Your sibling strikes up a conversation at the dinner table and tells you that Hilary Clinton is part of a child trafficking ring that operates out of a Washington pizzeria based on an email correspondence linking the two. This is the Pizzagate conspiracy driven by misinformation.
As our capacity to disseminate information increases, the prevalence of misinformation and fake news makes its way on to the scene. False stories about Leonardo DiCaprio donating $10 million to Ukraine and Rupaul claiming that Trump touched him inappropriately were shared on various social media outlets and fashioned as newsworthy truths.
If news outlets report on these matters and social media users share this information under false pretense, then the spread of misinformation appears to be problematic because it undermines our communicative practices.
After learning about the Pizzagate email correspondence, Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington to investigate the child trafficking ring and fired a rifle inside the pizzeria to break a lock on a door in pursuit of his search. We rely on these communicative practices to convey information and spread the truth, but these sources of misinformation seem to undermine our institutional and interpersonal trust and may require a unique solution as Regina Rini, of York University and the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition, suggests.
In today’s age, information is at our fingertips and the majority of what we know and believe comes from being told by others. I know that my birthday is on July 3 because my parents told me so. You rely on and believe what a stranger says in providing you with directions, and you come to justifiably believe that class is cancelled because your friend informs you.
Given that most of what we know about this world comes from being told by others, why is it that we believe what we’re told? What makes telling a distinct source of information—one that we can adamantly rely upon? As a philosopher at the University of Miami, I work on the epistemology of telling and examine the various ways we can gain knowledge through our communicative exchanges. Believing what you’re told is much like believing an oncoming motorist will yield at a stop sign. You have reason to believe that the motorist will yield because of the rules that govern traffic. Similar to how there are rules that govern traffic, so too are there rules that govern our communicative exchanges. For instance, you justifiably believe the news report of the presidential election outcome because you believe there are conventions governing how they report on such matters. We have reason to believe what we’re told because there are rules that govern our exchanges.
The prevalence of misinformation isn’t a unique problem for our communicative practices. It is a feature of our practices that we can tell the truth, lie, or be mistaken about the content of what we say. Anna Delvey, the inspiration for the Netflix series “Inventing Anna,” lied about being a German heiress while swindling Manhattan’s elite. What Delvey and other swindlers do is nothing out of the ordinary—they rely on the collaborative rules that govern our communicative exchanges to deceive their interlocutors. Misinformation is just another form of deceptive communication that relies on these rules. The presence of misinformation just entails that these collaborative rules are still operative and thriving.
The fact that people do lie, misinform, and deceive means that there is a precedent in our communicative exchanges to tell the truth. Someone who lies can only get away with deceiving their interlocutor if they mask their claim as the truth. Systems and sources that misinform can only get away with deceiving others if they mask it as credible information.
Reflecting on what makes telling a distinct source of information reveals to us that misinformation isn’t a unique problem for our communicative practices. We should deal with it the same way we deal with other forms of deceptive communication—place ourselves in a position to monitor, detect, and assess another speaker’s claims. It is when we stop trusting and relying upon our communicative practices that we run into trouble.
Nicolas Nicola is a graduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. Read more about the inaugural “Op-ed Challenge.”
