Conference Agenda

What are the attitudes with epistemic import expressed by users on social media? It seems that many of the claims uttered by social media users are of epistemic importance: knowledge claims, belief claims, reasoning, bringing up evidence or questioning other's evidence, and debunking. Taken as assertions, these claims do affect their audiences and their epistemic agency.

Recent work on the epistemology of social media has argued that users do not so much put forth epistemic claims, but rather they express allegiances and signal belonging to a group. Social media claims (posts, comments, memes, even images and reactions) would be mostly special kinds of expressive speech acts (Arielli, 2018; Marsilli, 2021), which should be analyzed instead of focusing on what is their intended effect on the audience, be that expressive, persuasive, inciting action, or giving rise to an emotion.

It has already been shown that on social media platforms, the affective and the epistemic are intertwined, sometimes indistinguishable. This intertwining is best detected by looking at the speaker's intent, and what they hoped to achieve with a certain social media utterance. But regardless of this intent, the effect can be epistemic for the audiences. This raises several problems for the epistemology of social media.

First, should we hold affective expressions to the same standards as the claims that can be true/ false? From the speaker's perspective, this seems too harsh a standard, but from the audience's perspective, this may be appropriate. Taking as a starting point the distinction between the intended effect of an utterance on social media and its achieved effect, I propose a taxonomy of types of utterances with epistemic effects occurring in the social media environment.

Secondly, I explore the most problematic case of an epistemic collective effect whereby the audiences of an utterance alter their epistemic attitudes towards a claim while the effect is achieved in a distributed and unintended manner. I show how the epistemic collective effect of social media posts are used currently in cognitive warfare and propaganda as a tactical way of changing people's beliefs with affective expressions and reactions to these expressions, and I argue that it has a detrimental effect on the current epistemic environments.

I end the presentation with several proposals for tackling these kinds of collective unintended epistemic effects of affective expressions online by outlining several measures coming from a designerly perspective and also from a critical literacy perspective.

References:

Emanuele Arielli. (2018). Sharing as Speech Act. Versus, 2, 243–258. https://doi.org/10.14649/91354

Marsili, N. (2021). Retweeting: Its linguistic and epistemic value. Synthese, 198(11), 10457–10483. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02731-y

In contemporary society, selling cigarettes to a twelve-year-old is unthinkable. Yet, we routinely expose children to products with seemingly similar addictive and harmful effects: social media.

Historically, addressing tobacco addiction has resulted in prohibitions on the sale of tobacco to anyone under the age of 18 and other public health interventions, despite industry resistance. These policy measures can and have been justified in the light of how tabaco usage undermines autonomy, reduces wellbeing, and harms others. Contemporary efforts to regulate social media usage, such as Australia’s recent ban on social media access for children under 16, seem to mirror this approach.

The analogy between tobacco and social media is at least implicit in contemporary ethical analysis and it provides a good starting point for investigating what a good policy response to social media would be. According to this analogy tobacco and social media are harmful in relevantly similar ways and should therefore by subjected to similar policy measures. This talk examines this particular argument from analogy.

I ultimately argue that the analogy does not hold. But analyzing it does demonstrate that it breaks down for different reasons than has been thought. It has been argued that banning social media is wrong because it would violate children’s autonomy and because social media does not affect the wellbeing of children. I demonstrate these objections do not hold because social media usage is, in this regard, relevantly similar to tobacco usage. The analogy also holds when it comes to harm to others and there are important parallels where the influence of industry and lobbyists are concerned.

But the analogy breaks down because social media isn’t essentially toxic. Social media does or may provide advantages and opportunities that tobacco does not and, contrary to cigarettes, one can take the toxicity out of social media. I discuss what this means for the current bans, and for desirable policy responses to social media more generally speaking.