Abstract

This paper addresses the proliferation of fake new from a philosophical – mainly epistemological – point of view. We devote special attention to three questions: how to define fake news, which mechanisms cause the proliferation of fake news on social media; who is to be blamed epistemically in the process through which fake news are generated, published and distributed. Starting from the extant literature on the topic, we endeavor to: offer a novel definition of fake news immune from the main difficulties which afflict alternative accounts available in the literature (§ 2); describe the most salient causal factors underwriting the phenomenon of fake news (§ 3); offer a novel account of the normative dimension of this phenomenon (§ 4).