How can ideas of reality be used to understand the phenomenon of fake news

Question 1

What is the core argument

Answer 1

That the phenomenon of fake news cannot be understood as new, but that this does not mean that its dangers are not particularly elevated.

Question 2

What is it really important to do throughout?

Answer 2

use examples

Question 3

What are the four points?

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What conception does Marx overturn?

Answer 4

The conception of plato that truth is somehow separate from the world in which we live

Question 5

What is Plato’s argument?

Answer 5

That truth is an eternal world, rather than the world of men

Question 6

What is plato’s idea of opinion?

Answer 6

Simply a lesser form of fact

Question 7

What is Plato’s allegory

Answer 7

cave

Question 8

What idea doe plato critique?

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

What does the sophist idea link to?

Answer 9

The next paragraph on how fakes news links to reality

Question 10

What does the Sophist idea show

Answer 10

that people are very willing to believe ideas, equally people are very willing to profit from making them up

Question 11

What does fake news end

Answer 11

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)

Question 12

Who is the philosopher thinking about bullshit?

Answer 12

Frankfurt

Question 13

What three Ps is fake news

Answer 13

Profitable, proliferate and publicly acceptable

Question 14

What does the loss of discursive space link to

Answer 14

Arendt’s work on the origins of totalitarianism

Question 15

What is the relevant idea from on the origins of totalitarianism?

Answer 15

That the masses reach a point when they simultaneously believe everything and believe nothing; that everything was possible and yet nothing was true

Question 16

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

Answer 16

Propaganda

Question 17

What is fake news somehow more than

Answer 17

disinformation

Question 18

What is significant, argues Arendt, about factual truth?

Answer 18

That it is the opposite of a lie

Question 19

What does the respect for truth maintain?

Answer 19

The integrity of the political realm and ensures the continuing discursive space, based on shared reason

Question 20

What transition has fake news promoted?

Answer 20

A transition from people disagreeing over policy to disagreeing with the facts themselves.

Question 21

For Arendt, what is the political realm?

Answer 21

Action

Question 22

What does action depend on

Answer 22

a shared discursive space

Question 23

The jepordisation of the discursive space means that there is no longer ground for common discussion. What concept does this bring in?

Answer 23

Mass isolation

Question 24

What is the key thing that Arendt thinks about for politics?

Answer 24

The commonality of a world, a commonality that fake news prohibits

Question 25

What distinction does Arendt’s theory of Work, Labour and actions rest on, and who else looks at this?

Answer 25

Zoe vs Bios dichotomy, also looked at by Agamben for bare life

Question 26

What is Plato’s solution for all of this

Answer 26

A set of well trained philosophers running government, but this raises question of the meritocracy

Question 27

What is the final paragraph?

Answer 27

Deep fakes

Question 28

Who is the source for deep fakes?

Answer 28

Chesney and Citron 2019

Question 29

What is the argument of Chesney and Citron 2019

Answer 29

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

Question 30

What are two examples of embarrassments for republicans that highlight how deep fakes, purely by existing, could jeopardise the truth?

Answer 30

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

Question 31

What has there been a lot of trust in that deep fakes compromise?

Answer 31

mechanical objectivity

Question 32

What is the argument of Dear 2016

Answer 32

Mechanical objectivity is a non-inevitable way to understand the world

Question 33

How has the white hosue manipulated the use of the word fake news?

Answer 33

They now use to apply to any news that the white house doesn’t like

Question 34

Who argues that post-truth ends the exceptionalism of lying and what is the critique of this?

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

What is the position of Kant?

Answer 35

We cannot know what things are like ‘in themselves’ — independent of how our minds format what we perceive

Question 36

What has mechanical objectivity done to reality?

Answer 36

The reality that is constructed is measured, and so is no longer the reality that people see in the world in front of them.

Question 37

The idea that truth does not matter is in part a legacy of what?

Answer 37

The inability of people to be able to maintain it through their own senses

Question 38

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?

Answer 38

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).