Resharing Partisan News on Social Media
Just finished reading Regina Rini’s paper, “Fake News and Partisan Epistemology”. I find her idea of social media re-sharing as a form of “bent” testimony pretty compelling. The core idea is that we have unclear norms about whether a retweet/reshare is an endorsement of the claims in an article, so when someone retweets an article without necessarily endorsing the claims in it, others may take it as more of an endorsement than it actually is. This makes social media a more potent vehicle for spreading falsehoods.
However, I’m not so sure about the part where she argues that it’s rational to favor the testimony of those who share our political views (she calls these people our co-partisans). This relies on an idea of “political importance”: our judgment of what news counts as politically important depends on our normative beliefs. Given this, she argues, it is rational to trust our co-partisans’ judgments of what counts as politically important, because they share (many of) our normative beliefs.
I worry that the notion of political importance she uses includes both normative and descriptive elements, and that consumers of social media can and do distinguish between these elements, and selectively share articles from their co-partisans based on this discernment. One can identify co-partisans who are more likely to share descriptively inaccurate news, even if that news would be important if true. For example, as someone with strong leftist sympathies, I know many co-partisans whom I think hold factually inaccurate views about genetically modified foods, localvorism, the effects of MSG, and so on. (These are all related beliefs held by a certain class of “natural foods” obsessed Americans.) I may confidently reshare certain kinds of articles from them, such as articles to do with how the recent tax cuts are devastating, but I would not confidently reshare articles to do with the latest “natural foods” fad. However, I do agree with these co-partisans that news about the dangers of MSG would be important if true.
One objection is that perhaps this discernment on my part could be interpreted as my simply not sharing normative beliefs with certain leftists on food-related issues. In that case, my not sharing food-related articles they share would be in line with Rini’s characterization. But I do not think this is true. I think that I do share with these leftists the broad ecological and public health goals that they have. I simply do not think that banning GMOs and going localvore are correct approaches towards those goals, because I disagree with them on whether GMOs in fact have the negative effects they claim (for example).
Rini makes the good point that sharing articles based on shared judgments of political importance is particularly powerful when it comes to evidence for the characters of politicians. One can selectively reshare only those articles that report negative information about a politician. Since everyone has both positive and negative sides to their character, this can easily skew other people’s perceptions of the politician. When I regularly reshare your articles about a politician’s character, I am implicitly trusting your judgment about how representative those articles are of the person’s character. This trust is possible because I share your values about what is relevant to this judgment.
I think it’s worth looking at how this notion of “representativeness” hides both normative and descriptive elements. Something that is judged to be false will also be judged to be unrepresentative. But there are also true facts that are not representative of a person’s character, because there may be many other countervailing true facts that contradict what the former say about a person’s character. My sense is that people have been particularly outraged about the recent spate of fake news because it’s the kind of news that is unrepresentative in virtue of being false, not in virtue of being cherry-picked. The pizza parlor conspiracy raised by Rini is an example of such fake news. It may be rational to share news about a person’s character that is true but perceived as unrepresentative by one’s political opponents. But I do not see how it can be rational to share news that is unrepresentative by virtue of being false, and I think it’s feasible for people to distinguish between these two different kinds of news shared by co-partisans.
That being said, perhaps other people reshare articles from their co-partisans without regard to how truth-conducive they are. For example, perhaps one way that scientifically unsubstantiated ideas about “juice-cleansing” methods become popular in leftist circles is from people uncritically sharing articles just because their co-partisans posted them. It’s an empirical question whether this is indeed the case, but I don’t think it’s a rational practice.
