CAN FAKE NEWS BE REGULATED BY THIRD-PARTY INSTITUTIONS? AN EPISTEMIC PERSPECTIVE
By: Niloofar Shadab
Tags: Philosophy, Epistemology, Fake News

USA- TODAY SUBJECTIVELY FACT CHECKS 1994 CRIME BILL

The rise of fake news, or in other words, the rise of awareness of the existence of fake news, happened mainly during the 2016 presidential campaign. Social media has been viewed as one of the main reasons for the widespread adverse effects of fake news. The factually false claims could be easily spread by partisan echo chambers on social media platforms. Since 2016, epistemologists have focused on the impacts of fake news and possible solutions to reduce the scale of epistemic destruction in the partisan issues. Regina Rini is one of the philosophers working on this subject. In this article, I discuss one of her solutions to this problem and raise my objection to the proposed solution.

Rini believes that the instability of social media’s testimonial norms is one reason that social media testimony is bent. One source of instability is the ambiguous relationship between testifiers and testimony. For instance, we have not settled whether a retweet demands a declaration of the truth of the content or not. This unstable testimonial norm is probably why the claim “a retweet is not an endorsement” causes an epistemic dilemma since retweeting implies an endorsement of the content shared by interlocutor. The second source, according to Rini, is individual partisan bias that results in the tendency to trust testimony of partisan pundits. This bias makes fake news believable despite sometimes being ridiculously violating the norms of responsible testimony reception. To prevent this bent testimony from building momentum and getting accepted by a significant number of people, Rini suggested that we need to label fake news as “disputed” on these platforms. Therefore, the reader knows whether what she is reading is fake or not. Her plan is basically to lift the burden from individuals and put it on the shoulders of institutions instead, to flag disputed fake news using third-party fact-checking process. In October 2020, Facebook and Twitter decided to implement a similar method on their platforms addressing fake news. Throughout this essay, I elaborate on the real situations where this solution has failed to reach its primary goal.

Although this solution has good intentions, I do not believe that it leads us to where we all want to be regarding social media testimonial norms. I believe that fake news is a systemic problem. To adopt new norms for testimony on social media platforms, we first need to address the root cause of this systemic problem. This view is contrary to Rini’s top-down solution for fake news. I have objections mainly to two parts of Rini’s solution: My first objection concerns the act of labeling fake news by unelected officials. The second objection regards her stance to refuse that this solution can lead to some types of censorship.

Objection 1- Unelected Officials Monitoring Fake News:

First of all, Rini does not discuss possible second-order harms of third-party officials labeling fake news on social media platforms. In theory, we can rely on third-party institutions to fact-check the news (as Rini points out). However, it is not a realistic and legitimate assumption that an institution remains a third-party with no particular interest any time. Facebook and Twitter also have their own financial (if not political or cultural) interests. Arbitrating news by unelected officials with potential financial, political, and ethnic ties could lead to other forms of misinformation on these platforms. Misinformation could be in the form of manipulating the public opinion in not believing certain news. This manipulation can be done by using “disputed” flags to discredit the essence of the content of some news. Moreover, fact-checking could be performed on contents that don’t even have any knowledge claim. Tempering mostly subjective contents that don’t claim knowledge could cripple fact checking process in the public eye.

The bottom line is that more regulations of this sort might provide at least three negative consequences. First, it creates some ways of resistance to these labeling policies. Today, we have already seen this policy resistance happening on Twitter where tweets with these types of flags can get more attention as the public trust on Twitter has fallen sharply due to “innocent” labeling errors. Second, it can facilitate misinformation when there is a conflict of interests between the institutions responsible for fact-checking news and the parties involved in the content of the news. Third, labeling news as “disputed” might undermine the credibility of independent journalism that sometimes reports unpopular news with conflicting evidence.

A possible argument against my first objection is that fact-checkers only dispute fake news by providing enough acceptable defeating evidence. Independent fact-checkers find defeating evidence and because they only deal with factual defeaters, their interests cannot get in the way of the fact-checking process. The problem with this view is that there are many cases that one cannot decide if some news is fake or not. There are news that can be easily rule out as false or fake. For example, the fake news of a person’s death can be easily contested and flagged. However, there are more complicated news that have many conflicting evidence that cannot be easily ruled out as fake. In this scenario, independent fact-checkers have to form their judgments about the credibility of the news based on available information. Since sometimes there has not been readily available relevant defeating evidence, they might require to search for some types of defeating evidence probably even in different contexts. Consequently, they might find some defeater necessary for them to flag the news as “Disputed”. Also, there are news that are partially true and partially false. In this situation, fact-checkers have to form their judgments on what the most important aspect of a news article is and that possibly relies upon political beliefs. There are two possible solutions to handling these types of complicated news. First, fact-checkers must only work with the available legal and verified evidence (e.g., those presented in the court of law) and leave other news as is. In this case, the majority of the news will not be covered by Rini’s solution. The second approach is that fact-checkers evaluate the quality and sufficiency of defeating evidence without necessarily relying on high standards. In this situation, drawing lines between acceptable and unacceptable defeating evidence, the quality of defeating evidence as well as whether it is sufficient for the fact-checkers to form judgement, become mainly subjective. The subjectivity level in this process is enough for us to conclude that the argument against my objection has no solid grounds.

Objection 2- Censorship:

Second, Rini also claims that this arbitration is not the same as censorship as it eventually allows the users to share the news with “disputed” labels on social media. I also disagree on the issue of censorship. Rini might be right that labeling is not censorship per se. But she is mistaken in believing that labeling cannot be a green light to censorship. Censorship can happen when fact-checkers who decide on the credibility of the contents of news, see themselves above others and favor harsher content and/or context regulations. In many cases, journalists need to cover some news not factually proven as truth; examples of these types of coverage could be the documents released by Snowden, Assange, and many others. With Rini’s proposed principle, these documents could have been flagged as “Disputed”. A similar event occurred during the 2020 presidential campaign that an unverified document came out about Hunter Biden’s alleged ties with some foreign countries’ officials. The first reaction of the social media fact-checkers to this news was to censor the article reporting on these allegations. The fact-checkers claimed the reason for this action was the use of hacked materials, unverified sources of information and a possible misinformation campaign interfering the election. All of these excuses were as unproven as the original news itself and were not backed up by any credible sources. The problem with this kind of action is that absence of evidence is mistakenly considered the same as the evidence of absence. Fact-checkers could not distinguish this difference and censored the news. From these incidents, we conclude that freedom of the press, a constitutional right, can be easily violated when these platforms decide to add context to such news.

However, some might argue that Hunter Biden’s laptop story was a wrong implementation of Rini’s solution and the censorship was quickly resolved within 24 hours. Therefore, we should not take this as proof of the failure of Rini’s solution. I cannot accept this explanation as I believe it does not matter whether this censorship lasted for a few hours or whether the social media companies apologized for this mistake. What matters here is the violation of the very identity of American freedom that might pave the way for harsher and more severe violations of this type. Imagine this censorship incident happens again as the byproduct of Rini’s solution in the future. This time, contrary to the previous attempt, it could become entirely unnoticed by the public. This lack of transparency is a direct result of appointing fact-checkers to feed the public with “safe” news. Only a complete and total transparency can prevent censorship to happen. However, achieving transparency could become challenging in the fact-checking process. Total transparency of this process can take us back to where we started. Partisan bias and the bent testimony are biggest hurdles of having complete and totally transparent fact-checking process.