We are happy to welcome Endre Begby to discuss with us ideas related to his new SSHRC Project on "Belief Formation in Antagonistic Information Environments", and his recent book, Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology.
Following the seminar, there will be a small reception on the 4th floor.
The phenomenon of “Fake News” has recently drawn the attention of the concerned public as well as philosophers and other academics. Standard attempts to throw light on this phenomenon tend to be structured around some seemingly natural assumptions about sender and receiver. The sender broadcasts the Fake News because they want to trick their audience into believing false things. Being naturally gullible, receivers mistake the Fake News for the real thing, and form the mistaken beliefs accordingly.
While intuitive, this explanatory scheme does face some problems: lots of Fake News is manifestly bogus; if the intent was really to persuade, shouldn’t we expect producers of Fake News to do a better job in maintaining a veneer of plausibility? And given how implausible much of Fake News is, surely we can’t suppose that people are in general so gullible as to believe much or even a significant fraction of it.
This paper aims to lay out a different account of the Fake News phenomenon, structured around very different assumptions. What if the foundational aim of Fake News not to persuade anyone but simply to change the signal-to-noise ratio in our information economy?
Here’s how this would work. Any society depends on healthy channels of information sharing: information sharing is key to public deliberation and effective decision making. The information is the signal. At all times, there is a certain amount of noise mixed in with the signal: this noise could arise from transmission error, from confusion, from misdirection, or from distraction. Nonetheless, the admixture of noise is manageable so long as the signal-to-noise ratio is reasonably favorable. It doesn’t take much effort to find the information.
Pumping significant amounts of manufactured noise into the information economy will render the retrieval of the signal more effortful and more uncertain. The expected utility of spending any amount of time engaging in public information sharing and deliberation will accordingly go down. Over a longer term, we should expect to see a significant degree of news-fatigue, accompanied by a growing degree of cynicism about the value of engaging in public deliberation and information sharing.
Creating Fake News fit to persuade a significant number of people is hard. On this alternative account, Fake News could accomplish a number of subversive aims in an efficient, low-cost manner: in particular, it could contribute to undermining our trust in important public institutions and get in the way of effective information sharing, deliberation, and decision-making. In doing so, it contributes to a wide-scale partial disenfranchisement of citizens, whose political participation depends on easy access to high-quality information.