Staying Up to Date with Fact and Reason Checking: An Argumentative Analysis of Outdated News

Abstract

This paper tackles outdated news about COVID-19 as a type of misinformation from an argumentative perspective, focusing on the fact-checker Snopes. In rapidly changing information environments the circulation of outdated news can be highly detrimental causing risky behaviors. Such type of misinformation is difficult to pin down through fact-checking since encompassing different types of contents, motivations and channels. To fully understand this phenomenon we deem necessary to move away from a naïve view of fact checking to an argumentative one. But what are the argumentative configurations of outdated statements in the context of the current information ecosystem? To answer this question we rely on the distinction between upstream and downstream argumentation to anchor the kind of issues put forward by outdated statements. We then take as a sample all the news that have been rated as “outdated” and “miscaptioned” by Snopes during the pandemic and analyse the type of source, the semantic type of news claim and the argumentative role played by the outdated information. We come up with an argumentative taxonomy of outdated news where the presence of multimodal information as well as the semantic-argumentative role played by outdated statements pattern with the spread of mis- and disinformation.

How to identify an argument type? On the hermeneutics of persuasive discourse

“…Then, based on the identification of their type, the individual arguments can be evaluated by making use of normative insights about the quality of arguments as they are formulated in, for instance, Hinton (2021) and Hinton and Wagemans (2021). As such, the complete hermeneutics may function as a starting point for developing a procedure for 'rhetoric-checking' (Plug and Wagemans, 2020), 'reason-checking' (Visser et al, 2020;Musi and Rocci, 2022), or 'argument-checking' (Brave et al, 2022) as an extension of 'fact-checking'.…”

Permacrisis, Conspiracy Stories and Metaphors

“…However, in terms of the WAR scenario it made sense because he had not shown sufficient solidarity with his own side. Fauci also featured in CS 1 ("hoax") versions, as an unlikely 'witness' for the case against the need to wear face masks (Musi & Rocci 2022). In an interview from 8 March 2020, Fauci had indeed stated that it was as yet unnecessary for everyone in the US to wear a mask because airborne infection had by then not been confirmed as a major form of transmission for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.…”