Fake News may not always be Disinformation …

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By Kay Mathiesen and Don Fallis

Prototypical instances of disinformation include deceptive advertising, government propaganda, doctored photographs, forged documents, and fake maps (see Fallis 2015). Our favorite (fictional) example comes from a Penny Arcade comic strip. Skeletor is seen changing the He-Man entry in Wikipedia, which originally read “He-man is the most powerful man in the universe,” to read “He-Man is actually a tremendous jackass and not all that powerful.”

At the end of our last blog post, we asked whether fake news counts as disinformation. Harvard researchers have recently claimed that fake news is disinformation. But we probably don’t want to just take their word for it.

In order to evaluate their claim, we first need to define our terms. We have already given a definition of fake news. But what is disinformation?

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, disinformation is “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.”

Most dictionary definitions are very similar. Moreover, several philosophers and information scientists (e.g., Hernon 1995, 134, Fetzer 2004, 231, Floridi 2011, 260) also claim that disinformation only occurs when false information is disseminated with the intention that people believe it.

Now, as we noted in the previous blog post, some fake news has been intentionally created in order to sway votes toward a particular candidate. For instance, the “Pope Endorses Trump” story was created by someone (Ovidiu Drobota) who wanted Trump to win. Such purveyors of fake news do intend to people to believe the false claims that they make. Thus, this sort of fake news pretty clearly counts as disinformation according to the dictionary definition.

However, most purveyors of fake news are just in it for the money. “The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives.” They want people to click on their stories, and to share their stories with other people who might also click on them, which generates advertising revenue. They don’t care whether people actually believe their stories. So, the fake news created by such purveyors does not count as disinformation according to the dictionary definition.

Now, there is a sense in which all purveyors of fake news are being deceptive. While their websites are not legitimate news sources (e.g., with editors and fact checkers), the purveyors of fake news try to make their websites look legitimate. “Some masquerade as well-known outlets like The New York Times or Fox News, while others operate under made-in-America-sounding names like USA Daily News 24.” But even so, the purveyors of fake news need not intend to mislead people into believing the content of their websites. Again, getting people to actually believe their stories is irrelevant to their purposes.

… but Fake News is Bullshit

Even though most fake news does not count as disinformation according to the dictionary definition, we want to argue that it counts as something that is almost as bad. Namely, it counts as bullshit.

In his bestselling book On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2005, 33-34) says that it is a “lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.” According to Frankfurt (2005, 30-31), someone bullshits when she asserts something “without any regard for how things really are … without conscientious attention to the relevant facts … without bothering to take into account at all the question of its accuracy.”

This is precisely what we see in the case of fake news. The purveyors of fake news are not concerned with whether their stories are true or false. Given that they make up the stories, they have a pretty good idea that their stories are false. But their stories could turn out to be true. For instance, maybe the Pope really had endorsed Trump and Ovidiu Drobota just hadn’t heard about it yet. Moreover, as long as people click on them and share them, the purveyors of fake news would still be perfectly happy if their stories did turn out to be true.

Frankfurt (2005, 54) also claims that bullshitters necessarily misrepresent what they are up to; they “represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth.” In other words, bullshitters always hide the fact that they are bullshitting. This is what purveyors of fake news are doing when they try to make their websites look legitimate.

Admittedly, a purveyor of fake news may not be the prototypical example of a bullshitter. Frankfurt (2005, 18) claims that a bullshitter is typically trying to “convey a certain impression of himself.” Politicians certainly fit this mold. They talk a lot of crap in order to convince us that they are the kind of people who share our values. But there are all sorts of reasons why people say things without caring whether or not it’s true. For instance, advertisers talk a lot of crap, not in order to bolster their image as the politician does, but just in order to sell products. And purveyors of fake news talk a lot of crap just in order to get people to click on their stories. Unlike politicians, they don’t really want to be noticed at all. Yet all of these people are bullshitters simply because they are not concerned with the truth of what they say.

So, fake news seems to be bullshit rather than disinformation. But even if it is not disinformation, bullshit is still pretty dangerous. The bullshitter may not intend to mislead anyone. Even so, since he says stuff without any concern for whether or not it is true, he certainly puts people at risk of being misled. This is why fake news is so (epistemically) dangerous.

Note: Sometimes bullshit does fit the dictionary definition of disinformation. Frankfurt (2005, 59-61) claims that lying and bullshitting are mutually exclusive categories. But as Professor Fallis (2015) points out, there is nothing inconsistent about intending to mislead someone while not being concerned with what the truth is. For instance, Ovidiu Drobota intended people to believe something that was false (that the Pope endorsed Trump), but he would still have wanted people to believe the very same thing if it had been true.

References:

Discussion Questions:

  • Is there any fake news that is not bullshit according to Frankfurt’s definition?
  • Is bullshit as dangerous as other forms of disinformation?

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