‘가짜뉴스’, 소셜미디어, 그리고 증언의 인식론

초록

With platforms such as YouTube and other social media having become major channels for the spread of so-called “fake news,” an epistemological examination of belief-forming practices based on social media has become increasingly urgent. Drawing on the epistemology of testimony, this paper investigates such practices and their epistemic justification, and on this basis, seeks possible solutions to the problem of fake news. Unlike reductionism, which requires epistemic subjects to hold a justified belief in the trustworthiness of testimony, the non-reductionist view adopted in this paper maintains that testimony itself possesses power to immediately justify belief. For such justification to be possible, it is necessary that appropriate external conditions obtain. The paper identifies the operation of conversational maxims and social norms as the key external conditions for the justificatory efficacy of testimony. However, the conversational spaces provided by current social media platforms are structurally ill-suited to sustaining such norms. As a result, testimonial beliefs formed on social media typically fail to possess the epistemic justification that ordinary testimonial beliefs enjoy. Building on this diagnosis, the paper further argues for a shift in our approach to the fake news problem toward a framework that emphasizes the broader social responsibility for the circulation of misinformation.

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