The Virtue of Epistemic Trustworthiness and Re-Posting on Social Media
Item Type
Author
Language
English
Abstract
Re-posting fake news on social media exposes others to epistemic risks that include not only false belief but also misguided trust in the source of the fake news. The risk of misguided trust comes from the fact that re-posting is a kind of credentialing; as a new kind of speech-act, re-posting does not yet have established norms and so runs an additional risk of “bent credentialing.” This chapter proposes that other-regarding epistemic virtues can help us mitigate the epistemic risks that come with re-posting—specifically the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness. It further considers how an epistemically trustworthy person should regulate her re-posting behavior in light of the psychological evidence that retracting false beliefs is far more difficult than might be supposed. Behaving in an epistemically trustworthy way requires being responsive to the real risks that our actions expose others to, as well as recognizing the real ways that others depend on us.
Subject
Social media
Fake news
Trustworthiness
Epistemic virtue
Bent credentialing
Bent testimony
Publication Title
Publication Year
2021
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
Source
University Press Scholarship
License
ISBN
978-0-19-886397-7
Publication Place
Oxford