxic content online target either the platform or platform users as a single site for intervention. Neither approach attends to the intense feedback between people, posts, and platforms. Leading prescriptions boil down to the suggestion that we make social media more like traditional media, whether by making platforms take active roles as gatekeepers, or by exhorting individuals to behave more like media professionals. Both approaches are (...)
- Everybody lies: deception levels in various domains of life.Kristina Šekrst - 2022 - Biosemiotics (2).The goal of this paper is to establish a hierarchical level of deception which does not apply only to humans and non-human animals, but also to the rest of the living world, including plants. We will follow the hierarchical categorization of deception, set forth by Mitchell (1986), in which the first level of deception starts with mimicry, while the last level of deception includes learning and intentionality, usually attributed to primates. We will show how such a hierarchy can be attributed (...)
- Information and misinformation about climate change: lessons from Brazil.Heslley Machado Silva - 2022 - Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 22:51-56.There is a growing movement in online social networks and within some governments to deny the long-established scientific consensus regarding climate change. Scientific research has shown that a series of climatic events in Latin America, and especially in Brazil, are being exacerbated by global warming. These events have had a profound impact on populations. Disruptions to Brazilian rainfall patterns with their devastating environmental and economic effects on agriculture have been directly linked with Amazonian deforestation. Furthermore, the Bolsonaro government, with its (...)
- Is COVID-19 Immune to Misinformation? A Brief Overview.Sana Ali, Atiqa Khalid & Erum Zahid - 2021 - Asian Bioethics Review 13 (2):255-277.During the current COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation is a major challenge, raising several social and psychological concerns. This article highlights the prevailing misinformation as an outbreak containing hoaxes, myths, and rumours. In comparison to traditional media, online media platforms facilitate misinformation even more widely. To further affirm this ethical concern, the researchers cite relevant studies demonstrating the role of new media in misinformation and its potential consequences. Besides other significant psychosocial impacts, such as xenophobia, psychological distress, LGBT rights violation, gender-based violence, (...)
- Beyond Fake News: Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation, by Justin P. McBrayer. [REVIEW]Dylan Small Anderson & Ted Shear - 2021 - Teaching Philosophy 44 (4):553-556.
- Different types of COVID-19 misinformation have different emotional valence on Twitter.Anja Bechmann, Ida A. Nissen, Jessica G. Walter & Marina Charquero-Ballester - 2021 - Big Data and Society 8 (2).The spreading of COVID-19 misinformation on social media could have severe consequences on people's behavior. In this paper, we investigated the emotional expression of misinformation related to the COVID-19 crisis on Twitter and whether emotional valence differed depending on the type of misinformation. We collected 17,463,220 English tweets with 76 COVID-19-related hashtags for March 2020. Using Google Fact Check Explorer API we identified 226 unique COVID-19 false stories for March 2020. These were clustered into six types of misinformation. Applying the (...)
- Misinformation and Intentional Deception: A Novel Account of Fake News.Michel Croce & Tommaso Piazza - 2021 - In Maria Silvia Vaccarezza & Nancy Snow (eds.), Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media: Ethical and Epistemic Issues. Routledge.This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does (...)
- Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation About COVID-19: Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Anxiety, Depression and Exposure to and Trust in Information Sources.David De Coninck, Thomas Frissen, Koen Matthijs, Leen D’Haenens, Grégoire Lits, Olivier Champagne-Poirier, Marie-Eve Carignan, Marc D. David, Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel, Sébastien Salerno & Melissa Généreux - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.While COVID-19 spreads aggressively and rapidly across the globe, many societies have also witnessed the spread of other viral phenomena like misinformation, conspiracy theories, and general mass suspicions about what is really going on. This study investigates how exposure to and trust in information sources, and anxiety and depression, are associated with conspiracy and misinformation beliefs in eight countries/regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected in an online survey fielded from May 29, 2020 to June 12, 2020, resulting in (...)
- Misinformation in the Information Space of Ukrainian Society during the Covid-19 Pandemic.Iryna Denysenko, Olena Skalatska & Oleg Parkhitko - 2021 - Postmodern Openings 12 (3):230-244.The specificity of misinformation about Covid-19 which was outspread in the media landscape of Ukrainian society was demonstrated in the article. The authors relying on the basics of postmodern theory within interdisciplinary discourse trace the means of forming misinformation and its influence on changing worldview landmarks of humanity. The authors underline that information in the postmodern conception of Jean Baudrillard is also capable to destroy its own content, communication and social ground. Misinformation about Covid-19 is «a stage setting of communication» (...)
- Animal deception and the content of signals.Don Fallis & Peter J. Lewis - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 87 (C):114-124.In cases of animal mimicry, the receiver of the signal learns the truth that he is either dealing with the real thing or with a mimic. Thus, despite being a prototypical example of animal deception, mimicry does not seem to qualify as deception on the traditional definition, since the receiver is not actually misled. We offer a new account of propositional content in sender-receiver games that explains how the receiver is misled by mimicry. We show that previous accounts of deception, (...)
- Online Misinformation and “Phantom Patterns”: Epistemic Exploitation in the Era of Big Data.Megan Fritts & Frank Cabrera - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 60 (1):57-87.In this paper, we examine how the availability of massive quantities of data i.e., the “Big Data” phenomenon, contributes to the creation, spread, and harms of online misinformation. Specifically, we argue that a factor in the problem of online misinformation is the evolved human instinct to recognize patterns. While the pattern-recognition instinct is a crucial evolutionary adaptation, we argue that in the age of Big Data, these capacities have, unfortunately, rendered us vulnerable. Given the ways in which online media outlets (...)
- “Bad News” in Herodotos and Thoukydides: misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda.Donald Lateiner - 2021 - Journal of Ancient History 9 (1):53-99.Herodotos and Thoukydides report on many occasions that kings, polis leaders, and other politicians speak and behave in ways that unintentionally announce or analyze situations incorrectly (misinformation). Elsewhere, they represent as facts knowingly false constructs or “fake news” (disinformation), or they slant data in ways that advance a cause personal or public (propaganda, true or false). Historians attempt to or claim to acquaint audiences with a truer fact situation and to identify subjects’ motives for distortion such as immediate personal advantage, (...)
- Echoes of covid misinformation.Neil Levy - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (5):931-948.Public support for responses to the coronavirus pandemic has sharply diverged on partisan lines in many countries, with conservatives tending to oppose lockdowns, social distancing, mask mandates and vaccines, and liberals far more supportive. This polarization may arise from the way in which the attitudes of each side is echoed back to them, especially on social media. In this paper, I argue that echo chambers are not to blame for this polarization, even if they are causally responsible for it. They (...)
- Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation.Sander van der Linden, William P. McClanahan, Fatih Uenal, Manon Berriche, Jon Roozenbeek & Melisa Basol - 2021 - Big Data and Society 8 (1).Misinformation about the novel coronavirus is a pressing societal challenge. Across two studies, one preregistered, we assess the efficacy of two ‘prebunking’ interventions aimed at improving people’s ability to spot manipulation techniques commonly used in COVID-19 misinformation across three different languages. We find that Go Viral!, a novel five-minute browser game, increases the perceived manipulativeness of misinformation about COVID-19, improves people’s attitudinal certainty in their ability to spot misinformation and reduces self-reported willingness to share misinformation with others. The first two (...)
- Three contextual dimensions of information on social media: lessons learned from the COVID-19 infodemic.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23:79–86.The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need to post content (...)
- Sharing (mis) information on social networking sites. An exploration of the norms for distributing content authored by others.Lavinia Marin - 2021 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3):363-372.This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...)
- Misinformation and the Limits of Individual Responsibility.Boyd Millar - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (12):8-21.The issue of how best to combat the negative impacts of misinformation distributed via social media hangs on the following question: are there methods that most individuals can reasonably be expected to employ that would largely protect them from the negative impact that encountering misinformation on social media would otherwise have on their beliefs? If the answer is “yes,” then presumably individuals bear significant responsibility for those negative impacts; and, further, presumably there are feasible educational remedies for the problem of (...)
- Science, misinformation and digital technology during the Covid-19 pandemic.Aníbal Monasterio Astobiza - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-6.Three interdependent factors are behind the current Covid-19 pandemic distorted narrative: (1) science´s culture of “publish or perish”, (2) misinformation spread by traditional media and social digital media and (3) distrust of technology for tracing contacts and its privacy-related issues. In this short paper, I wish to tackle how these three factors have added up to give rise to a negative public understanding of science in times of a health crisis, such as the current Covid-19 pandemic and finally, how to (...)
- The case for tracking misinformation the way we track disease.Joe Smyser, Jennifer Sittig & Erika Bonnevie - 2021 - Big Data and Society 8 (1).While public health organizations can detect disease spread, few can monitor and respond to real-time misinformation. Misinformation risks the public’s health, the credibility of institutions, and the safety of experts and front-line workers. Big Data, and specifically publicly available media data, can play a significant role in understanding and responding to misinformation. The Public Good Projects uses supervised machine learning to aggregate and code millions of conversations relating to vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic broadly, in real-time. Public health researchers supervise (...)
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