How Virtue Epistemology Can Help in the Fight Against Misinformation

The rapid spread of disinformation and misinformation has proven to have a profound effect on people’s ways of thinking, and thereby having a pernicious effect on, for example, politics and public discussion. Up to now, companies and researchers have offered technical solutions such as debunking or suspending misinformation-spreading accounts. Similarly, the current body of research on misinformation, both in philosophy and in the social sciences, is focused on the features inherent to misinformation itself and its spreaders. This leaves a significant gap in understanding the role of misinformation recipients, which has not been thoroughly explored. To address this gap, I use a virtue epistemological toolkit and empirical analytics work, developing a solution focused on the epistemic characteristics of the users who tend to engage with false content. Specifically, I examine the prevalence of epistemic vices (systematically harmful ways of thinking like closed-mindedness) among those who engage with false content. The main thesis of the paper is: in order to combat misinformation on social media, we shouldn’t focus on the endless struggle of curbing false content but rather on the underlying epistemic vices that allow it to flourish. I propose a novel approach to combating misinformation by targeting the algorithmic design of social media platforms to promote the dissemination of accurate information and foster epistemic virtues (that is, beneficial thinking patterns like intellectual humility) among users. This approach is used to support a set of regulatory strategies. First, the paper argues that falsehoods spread on social media because social media nurtures epistemic vices that make social media users less epistemically vigilant. This part incorporates an empirical case study of how social media users engage with misleading information on social media. The study will be conducted using specialised analytics tools provided by UK media analytics firm Commetric, which agreed to be my industry partner for this research. On the quantitative side, state-of-the-art analytics tools will be used to conduct social network analysis, topic modelling, and automatic sentiment and emotion analysis on top of posts/replies, as well as calculating various network metrics, such as betweenness centrality and clustering coefficients. The quantitative aspect of the study empirically anchors epistemic vices by revealing the emotional and attitudinal underpinnings of user engagement with misleading information on social media, offering insights into how vices like closed-mindedness shape users’ attitudes towards fake news. Second, the paper shows that regulation is needed to curb the spread of false information, and that regulation should focus on the recommendation algorithms that amplify the content in social media newsfeeds, not the content itself. Third, the paper argues that imposing these regulations would lead to more dissemination of accurate information, and so speaks to the motivations behind Mill’s famous defence of free speech. I would the abstract to be included in Panel 2: Epistemic Integrity and the Problem of Misinformation.