How can ideas of reality be used to understand the phenomenon of fake news Flashcards
What is the core argument
That the phenomenon of fake news cannot be understood as new, but that this does not mean that its dangers are not particularly elevated.
What is it really important to do throughout?
use examples
What are the four points?
1) How has reality be traditionally been understood
2) How does fake news challenge reality
3) What is the impact of this challenge on society and its politics
4) Deep fakes - looking to the future and its impacts on politics
What conception does Marx overturn?
The conception of plato that truth is somehow separate from the world in which we live
What is Plato’s argument?
That truth is an eternal world, rather than the world of men
What is plato’s idea of opinion?
Simply a lesser form of fact
What is Plato’s allegory
cave
What idea doe plato critique?
The Sophist idea that truth is relative do an individual or particular community. In the cave allegory, these are the puppeteers - those who will do anything for money.
What does the sophist idea link to?
The next paragraph on how fakes news links to reality
What does the Sophist idea show
that people are very willing to believe ideas, equally people are very willing to profit from making them up
What does fake news end
The importance of reality as a referent point for politics (important as it reduces the shared space but this essay will come back to that later)
Who is the philosopher thinking about bullshit?
Frankfurt
What three Ps is fake news
Profitable, proliferate and publicly acceptable
What does the loss of discursive space link to
Arendt’s work on the origins of totalitarianism
What is the relevant idea from on the origins of totalitarianism?
That the masses reach a point when they simultaneously believe everything and believe nothing; that everything was possible and yet nothing was true
What is Hannah arendt talking about when she said That the masses reach a point when they simultaneously believe everything and believe nothing; that everything was possible and yet nothing was true
Propaganda
What is fake news somehow more than
disinformation
What is significant, argues Arendt, about factual truth?
That it is the opposite of a lie
What does the respect for truth maintain?
The integrity of the political realm and ensures the continuing discursive space, based on shared reason
What transition has fake news promoted?
A transition from people disagreeing over policy to disagreeing with the facts themselves.
For Arendt, what is the political realm?
Action
What does action depend on
a shared discursive space
The jepordisation of the discursive space means that there is no longer ground for common discussion. What concept does this bring in?
Mass isolation
What is the key thing that Arendt thinks about for politics?
The commonality of a world, a commonality that fake news prohibits
What distinction does Arendt’s theory of Work, Labour and actions rest on, and who else looks at this?
Zoe vs Bios dichotomy, also looked at by Agamben for bare life
What is Plato’s solution for all of this
A set of well trained philosophers running government, but this raises question of the meritocracy
What is the final paragraph?
Deep fakes
Who is the source for deep fakes?
Chesney and Citron 2019
What is the argument of Chesney and Citron 2019
Reality and politics was never predicated on truth, but the rise fo deep fakes means that the falsifiability of that truth becomes even harder. Must consider the marginal impact of that
What are two examples of embarrassments for republicans that highlight how deep fakes, purely by existing, could jeopardise the truth?
The 47% comment and the Access Hollywood tape, and they come out in 2020 would be very easy for the people involved to dismiss as fabricated
What has there been a lot of trust in that deep fakes compromise?
mechanical objectivity
What is the argument of Dear 2016
Mechanical objectivity is a non-inevitable way to understand the world
How has the white hosue manipulated the use of the word fake news?
They now use to apply to any news that the white house doesn’t like
Who argues that post-truth ends the exceptionalism of lying and what is the critique of this?
Higgins 2016 in nature. But need to highlight that the phenomenon is somehow more than this; it is an end fo the importance of the reference point of truth.
What is the position of Kant?
We cannot know what things are like ‘in themselves’ — independent of how our minds format what we perceive
What has mechanical objectivity done to reality?
The reality that is constructed is measured, and so is no longer the reality that people see in the world in front of them.
The idea that truth does not matter is in part a legacy of what?
The inability of people to be able to maintain it through their own senses
The rise of people being unable to make sense of reality through their own senses, since science is telling them a different, objective reality, comes in tandem to what?
Politician’s normal discourse becoming more and more detached from the materiality of what people see (ie, David Cameron championing economic growth and big business whilst simultaneously austerity makes people’s immediate spatial materiality poorer).
