Fake news is counterfeit news

ABSTRACT

Fake news poses a serious threat to knowledge and democracy. In order to address this threat, it is important to understand exactly what fake news is. After surveying the various definitions that have been proposed in the philosophical literature, we argue that fake news is best understood as counterfeit news. A story is genuine news if and only if it has gone through the standard modern journalistic process involving professionally trained reporters, fact checkers, and editors. And a story is counterfeit news if and only if it is not genuine news, but is presented as genuine news, with the intention and propensity to deceive. This analysis is a contribution to ‘systems-oriented social epistemology’ (Goldman, Alvin I. 2011. “A Guide to Social Epistemology.” In Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, edited by Alvin I. Goldman, and Dennis Whitcomb, 11–37. New York: Oxford University Press). Various social institutions, such as science and journalism, provide important epistemic benefits to society. But unscrupulous agents are often motivated to leverage the epistemic authority of these institutions by counterfeiting them. People can thereby be misled and/or lose faith in these institutions. Thus, society may suffer significant epistemic costs when such counterfeits proliferate.

KEYWORDS:

• Fake news
• deception
• conceptual analysis
• social epistemology
• counterfeits

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Don Fallis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1385-8009

Kay Mathiesen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1044-1227

Notes

1 The term fake news does go back at least as far as the 1930s. American newspapers applied it to propaganda produced by Joseph Goebbels that was disguised as radio news reports (see Lepore 2018, 454).

2 This story did not originate with Drobata, but his website made it popular (see Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016b). Even though this story was completely made-up, it might have been true, for all Drobota knew, that the Pope endorsed Trump. However, knowing that the claim in question is false is probably not necessary for deception (see Mahon 2015, §3.1).

3 As it happens, the Macedonian teenagers may have been supported by people who did intend to deceive the public (see Silverman et al. 2018). Nevertheless, the Macedonian teenagers themselves are only in it for the money generated by clicks. Also, there are purveyors of fake news who are not influenced by political motivations at all (see Silverman and Singer-Vine 2016b).

4 Of course, fake news is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. For instance, fake news about the Trump-Russia investigation has gotten traction among Democrats (see Beauchamp 2017).

5 In addition to being intended to deceive, we require that fake news actually have the propensity to deceive (see Fallis 2016, 338; Gelfert 2018, 102–03). After all, if someone unreasonably tries to pass off a completely unconvincing fake—such as a child trying to pay for candy with Monopoly money, does it really count as a counterfeit?

6 Strictly speaking, even though having a certain history of production is what makes something a genuine X, people can be fooled by counterfeit Xs even if they do not know that this is what makes something a genuine X. They just have to know that there are genuine Xs (coins, Swiss Army knives, news stories, etc.) and how to identify them. Counterfeiters fool people by faking the indicators of genuineness that people look for.

7 That United States currency has monetary value is what John Searle (1995, 26) calls a ‘social fact.’ Certain bits of printed paper and round bits of metal produced by the United States Mint count as legal tender in the context of the United States economic system simply because we collectively treat them as valuable. In contrast, given the evidence gathering and fact checking that produced it, a genuine news story has epistemic value whether or not anyone treats it as having epistemic value. Thus, a closer analogy would be between fake news and counterfeit versions of brands that are valued for their quality. For example, a cheaply produced army knife made to look like a Victorinox AG Swiss Army Knife trades on the fact that Victorinox knives are produced through a process that results in knives of superior quality.

8 The opinion pages in newspapers are clearly not fake news. But cable news outlets are not always careful to clearly distinguish when they are offering news produced by careful journalism and when they are just offering opinion. Also, advertising in newspapers is sometimes made to look like content, and some readers may not notice the fine print identifying it as advertising (see Launder 2013). If such muddying of the waters is done intentionally and has the propensity to deceive, it might count as fake news on our definition.

9 In addition to making stories more convincing by mimicking the traditional news media, purveyors of fake news also use other forms of deception. For instance, they use bots to make it seem like the stories have been viewed or endorsed by more people than really have viewed or endorsed them (see Lazer et al. 2018, 1095).

10 Thus, much like a king snake mimicking the appearance of a coral snake, even though their stories are not intentional disinformation, they are arguably adaptive disinformation (see Fallis 2016, 340).

11 This may be because people like reading and sharing extreme claims, and extreme claims are more likely to be false. Indeed, David Hume (1977 [1748], 78) thought that this feature of human psychology explained the spread of reports of miracles:

The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events. And this goes so far, that even those who cannot enjoy this pleasure immediately, nor can believe those miraculous events, of which they are informed, yet love to partake of the satisfaction at second-hand or by rebound, and place a pride and delight in exciting the admiration of others.

12 Furthermore, even if a counterfeit news story is true, there is still an epistemic downside to believing it. Basically, your justified true belief is gettierized. Your justification for believing the story is not appropriately connected to the truth of the story. So, you do not know that it is true.

13 Some philosophers (e.g., Véliz 2019, §5) have argued that, in order to promote free speech online, people should be allowed to use false names. But these false names should be known to be false names. So, this proposal is not a defense of counterfeit news.

14 Admittedly, Trump's claims are often presented as what ‘many people are saying’ rather than as what he is saying (see Johnson 2016). But either way, they are not presented as having gone through the standard modern journalistic process.

15 There is one possible way in which Trump might count as a purveyor of fake news. Suppose that he recounts a story and falsely claims that he read it on a news website. In that case, he would be falsely purporting that the story went through the standard modern journalistic process. If he actually did read the story on a website, it might still be fake news. But in that case, he would just be passing on fake news (wittingly or unwittingly). His actions did not make it fake news.

16 An anonymous reviewer plausibly suggests that a story would not be effective satire if it did not fool anyone at all. It is not clear to us though that satirists must have such a goal.

17 Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel K. Sterken (forthcoming, section 2) have recently and independently offered a definition of fake news that also contrasts it with genuine news produced by a standard journalistic process. They claim that fake news is ‘the broad spread of stories treated by those who spread them as having been produced by standard journalistic practices, but that have not in fact been produced by such practices.’ It is worth noting a couple of points of (apparent) disagreement between their definition and ours.

First, Pepp et al. emphasize that whether a story counts as fake news can change over time. We think that this is correct, but that it is consistent with our definition. A story might start out as neither fake news nor genuine news. For instance, it could have been created by someone with no intention to deceive, such as a conspiracy theorist posting on Twitter under own his name or a satirist working for The Onion. Later the story may become fake news. For instance, it could get the attention of a Macedonian teenager on the lookout for good headlines who republishes the story on a fraudulent website. And then the story might even become genuine news. For instance, it could get the attention of a professional journalist working for the New York Times who then investigates it, verifies it, and republishes it.

Second, Pepp et al. seem to allow for cases where it is a complete accident that a story is treated as genuine news (as when someone is fooled by a story in The Onion). We think that this is incorrect and our definition is designed to rule out such cases. If a story is not intended to look like genuine news, there must at least be a mechanism that reinforces this appearance.

18 By offering a new definition of fake news that (a) captures intuitions about cases and (b) explains why this particular phenomenon is so dangerous, we take ourselves to have responded to Habgood-Coote's criticisms of the utility of the term.

19 For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this work, we would like to thank Candice Delmas, Tony Doyle, Paul Faulkner, Axel Gelfert, Ken Herold, David Lazer, Regina Rini, Patrick Rysiew, Sille Obelitz Søe, Roy Sorensen, Jonna Vance, Dan Zelinski, two anonymous reviewers, and audiences at the Department of Philosophy, Chapman University and at the Sedona Salon, Philosophy in the Public Interest.