Combating Misinformation in Democracies
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The challenge confronting the informational state of the public is the accelerating spread of misinformation and disinformation on the internet. On Twitter falsehoods spread further and faster than the truth. And, online misinformation and disinformation in a wide variety of forms have created serious issues vis-à-vis public belief and democratic functioning. In response to “fake news”, programmers have built algorithms that aim to judge the veracity of online stories. Researchers explore which features of an article are the most reliable identifiers of fake news. These sorts of tools have some promise as part of the enterprise of social epistemology. But their power to discriminate true stories from false ones has limited reliability. As O’Connor and Weatherall (2019) point out, online misinformation constitutes a kind of arms race. As platforms and programmers and governments develop tools to fight it, the purveyors of misinformation will develop new methods of shaping public belief.
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All ill-informed populace may not be able to effectively represent their interests in a democratic society. It will be necessary for those fighting online misinformation to keep adapting with the best tools and theory available to them. This includes understanding social aspects of knowledge and belief formation. In other words, social epistemology has much to say to those faced with the challenging task of protecting democracy from misinformation. Some recent writers seek to expand the notion of social epistemology by incorporating moral or ethical elements. Miranda Fricker has made significant contributions to this literature. Fricker introduces the notion of “epistemic injustice,” which arises when somebody is wronged in their capacity as a knower – when a person or a social group is unfairly deprived of knowledge because of their lack of adequate access to education or other epistemic resources. Fricker’s work also focuses on two less obvious forms of epistemic injustice. The first is testimonial injustice, which occurs when a speaker is given less credibility than she deserves because the hearer has prejudices about a social group to which the speaker belongs. The second kind is hermeneutical injustice. This occurs when, as a result of a group being socially powerless, members of the group lack the conceptual resources to make sense of certain distinctive social experiences.
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These issues are relevant epistemological ones for those in democratic societies. Epistemic injustices may leave some members of society ill-equipped to engage in the debates that fuel a well-functioning democracy. Testimonial injustice may prevent the spread of important information and perspectives through a community. Misinformation can also pose epistemic threats to democratic functioning. With respect to internet misinformation, we might ask: do we have a right to protection against such misinformation? Is it morally acceptable for internet platforms, or government bodies, to protect public belief by regulating and limiting misinformation? There are deep political and moral issues here. Free speech is protected in most democratic societies, but part of the defense of free speech is that it is crucial for freedom of thought. Once we recognize that human beliefs are deeply social, we might acknowledge that some sorts of speech interfere with our freedom of thought, and in some cases we may need to decide to protect one in lieu of the other.
