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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 (458)
- Databases (99 | 52)
- The Information Economy (53)
- The Infosphere (45)
- Information Theory (302)
- Information Ethics (285)
- Physics of Information (120)
- Information-Based Accounts of Mental Content (175)
- Ontology of Information Artifacts (32)
- Genetic Information (36)
- Biological Information (286)
- Biomedical Information (76 | 14)
- Quantum Information (282)
- Logic and Information (237)
- Philosophy of Information, Misc (156)
Contents
148 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 148 |
- How online misinformation works: a costly signalling perspective.Neri Marsili - manuscriptThis chapter explores how online communication, particularly on social media, reshapes the reputational incentives that motivate speakers to communicate truthfully. Drawing on costly signalling theory (CST), it examines how online contexts alter the social mechanisms that sustain honest communication. Key characteristics of online spaces are identified and discussed, namely (i) the presence of novel speech acts like reposting, (ii) the gamification of communication, (iii) information overload, (iv) the presence of anonymous and unaccountable sources and (v) the increased reach and persistence (...)
- (1 other version)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 (...)
- Functional Malice vs. Epistemic Consequence: Defining Disinformation in an Age of Automated Deception.Ramin Rambod - manuscriptThis paper addresses the central conceptual challenge in social epistemology: defining disinformation. We critically examine two dominant models, Fallis's functional model and Simion's purely epistemic model, and evaluate their utility in several real-world scenarios, including the Backfire Effect, the spread of Bullshit, and the debate over the epistemic status of Large Language Models (LLMs). Fallis's functional model defines disinformation as content with a teleological function of misleading, successfully covering complex forms like true and adaptive disinformation, but failing to classify content (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Weaponizing Conspiracy Theories.Chris Ranalli - manuscriptA popular idea about conspiracy theorists is that they are purveyors of misinformation. However, this idea fails to appreciate the fact that there are different species of conspiracy theorists, each with different pro-relations to conspiracy theories. Some are theorists who posit conspiracies as the best explanation of one or more event. They are traditional conspiracy theorists. Despite their explanatory aims, their theories can be broadcasted and shared, leading people to believe them on the basis of testimony alone. There are conspiracy (...)
- (1 other version)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
- Do It Yourself Content and the Wisdom of the Crowds.Dallas Amico-Korby, Maralee Harrell & David Danks - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-29.Many social media platforms enable (nearly) anyone to post (nearly) anything. One clear downside of this permissiveness is that many people appear bad at determining who to trust online. Hacks, quacks, climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, and election deniers have all gained massive followings in these free markets of ideas, and many of their followers seem to genuinely trust them. At the same time, there are many cases in which people seem to reliably determine who to trust online. Consider, for (...)
- Norm Violations in Online Discourse: Epistemic and Civil Foundations for Platform Design and Moderation.Aviv Barnoy, Ori Freiman, Arnon Keren & Boaz Miller - forthcoming - Social Epistemology.Fostering healthy online conversations is essential to the integrity of public discourse, yet the norms that guide such conversations remain contested and difficult to enforce. This paper develops and empirically grounds a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding and addressing online toxicity. Building on the distinction between epistemic and civil norms, we argue that norm violations are the proper target of moderation. While this paper is primarily conceptual, it is informed by empirical observations drawn from a collaboration with a platform (...)
- Against Publishing Without Belief: Fake News, Misinformation, and Perverse Publishing Incentives.Rima Basu - forthcoming - In Sanford C. Goldberg & Mark Walker, 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 (...)
- Is fake news a threat to deliberative democracy? Partisanship, inattentiveness, and deliberative capacities.Jonathan Benson - forthcoming - Social Theory and Practice.Deliberative democracy is increasingly criticised as out of touch with the realities of partisan politics. This paper considers the rise of fake and hyperpartisan news as one source of this scepticism. While popular accounts often blame such content on citizens’ political biases and motivated reasoning, I survey the empirical evidence and argue that it does not support strong claims about the inability of citizens to live up to deliberative ideals. Instead, much of this research is shown to support the deliberative (...)
- Speculative risks of effectively combating misinformation: echo chambers and self-censorship.Bartek Chomanski - forthcoming - Synthese.This paper makes the following argument: (1) If there is political bias in implementing misinformation-countering measures, then the measures will asymmetrically target the cluster of misinformation associated with the disfavored side. (2) Given such asymmetric targeting, it is likely that the measures will induce significant trust disparity between the sides, and cause self-censorship and withdrawal by people supporting the disfavored side. (3) If there is trust disparity in an epistemic environment, then it is likely that the environment will degenerate into (...)
- Disinformation as weaponised ignorance: A hybrid teleological–epistemic framework.R. Rambod, Samadi Hadi & Eslami Shahla - forthcoming - Journal of Cyberspace Studies.Background: Contemporary debates on disinformation are dominated by two influential approaches: Fallis’s functional (teleological) model and Simion’s purely epistemic Disinformation as Ignorance-Generating Content (DIGC) model. Their respective strengths and weaknesses become salient in real-world settings such as the Backfire Effect, the spread of bullshit, and disputes about the epistemic status of Large Language Models (LLMs). Aims: We aim to (i) critically evaluate the explanatory and classificatory utility of the functional and purely epistemic models across these scenarios, (ii) diagnose key failure (...)
- A Functional Analysis of Self-Deception.Krstić Vladimir - forthcoming - Journal of American Philosophical Association.Our received theories of self-deception are problematic. The traditional view, according to which self-deceivers intend to deceive themselves, generates paradoxes: you cannot deceive yourself intentionally because you know your own plans and intentions. Non-traditional views argue that self-deceivers act (sub-)intentionally but deceive themselves unintentionally and unknowingly. Some non-traditionalists even say that self-deception involves a mere error (of self-knowledge). The non-traditional approach does not generate paradoxes, but it entails that people can deceive themselves by accident or by mistake, which is rather (...)
- Collapsing words and worlds; ontological plurality and structural reasoning.Benjamin James - 2026 - Internet Archive.We keep learning the hard way that using the same words doesn’t necessarily mean we’re pointing at the same thing. Two people will say “truth,” “harm,” “freedom,” “safety,” “trauma,” “intelligence,” and feel aligned for a moment, but then their conversation snaps and turns hostile. When you look closely, the turn isn’t mysterious. It happens because their words were doing social work, not referential work. They created the feeling of agreement without the substance of shared reference. Their terms functioned like a (...)
- The effects of beliefs on correcting misinformation in memory.Silvy H. P. Collin & Michal Klincewicz - 2025 - Journal of Cognitive Psychology 37:1–19.We are faced with false information (misinformation) and corrections regularly. Typically, we have no problem correcting misinformation. However, there are individual differences in how effective people are in correcting misinformation and in the scope and magnitude of the influence of misinformation after correction. Understanding individual differences can shed light on the mechanisms that underlie these effects. Here, we asked participants to read fictitious news articles that were later corrected to test their memory of each and identified patterns in user generated (...)
- The Problem of Disinformation: A Critical Approach.Tim Hayward - 2025 - Social Epistemology 39 (1):1-23.The term disinformation is generally used to refer to information that is false and harmful, by contrast with misinformation (false but harmless) and malinformation (harmful but true); disinformation is also generally understood to involve coordination and to be intentionally false and/or harmful. However, particular studies rarely apply all these criteria when discussing cases. Doing so would involve applying at least three distinct problem framings: an epistemic framing to detect that a proposition in circulation is false, a behavioural framing to detect (...)
- The Limits of Machine Learning Models of Misinformation.Adrian K. Yee - 2025 - AI and Society 40 (1):5871-5884.Judgments of misinformation are made relative to the informational preferences of the communities making them. However, informational standards change over time, inducing distribution shifts that threaten the adequacy of machine learning models of misinformation. After articulating five kinds of distribution shifts, three solutions for enhancing success are discussed: larger static training sets, social engineering, and dynamic sampling. I argue that given the idiosyncratic ontology of misinformation, the first option is inadequate, the second is unethical, and thus the third is superior. (...)
- The Limits of Epidemiological Models of Misinformation.Adrian K. Yee - 2025 - Synthese 206 (158):1-23.Empirical social sciences routinely model misinformation as exhibiting dynamics analogous to vaccinable diseases or contagious outbreaks, as in inoculation theory and other epidemiological models. However, idiosyncratic features of the social construction of misinformation violate the biological analogy in significant ways, rendering these models far weaker in effect size, predictive accuracy, and explanatory power than has been claimed. Four arguments are discussed regarding problems with the ontology of misinformation posited in these models, methods for measuring misinformation, individuation of mechanisms, and application (...)
- What makes audiences resilient to disinformation? Integrating micro, meso, and macro factors based on a systematic literature review.Jülide Kont, Wim Elving, Marcel Broersma & Çiğdem Bozdağ - 2025 - Communications 50 (2):534-555.Despite increased attention since 2015, there is little consensus on why audiences believe or share disinformation. In our study, we propose a shift in analytical perspective by applying the concept of resilience. Through a systematic literature review (n = 95), we identify factors that have been linked to individuals’ resilience and vulnerability to disinformation thus far. Our analysis reveals twelve factors: thinking styles, political ideology, worldview and beliefs, pathologies, knowledge, emotions, (social) media use, demographics, perceived control, trust, culture, and environment. (...)
- We Should Move on from Signalling-Based Analyses of Biological Deception.Vladimir Krstić - 2025 - Erkenntnis 90 (2):545-565.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. (...)
- (1 other version)Disinformation is for degrading the value of information, not confirming falsehoods.Clayton Littlejohn - 2025 - Philosophical Studies.According to a recent account of disinformation, disinformation is content that “generates ignorance” (Simion 2024a; 2024b). The view improves upon previous accounts that focused upon the potential for disinformation to induce false belief, overlooking its role in generating ignorance by inducing doubt. While this proposal gives us a broader understanding of what disinformation can be, it retains the idea that disinformation functions as evidence that incrementally confirms falsehoods. Thus, this approach implies (in line with previous views) that when disinformation is (...)
- Hacker la Réalité: Guide opérationnel pour le prochain Christ.Réjean McCormick - 2025 - Québec: Amazon KDP (self-published). Edited by Réjean McCormick.Ce livre propose une anthropologie messianique et une éthique de l’action sous le motif du chef d’orchestre du réel : dans un monde dissonant, l’autorité véritable consiste à harmoniser des forces éparses plutôt qu’à les dominer. Le cadre défend qu’un Logos opératoire peut être rendu effectif par un double mouvement : (1) un discernement qui accueille signes, intuitions et coïncidences tout en les éprouvant au critère constant de l’amour/justice, afin d’éviter les dérives pseudo-spirituelles ; (2) une stratégie d’action où le (...)
- Conceptual misinformation.James H. McIntyre - 2025 - Synthese 206 (4):1-19.Misinformation is paradigmatically false. However, a great deal of contemporary political content misleads by invoking defective concepts, even when the content is true. This paper offers an account of conceptual misinformation, according to which the use of a concept constitutes misinformation when that concept both fails to adequately capture the world’s structure and receives uptake. Central to my account is the metaphysical notion of “joint-carving” concepts—those that capture the world’s structure and figure into good explanations. This notion can be extended (...)
- On Amplification.Eliot Michaelson, Rachel Sterken & Jessica Pepp - 2025 - In Patrick Connolly, Sandy Goldberg & Jennifer Saul, Conversations Online: Explorations in Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press. pp. 400-420.Online speech is structured rather differently than offline speech. One important aspect of this, we argue, is that online speech environments are amplificatory. That is, these speech environments are designed to make the speech act of amplification easy, make amplification of others’ speech a predictable side-effect of one’s own, or both. In this essay, we first clarify what the speech act of amplification amounts to. Then we investigate the design choices of our present online speech environments which serve to promote (...)
- Navigating the Fake News Environment: Enhancing Media Literacy in the Digital Age.T. V. Rodrigues - 2025 - International Journal for Innovation Education and Research 13 (1):18-39.The proliferation of fake news in our time presents a major challenge to public discourse and informed decision-making. As social media platforms expose individuals to vast amounts of information, distinguishing between credible content and misinformation has become increasingly difficult. This paper examines the mechanisms that facilitate the spread of fake news, including clickbait headlines and emotional manipulation, which exploit cognitive biases and contribute to the virality of misleading narratives. Emphasizing the urgent need for enhanced media literacy, the study advocates for (...)
- Ciudadanía digital y bulos. Respuesta desde la ética cívica.Leonardo Suárez Montoya - 2025 - Dissertation, Department of PhilosophyEsta tesis pretende ofrecer una reflexión desde la filosofía moral a uno de los desórdenes informativos de mayor impacto en la esfera pública, las fake news. Esta mirada alternativa a la ética periodística o a la comunicación política, es la ética cívica. El hilo conductor de este itinerario no será ya la modernización mediática con sus implicaciones en los usuarios, como plantea la teoría de la mediación, sino la tecnologización a través de las redes sociales y de la inteligencia artificial. (...)
- Deception and Self-Deception: A Unified Account.Krstić Vladimir - 2025 - Cambridge University Press.Received theories of self-deception are problematic. The traditional view, according to which self-deceivers intend to deceive themselves, generates paradoxes: you cannot deceive yourself intentionally because you know your own plans and intentions. Non-traditional views argue that self-deceivers act intentionally but deceive themselves unintentionally or that self-deception is not intentional at all. The non-traditional approaches do not generate paradoxes, but they entail that people can deceive themselves by accident or by mistake, which is controversial. The author argues that a functional analysis (...)
- The contextual interplay between advertising and online disinformation: How brands suffer from and amplify deceptive content.Brahim Zarouali - 2025 - Communications 50 (1):149-172.The proliferation of online disinformation has become of major societal concern. Because of online programmatic algorithms, brands may find their ads running on disinformation websites alongside disinformation. In this experimental study (N = 617), we investigate people’s brand-related and news-related responses in this context. Results show that when an advertised brand is displayed on the same webpage as a disinformation article, brand attitude and brand trust are negatively affected; this effect is even more pronounced when the brand is thematically congruent (...)
- From Dezinformatsiya to Disinformation: A Critical Analysis of Strategies and Effect on the Digital Public Sphere.Suania Acampa - 2024 - Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.The book takes a critical look at the phenomenon of disinformation by identifying the historical, technological and human elements that contribute to the current success of disinformation strategies. The author examines the origin of the word "Dezinformatsiya", used by Russian planners in the 1950s, to understand how military strategy has transformed into militarization of information. The book pays particular attention to the power of algorithmic platforms on the selection and dissemination of digital content and their role in the spread of (...)
- The Ecology of (dis-)Engagement in Digital Environments.Emanuele Arielli - 2024 - Topoi 43 (4):1-10.This paper explores some features of the epistemic environment in social media and online communication. We argue that digital environments differ from offline ones in at least two ways: (a) online environments are thoroughly structured and programmed. Every action is defined and limited by the underlying code created by the system’s developers, providing the tools users need to navigate the online space. In contrast, offline environments are open to chance and unpredictability, allowing for events and actions that the system has (...)
- Deepfakes and Dishonesty.Tobias Flattery & Christian B. Miller - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (120):1-24.Deepfakes raise various concerns: risks of political destabilization, depictions of persons without consent and causing them harms, erosion of trust in video and audio as reliable sources of evidence, and more. These concerns have been the focus of recent work in the philosophical literature on deepfakes. However, there has been almost no sustained philosophical analysis of deepfakes from the perspective of concerns about honesty and dishonesty. That deepfakes are potentially deceptive is unsurprising and has been noted. But under what conditions (...)
- 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 (...)
- Synthetic Media Detection, the Wheel, and the Burden of Proof.Keith Raymond Harris - 2024 - Philosophy and Technology 37 (4):1-20.Deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media are widely regarded as serious threats to our knowledge of the world. Various technological responses to these threats have been proposed. The reactive approach proposes to use artificial intelligence to identify synthetic media. The proactive approach proposes to use blockchain and related technologies to create immutable records of verified media content. I argue that both approaches, but especially the reactive approach, are vulnerable to a problem analogous to the ancient problem of the criterion—a (...)
- From the eco-calypse to the infocalypse: the importance of building a new culture for protecting the infosphere.Manh-Tung Ho & Hong-Kong To Nguyen - 2024 - AI and Society 39 (5):2611-2613.In our ever technologically driven and mediatized society, we face the existential risk of falling into an info-calypse as much as an eco-calypse. To complement the list of values of a progressive culture put forth by Harrison (Natl Interest 60:55–65, 2000) and Vuong (Econ Bus Lett 10(3):284–290, 2021), this short essay proposes cultivating a new cultural value of protecting the infosphere. It argues rewarding practices and products that strengthen the integrity of infosphere as part of the newly emerged corporate social (...)
- Manipulation, deception, the victim’s reasoning and her evidence.Vladimir Krstić - 2024 - Analysis 84 (2):267-275.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 (...)
- A Functional Analysis of Human Deception.Vladimir Krstić - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (4):836-854.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, (...)
- “A Place of very Arduous interfaces”. Social Media Platforms as Epistemic Environments with Faulty Interfaces.Lavinia Marin - 2024 - Topoi 43 (5).I argue that the concept of an epistemic interface is a useful one to add to the epistemic ecology toolkit in order to enrich our investigations concerning the complex epistemic phenomena arising on social media. An epistemic interface is defined as any informational interface (be it technical, human or institutional) that facilitates the transfer of epistemic goods from one epistemic environment to its outside, be that another epistemic environment or a person. When assessing the kinds of epistemic environments emerging on (...)
- Sucht oder Autonomie? Neue ExpertInnen im Netz.Nicola Mößner - 2024 - In Rainer Adolphi, Suzana Alpsancar, Susanne Hahn & Matthias Kettner, Philosophische Digitalisierungsforschung: Verantwortung, Verständigung, Vernunft, Macht. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. pp. 197-217.During the Covid-19 pandemic, a significant number of people has seemingly been lured in believing conspiracy theories. Many deliberately disregarded expert advices by virologists and physicians to reduce new infections. This turning away from traditional expert authorities exemplifies the »crisis of expertise« that has been discussed in the philosophy of science for some time, namely that many people seem to have lost their trust in the established authority of expert knowledge and are looking for epistemic alternatives, especially on the Internet (...)
- (1 other version)Conspiracy Theories and the Epistemic Power of Narratives.Daniel Munro - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology.We often turn to comforting stories to distract ourselves from emotionally painful truths. This paper explores a dark side of this tendency. I argue that the way false conspiracy theories are disseminated often involves packaging them as part of narratives that offer comforting alternatives to ugly truths. Furthermore, I argue that the way these narratives arouse and resolve our emotions can be part of what causes people to believe conspiracy theories. This account helps to bring out some general implications about (...)
- 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 (...)
- Political Disagreement, Moral Misinformation, and Affective Polarization.Ritsaart Willem Peter Reimann & Mark Alfano - 2024 - In Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland, Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement. New York, NY: 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 (...)
- 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.".
- Knowledge and Disinformation.Mona Simion - 2024 - Episteme 21 (4):1208-1219.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 (...)
- Cautious Hope Regarding Information, Misinformation, and Disinformation.Sarah M. Stitzlein - 2024 - Philosophy of Education 80 (1):15-23.
- Redefreiheit, Digitalisierung und die Rolle der Philosophie.Micha Werner - 2024 - In Rainer Adolphi, Suzana Alpsancar, Susanne Hahn & Matthias Kettner, Philosophische Digitalisierungsforschung: Verantwortung, Verständigung, Vernunft, Macht. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. pp. 155-196.The ongoing digital transformation of almost all areas of human action and agency calls for a readjustment of the norms that regulate these practices. For example, the digitisation of communicative practices poses new challenges to their functioning. This paper explains some of these challenges and argues that they cannot be met by a normative framework that focuses mainly on defensive (free speech and property) rights. In the context of mediated digital communication, the application of such a framework may even have (...)
- 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 (...)
- Beyond Belief: On Disinformation and Manipulation.Keith Raymond Harris - 2023 - Erkenntnis 90 (2):483-503.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 (...)
- 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 (...)
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