Abstract
This article deals with the question about the conditions for someone to call something ‘fake news’. It examines cases in which something is called fake news and analyses these cases from an ordinary language point of view as speech acts. Doing so, the analysis explains fake news as the expression of a dissent. The analysis avoids problems of recent attempts to provide a definition of fake news and argues against the view that fake news belong to a so-called post-truth era. The conclusion of the article is that it is not possible to call something fake news without having unyielding convictions about the truth.
Introduction
In 2017, Fake News was selected as the Word of the Year by Collins Dictionaries (2017). Although the term has been present in debates and discourses since late 2016, both its intension and extension are unclear, and the question of whether fake news is a sound concept at all has not yet been decided. Several recent articles aim to provide a proper definition, but no common understanding has yet been established among academics. Consequently, it is unclear which phenomena count as fake news and which do not. Comprehensive overviews of attempts to define fake news are given by Habgood-Coote (2019) and Pepp, Michaelson, and Sterken (2019).
Regardless of its missing definition, the term is in use. 1 Fake news appeals to an intuitive understanding that is derived from its components fake and news. Usually, the term refers to news, that is, reports about recent events, and usually, the news conveys a political message. Furthermore, fake news is characterized by a lack of truth, which means that it portrays untrustworthy reports. Several authors (Dentith 2016; Jaster and Lanius 2019; McIntyre 2018, 97–104) point out that false and untrustworthy reports have been used to justify political actions in history, and they compare these reports with the modern use of fake news. For instance, in 1939, members of the German Nazi Party staged an assault on the German radio station Sender Gleiwitz in order to spread the false claim that Poland attacked Germany and to justify their invasion of Poland; in 2003, the Bush administration of the US justified the invasion of Iraq with the claim that there was evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, although such evidence did not exist (see Jaster and Lanius 2019, 22–23). In these cases, fake news refers to a deliberate deception for a specific purpose. Another common view is that fake news is a form of Bullshit in the way Frankfurt (2005) used the term (Jaster and Lanius 2018; Mukerji 2018). For Frankfurt, a bullshitter is a person who does not care whether a particular statement is true or false. Frankfurt regards the ‘lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—[…] as of the essence of bullshit’. (Frankfurt 2005, 33–34). Examples for this understanding are the so-called ‘Pizzagate affair’ (see Mukerji 2018) and the examples given in the section Prototypical Examples of Fake News of this article.
However, there is a problem of demarcation with the concept fake news – even with considering the historical cases and distinguishing a pure lying type and a bullshit type, following the terminology of Mukerji (2018) – and phenomena like disinformation, conspiracy theories, satire, hoaxes, and bad or biased journalism (see Mukerji 2018, 924–926; Jaster and Lanius 2019, 35–37). As a result, there are academic accounts that are sceptical towards the usefulness of the concept and the task of finding a satisfying definition of fake news (Dentith 2018; Habgood-Coote 2019). Habgood-Coote (2019) gives three reasons to reject the term: (1) Fake news is linguistically defective, that is, the term is a pseudo-concept that does not mean anything; (2) the term is unnecessary because the concept’s extension – whatever it may be – is already covered by other terms and (3) the term itself is ideologically loaded, has been politically weaponized and is therefore unfit for an academic debate.
In this article, I add two more reasons for being sceptical towards fake news. Firstly, most of the given definitions present fake news as a kind of text: What is considered an example of fake news is supposed to be a text with certain characteristics. This approach ignores, for example, using fake news as an insult, as shown in the section Calling Something Fake News, in which three cases of calling something fake news are distinguished. The further analysis is built on these cases. Secondly, a common proposal to combat fake news is a return to truth. This proposal has a practical and a theoretical dimension and I want to criticize both of them. For the public that consumes media and the professionals who write news coverage, there are fact-checking websites that offer rejections and confirmations of claims (e.g. the US-focused websites snopes.com and truthorfiction.com, the Russia-focused website stopfake.org), journalistic research platforms such as the BBC Reality Check or the Austrian Addendum (active from 2017–2020 and financed by the Quo Vadis Veritas foundation of billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz), and initiatives like the Pro-Truth Pledge that was released by the educational non-profit organization Intentional Insights in December 2016 to promote ‘science-based truth-seeking, rational thinking, and wise decision-making’. 2 The goal of such platforms and initiatives is, on the one hand, to establish ethical guidelines for journalism and, on the other, to describe the world as it is by stating facts. Stating facts is understood as a necessary measure for a public that has lost its orientation towards the truth. The media discourse calling for a return to truth builds upon the narrative of a global information war in an epoch of post-truth politics, as in, for example, the Washington Post’s opinion article In today’s world, the truth is losing (Ignatius 2016). This view can be criticized in several ways: How is it possible to describe the world as it is? It can be argued that the aforementioned initiatives and platforms offer interpretations under the guise of objectivity, relying on the financial support of sponsors. From a philosophical point of view, it seems naïve to assume that the world can be described as it is without any further difficulties; and it should raise doubts when sponsored initiatives aim to decide what is true and what is false. But this philosophical criticism is based on presuppositions, which in turn are under criticism in philosophy: Positions such as the New Realism aim to explain the rise of right-wing populism – and fake news stands symptomatically for its rise – as an outcome of the postmodern understanding of reality as a social construction and the postmodern abandonment of truth (Ferraris 2014). In his Manifesto of New Realism (2012), Maurizio Ferraris presents the idea ‘that there are no facts but only interpretations’ (Ferraris 2014, 4) as one of the pillars of postmodern thought. He traces the origins of this idea back to Nietzsche and claims that it had been applied to science through its take-up in postmodernism. If science – as the activity of finding out the truth about the world – had a special epistemic status, postmodernism has removed this status and has taken care that the results of scientific research join the literary and fictional products, which require being interpreted. If the scientific reference to reality is replaced with the interpretation of text, then the idea that there are no facts but only interpretations leads to ‘the delegitimation of human knowledge and into the reference to a transcendent foundation’ (Ferraris 2014, 14). Ferraris does not claim that right-wing political populism is a logical consequence of postmodern thought, but he points out that populism ‘benefited […] from an ideological support on the part of postmodernism’ (Ferraris 2014, 3). A similar view is held by Lee McIntyre: In his book Post-Truth (2018), McIntyre investigates the question ‘Did Postmodernism Lead to Post-Truth?’ and comes to the conclusion that ‘postmodernism [is] the godfather of post-truth’ (McIntyre 2018, 150). For McIntyre, the core thesis of postmodern thought is the idea that ‘there is no such thing as objective truth’ (McIntyre 2018, 126). He shows how science denial is rooted in this idea, how postmodern thought led to what he calls ‘post-truth’, and draws a direct link from the philosophical criticism of truth to the rise of fake news. The section Interpreting the Accusation of Fake News as a Speech Act argues against the claim that fake news is born out of the abandonment of truth and shows that fake news must not necessarily be regarded as a post-truth phenomenon. To this end, the speech act of calling something fake news is examined with reference to the three cases of calling something fake news in the section Calling Something Fake News. It is argued that it is not possible to call something fake news without having beliefs about truth. It is shown that fake news is a symptom of the fixation on one’s own beliefs rather than of an era in which truth has been abandoned.
Calling something fake news
This section deals with the term fake news and examines different usages. It is proposed that there are three different cases in which something is called fake news. The distinction between these cases is based on two considerations: (1) to what does the predicate fake news refer to and (2) if there is some x that is referred to by calling it fake news, what is the truth value of x. Although there are historical phenomena that resemble fake news, only the modern context of the campaigning for the 45th presidential elections in the United States of America and the period afterwards is examined.
The prototypical case of calling news fake news is discussed in the Prototypical Examples of Fake News section. I refer to the examples as ‘prototypical’ because a similar set of fake news examples is discussed without disagreement about the attribution by several authors (Silverman 2016; Habgood-Coote 2019, 1038; Zimdars 2020, 2–3). The case of disagreement about calling the news fake is discussed in the section Ideological Use. This disagreement arises from the clash of different beliefs about the truth value of certain claims. The section You are Fake News discusses the statement ‘You are Fake News’.
Prototypical examples of fake news
The first case refers to prototypical examples of fake news: online articles with lurid headlines and questionable, mostly untrue content. Some articles have been mentioned frequently in the discourse since 2016 as exemplifications of fake news, such as: ‘Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement’ (originally published by WTOE 5 News, republished by Ending the Fed on September 26, 2016), 3 ‘WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary sold weapons to ISIS… Then drops another BOMBSHELL! Breaking news’ (published by The Political Insider on August 4, 2016), 4 or ‘IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked & It’s Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined’ (published by Ending the Fed on October 11, 2016). 5
Today, many fake news websites are shut down and are only accessible as snapshots provided by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or screenshots. Nevertheless, new sites are emerging, and the success of fake news stems from sharing them on social media (see Jaster and Lanius 2019, 69–81). Facebook engagement statistics show that there have been more interactions (i.e. shares, reactions and comments) with the article Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President …, namely, 960,000 interactions, than with the most interacted trustworthy news article (849,000 interactions) during the three months preceding the final US presidential election in November 2016 (Silverman 2016).
In 2016, The Guardian (Tynan 2016) and BuzzFeed News (Silverman and Alexander 2016) published articles about the origin of the fake news websites. The journalists found out that most websites originated in the Balkan countries. There, foremost young people, living in precarious conditions, made up clickbait stories to have them shared on social media and earn money by selling advertising. The journalist and writer Samanth Subramanian visited Macedonia and interviewed fake news writers in Veles, a town of 44,000 people, which was ‘the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites’ (Subramanian 2017). The outcome of the coverage was that the Balkan authors of fake news do not write with a political purpose or the intention to seek the truth. They want to earn money by selling advertisements on their news-lookalike websites. Pro-Trump news turned out to attract the largest stream of online visitors (Subramanian 2017).
In this case, texts are called fake news. These texts report mainly about fabricated political events, and the reports are patently false. It can be assumed that a standard internet user can identify such a text as fake news due to the appearance of the website that provides the text, the missing or insufficient evidence, and the lack of coverage in other media. Even if someone is unsure whether a text is fake news, there are simple formal criteria that help to assign the attribution. McIntyre (2018, 117–121) and Jaster and Lanius (2019, 95–98) list such criteria, for example, the indication of an author, the reference to credible sources, or the trustworthiness of the website (which can be as seen as a formal criterion by, for example, searching for a ‘Terms of Use’ or ‘Privacy Policy’ page).
This usage of calling something fake news means pointing out that the statements of a particular text are false. The attribution is based on a consensus of what is true and what is false; it had been made several times in the extensive work on fake news written since 2016. There is no disagreement that such a text exemplifies fake news.
Ideological use
The second case is the usage of fake news for casting doubts on news coverage for ideological reasons. With this use, there could be disagreement about the attribution. Calling something fake news is widely regarded as a ‘right-wing rhetorical device’ (Dentith 2016, 66). However, criticizing news coverage for being false is neither a new phenomenon nor typical of a particular political party or ideology. Dentith (2016, 66) notes that pointing out errors in partisan reporting has been a left-wing tradition in the United States. McIntyre (2018, 63–87) elaborates on the evolution of the US media landscape in the second half of the 20th century and describes how partisan opinion-based media outlets emerged from a ‘golden age’ of traditional media. He links the fragmentation of the US media landscape to the rise of partisan media, claiming that it paved the way for fake news. One of McIntyre’s examples is Fox News, also cited by Dentith (2016), which is well-known for its biased reporting and for being criticized by liberals. McIntyre (2018, 117) also claims that there are ‘now even allegations of left-leaning versions of fake news’. The New York Times stated in December 2016 that ‘the issue [of fake news] has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites’. (Tavernise 2016)
The point here is that calling something fake news is often an ideologically motivated attack and that the accusation is made with justifications. Accusers give reasons why something ought to be fake news. This leads to situations in which some defend a report as truthful while it is clearly fake news to others (and vice versa). This disagreement has its roots in the clash of different ideologies.
A claim that has been called fake news for ideological reasons is that Hillary Clinton, the defeated candidate in the 45th US presidential elections, won the so-called popular vote. After releasing the official election result in November 2016, press statements claimed that Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. Shortly thereafter, these articles were called fake news. Along with these allegations, it was stated that Clinton had not won the popular vote. Interestingly, both claims were accompanied by justifications: The claim that Clinton won the popular vote is justified by the Official 2016 Presidential General Election Results. The claim that she did not win is countered with attempts to refute it with election fraud (double votes, illegal votes, the dead vote, etc.) or with denials as ‘there is no such thing as a national popular vote’ (a Google search for this claim gives a few hundred results).
Another example is the claims about the size of the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on January 20, 2017 in Washington. The crowd size has not been officially determined. However, pictures show that the crowd at Trump’s inauguration speech was smaller than the crowd at former US president Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. This was refuted by Trump. The term fake news was not used by the US president or his team at the time, but it was used by the supporters of Trump to expose photographic evidence of the event as fake and to reject the claim that there were fewer people present at the Trump inauguration than at other inaugurations. The White House press team introduced the term ‘alternative fact’ to justify the claim about the larger crowd. An ‘alternative fact’ is used like a fact, for example, to support an argument, but its truth is contested (see Chiacu and Lange 2017; Hirschfeld Davis and Rosenberg 2017).
It is not my intention to prove the claims in the examples true or false. The aim of this article is to examine the use of the term fake news and the examples given in this section show that the attribution fake news is also given to claims that are true: that Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 or that fewer people attended Trump’s inauguration than other inaugurations. Again, fake news is attributed to assertions in order to express the belief that these assertions are false. However, this case of calling something fake news is different compared to the case from the previous section Prototypical Examples of Fake News: Whether the attribution of a truth value is correct is a matter of dispute between ideological positions; there is no consensus on what is true and what is false. As shown with the examples in this section, the claim that something is fake news is accompanied with support: bogus arguments are made, conspiracy theories are invoked, and ‘alternative facts’ are invented in order to justify the claim that something is fake news. My interest is not to argue that these measures are irrational (which they undoubtedly are) but to point out that these measures are taken when a statement is called fake news. In the examples discussed, the support for calling something fake news is based on an ideology that enables the invention of illegal votes or the denial of the existence of the popular vote. This support is brought forward as if it was true. At the same time, one can also refer to trustworthy evidence – such as the official election results – to justify the claim that alleged election fraud is fake news.
You are Fake News
The third case comprises examples in which the attribution fake news no longer refers to a specific text or even to a statement but is used to insult. After Trump’s election victory, several established media institutions – most prominent newspapers such as the New York Times or the news television channel Cable News Network (CNN) – were attacked by the US president with the statement that they are fake news. In a press conference on January 11, 2017, shortly before Trump’s inauguration as president, a CNN reporter wanted to ask a question, and Trump refused to accept it (NYT 2017). Instead, he replied, ‘I’m not going to give you a question’, ‘You are Fake News’ and pointed to another reporter. In this case, fake news is used as an insult, and differs from the previous examples. McIntyre (2018, 111–112) interprets the utterance You are fake news in this incident as the expression that Trump calls ‘anything he does not want to believe’ fake. However, in this particular case as well as in a generalization, it is not clear what the person uttering the insult does not want to believe. The person who insults does not refer to a specific statement. Calling a person – or an institution – fake news, attacks the credibility of this person or the institution. Here no epistemological statement about truth values is made, but a moral comment about who not to trust. In the example given, the US president-elect discredits a reporter who represents CNN and aims to undermine CNN’s integrity as a news source. It is not included in the transcript, but in the video recording of the press conference, a voice shouting back from the audience can be heard, saying, ‘You are fake news’ (NYT 2017), practicing the same usage.
This phrase somehow spread, it went viral, and by summer 2021, it was commonly used on social media as an insult that expresses disbelief and aims to discredit someone. As it is the case with communication in social media, net culture phenomena such as memes are involved. This means that on social media, the insult ‘You are fake news’ is also used ironically or in order to participate as a member of a particular community.
Interpreting the accusation of fake news as a speech act
Understanding fake news as untrue, written reports about recent events falls short in cases where factual statements are labelled fake news. It also falls short in cases in which the term is used as an insult. A fair understanding of fake news cannot be found if it is considered merely a type of text consisting of untrue statements. The attempt to investigate the truth and truthfulness of reports in order to grasp what fake news is (Jaster and Lanius 2018) or the definition of fake news as ‘purported facts [that] are either entirely false (and thus not facts at all) or […] only partial truths’ (Dentith 2016, 66) are examples for such accounts. Habgood-Coote (2019) and Dentith (2018) have raised concerns about the usefulness of the concept and the task of finding a satisfying definition of fake news and those concerns should be addressed when attempting to develop a definition. However, rather than defining or approaching fake news through concept analysis, it might be more fruitful to investigate the speech act of calling something fake news. The concept of speech act stands for understanding the meaning of an expression through its use in language. In the following, I refer to J. L. Austin’s speech act theory (Austin 1962). The statement ‘x is fake news’ does not necessarily have to be understood as a performative in Austin’s sense, but it has an illocutionary force; I am interested in what is expressed in saying ‘x is fake news’. The examination of the ‘illocutionary act’, that is, ‘the performance of an act in saying something’ (Austin 1962, 99), shall shed light on what happens in uttering a statement. A short paragraph in Habgood-Coote (2019) makes use of a speech act analysis and states that fake news ‘functions as an epistemic slur term that insults the epistemic character of the institution that produced the story’ (Habgood-Coote 2019, 1041). It has been shown in the previous section that ‘You are fake news’ can be used to insult somebody. In the following, it is shown that the other two cases given in the Prototypical Examples of Fake News and Ideological Use sections, too, have an illocutionary force when calling something fake news is understood as a speech act.
Following this approach, the question about a definition of fake news can be replaced by the question about the conditions of this speech act: What are the conditions for somebody calling something fake news? Austin (1962, 14) devotes much space to identifying infelicities, that is, ‘the things that can be and go wrong’ on the occasion of performative utterances. For example, he lists cases when an utterance is made without serious intention, in the wrong context, by an actor on a stage, too quietly to be heard, etc., and he excludes such failures from his analysis. In the following, reference is made only to those utterances in which something is called fake news sincerely. This condition excludes calling something fake news ironically, unintentionally or accidentally. These cases excluded, the speech act consists of a speaker who asserts that something is fake news and an object called fake news by the speaker.
In the cases from the sections Prototypical Examples of Fake News and Ideological Use, the object called fake news is a text. In both cases, there are some statements s 1 , s 2 , …, s n associated with the alleged fake news. The allegation of being untrue comes from the speaker who claims so. The examples in these sections show that both, true and false statements are called fake news. The statement that Clinton won the popular vote has been referred to as fake news, as well as the statement that the Pope endorsed Trump for President. Hence, a statement s that is called fake news can be either true or false.
The speaker who calls something fake news exhibits some of their beliefs. Here lies the performative character of the speech act: The speakers show that they do not believe that a claim is true and they express their disbelief. This is more than just assigning a truth value to a certain statement. To call a statement s, fake news expresses the speaker’s outrage at believing s to be true; according to the speaker’s beliefs, s is not the case. A blogger, who writes that the media coverage about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration is fake news, believes that more people were present at the inauguration in 2016 than in 2009. Furthermore, the speech act can be understood as a call to denounce x as false. The readers of the blog should be convinced by what they read.
When a person or an institution is called fake news and therefore insulted, there are not necessarily any utterances to which a truth value is assigned. Calling a person fake news discredits an individual or an institution. This can occur without reference to a particular statement; hence no truth value is assigned. In this case, the person who insults exhibits their attitudes towards the insulted subject. They show that they do not trust the insulted subject and express their reluctance to accept statements of the insulted subject as true.
This analysis allows for some observations: Truth is not absent in the so-called post-truth era of fake news, but very present. Someone cannot call something fake news without having beliefs about what is true. In the case of the ideological use, there are at least two groups that are in disagreement about the truth of something. Each group is convinced to stand on the side of truth and invokes justifications to defend their opinions. In a dispute about whether something is fake news or not, one group may hold that ‘x is fake news’ is true, and the other group may hold that ‘x is fake news’ is not true. Fake news should therefore not be seen as a symptom of post-truth, relativistic arbitrariness, but as a symptom of the fixation on one’s own beliefs. Own beliefs are assumed, and sometimes mistaken, as true and defended as if they were true.
The prototypical examples appear to be different because there is no dispute about the truth value of the fake news. These examples can be regarded as Frankfurtian Bullshit, utterances of someone who does not care about truth. Nevertheless, this objection does not contradict the claim that it is not possible to call something fake news without having beliefs about truth because Bullshit is not a post-truth concept. One can utter Bullshit and believe in truth at the same time. Identifying a text like Pope Francis Shocks World … as fake news involves assigning certain truth values to certain statements (the statement that the pope endorsed Trump for president is false). When we propose one of these texts as an example for fake news, we express our own disbelief in the truth of the statements in question.
In the dissent about whether something should be called fake news or not, irreconcilable beliefs about the truth value of certain statements are involved. Usually, a dissent can be resolved by checking the facts: If two parties in a conflict argue about the correct number of people that have attended a speech or the correct number of votes in an election, a reference to the data should answer open questions. Objectivity and fact-checking are the suggested aids to overcome the confusion caused by the spread of fake news. These means should facilitate a return to truth. On the practical level, fact-checking websites should help make this happen; the advocacy of objective truth and the rejection of the idea that there is no truth, but only interpretations, contribute to the theoretical level. But the conflict exists in the first place because referring to the data, pictures, evidence – any object of the controversy – does not help, nor do the arguments about what is true. The opposite is the case: The object of the controversy consolidates irreconcilable beliefs because one party in a conflict holds on to their interpretation of the data and the other party holds on to theirs. Josef Mitterer (2011, 70–73) 6 points out that facts that are used in arguments depend on the interpretation of the speaker who picks them up. Hence, the reference to the state of affairs is futile in many cases because a state of affairs is ‘true’ according to the criteria of one party in a conflict and not according to the criteria of all.
One way of addressing this problem is to point out that the notion of ‘true according to one’s own criteria’ leads the concept of truth ad absurdum. The correspondence with one’s own criteria is by no means sufficient for a statement to be true by any truth theory. What is defended as if it was true is a moral opinion mistaken for a fact. Therefore, it is proposed to combat fake news by identifying true and false beliefs about something. Evidence shall prove certain assumptions false, that the opponents in the conflict are wrong, and convince them of the truth. When nobody can be convinced, everyone remains holding on to their beliefs. In the worst case, if a return to truth with the help of arguments does not help, violence is the next option. This does not appear to be a problem of a post-truth epoch but of truth ever since.
Another way to address the problem may make use of the speech act analysis. It was shown that people have reasons for calling something fake news. These reasons allow certain justifications to be used in arguments. The justifications may not be accepted by all parties that are involved in a conflict. Nevertheless, they serve the same purpose for all conflict opponents: to justify the own beliefs and convince others.
This is another way of looking at the problem that a conflict arises from different and irreconcilable beliefs about the truth values of a particular statement, but it does not offer to solve the problem. Maybe it is more helpful to address an opponent’s beliefs rather than what the conflict is about. Maybe it is more important to ask why somebody calls something fake news than fact-checking statements. A danger of fake news is that it divides society. I do not share the hope that fact-checking will somehow counteract this. People will rather invent alternative facts than accept an opponent’s opinion who adheres to a different ideology. I cannot tell how to address an opponent – but this may be a better quest than arguing about truth.
Conclusion
Understanding fake news as untruthful text ignores some cases in which something is called fake news. I, therefore, suggest to investigate the speech act of calling something fake news. This approach shows that calling something fake news means that opinions about what is true and false have hardened. Those who call something fake news do so for specific reasons and with the disposition to justify their assertions. These justifications may base on lies, misstatements, and ‘alternative facts’, but understanding fake news as a symptom of post-truth overlooks that the practice of justifying claims has nothing to do with an end of truth. The term fake news denotes a failure to take an opponent’s position in conflict, an unwillingness to approach conflicting opinions. My suggestion for countering such dissent is not to dwell on what one believes to be true but to critically address and question the beliefs of the parties to the conflict.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
