In their paper arguing that ‘educational’ solutions to fake news are superior to ‘structural’ solutions, Michel Croce and Tommaso Piazza (2021) challenge my earlier (Rini 2017) claim that the spread of fake news results (partly) from an individually reasonable practice… Read More ›
3. Some Alternative Proposals If it isn’t reasonable to expect individuals to avoid social media altogether, and if merely supplementing your social media use with high-quality news consumption doesn’t largely protect you from the negative impacts of misinformation, then perhaps… Read More ›
Abstract The issue of how best to combat the negative impacts of misinformation distributed via social media hangs on the following question: are there methods that most individuals can reasonably be expected to employ that would largely protect them from… Read More ›
How 4S Got Absolutely Bodied on Twitter by MC Hammer—yes, that one; no, I’m not kidding—and Deserved It At around noon on February 22, 2021, a remarkable thing happened. MC Hammer (yes, that one; no, I’m not kidding) distilled the… Read More ›
In their introduction to this special issue, Alfano and Klein (2019) pose two neatly contrasting questions for social epistemologists who want to take our epistemic networks seriously. First, what sort of individual epistemic properties should we cultivate, given the social… Read More ›
The intimate relationship between expertise and ethos is mediated by rhetoric. Complex articulations of these social, political, and rhetorical relationships are found in Reddit’s r/science Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series that allows a scientific expert to engage in an online question-and-answer period… Read More ›
The average Australian spends almost 10 hours a week on social media; a majority report that checking Facebook is one of the first things they do in the morning (Sensis 2017). Recent revelations about fake news and extremist sentiments spread… Read More ›
The two-part article by Brian Martin contains two main points. The first is his argument of Conspiracy Theory Attribution (CTA) as a method of denigration, which I have little to disagree with. The second is the example given of the… Read More ›
In “Bad Social Science,” (2019) I pointed to the phenomenon of non-specialists in the social science domain making claims that fall very far short of what social scientists consider best practice. I identified “several facets of bad social science: ad… Read More ›
Author Information: Bernard Wills, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. bwills@grenfell.mun.ca. Wills, Bernard. “Notes on the Rhetoric of Trolling.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 8, no. 5 (2019): 1-10. The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Due… Read More ›