Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology

Item Type

Language

English

Abstract

A familiar criticism of Donald Trump is that, in watching only Fox News and similar news sources, he is creating a dangerous echo chamber for himself. Echo chambers are said to be responsible for a host of today’s problems, including the degradation of democracy. This diagnosis is fundamentally incorrect, and this chapter examines the two dominant explanations of the distinctively epistemic problem with echo chambers and shows that each is wanting. Echo chambers, by themselves, are not epistemically problematic. Echo chambers are characterized in purely structural terms, but what is needed to capture what is wrong with Trump’s exposure to only Fox News is content-sensitive. It is not that Trump is relying on a single source for news, but that he is relying on one that is unreliable. Finally, the chapter calls attention to the challenge of social media bots and the role of non-ideal social epistemology.

Subject

Fake news
Social epistemology
Bots
Diversity
Echo chamber
Lack of awareness
Lack of independence

Publication Title

Publication Year

2021

Publication Date

2021

Source

University Press Scholarship

License

ISBN

978-0-19-886397-7

Publication Place

Oxford

Citer cette ressource

Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology, dans Science & Ignorance, consulté le 21 Novembre 2024, https://ignorancestudies.inist.fr/s/science-ignorance/item/5056

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