Echo Chambers, Fake News, and Social Epistemology
Item Type
Author
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
Publisher
Source
University Press Scholarship
License
ISBN
978-0-19-886397-7
Publication Place
Oxford