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Fake News, False Beliefs, and the Fallible Art of Knowledge Maintenance

The term ‘fake news’, it is argued in this chapter, captures a novel kind of social-epistemic dysfunction that arises from systemic distortions of established processes of creating, disseminating, and consuming news-like content. Navigating informational environments populated by fake news requires the cultivation of epistemic routines that reduce our exposure to misleading and deceptive information, while at the same time continuing to allow us to partake in the collective growth of knowledge. Shifting the focus to epistemic routines steers a middle path between two frequently encountered dichotomous responses to the problem of fake news: viz., between emphasizing the individual’s responsibility to ‘think critically and check one’s sources’ and advocating technological tweaks (such as automated fact-checking). While epistemic agents ought to be held responsible for the epistemic routines they commit themselves to, there is also a collective need for making the predictable effects of such choices transparent to individuals, wherever technologically possible.