Trustworthiness and Truth: The Epistemic Pitfalls of Internet Accountability

Frost‐Arnold, Karen

doi:10.1017/epi.2013.43

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Social epistemologists of digital and social media engage in normative epistemic evaluation of Internet platforms and practices, such as blogging (Coady, 2011; Goldman, 2008; Munn, 2012; Turner, 2013), googling (Simpson, 2012), ranking (Origgi, 2012; Simpson, 2011), user-anonymity (Frost-Arnold, 2014), crowdsourced GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation (Record and Miller, forthcoming), and Wikipedia (De Laat, 2011; Fallis, 2011; Magnus, 2009; Wray, 2009). A related project analyzes Internet phenomena to re-examine traditional epistemic notions such as knowledge, justification, trust, and testimony, with an eye to epistemically bettering current online practices (Freiman, 2014; Lynch, 2016; Miller and Record, 2013; Record and Miller, forthcoming; Simon, 2010; Tollefsen, 2009; Weinberger, 2011).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsible epistemic technologies: A social-epistemological analysis of autocompleted web search

Miller

Record

2016

New Media & Society

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Information providing and gathering increasingly involve technologies like search engines, which actively shape their epistemic surroundings. Yet, a satisfying account of the epistemic responsibilities associated with them does not exist. We analyze automatically generated search suggestions from the perspective of social epistemology to illustrate how epistemic responsibilities associated with a technology can be derived and assigned. Drawing on our previously developed theoretical framework that connects responsible epistemic behavior to practicability, we address two questions: first, given the different technological possibilities available to searchers, the search technology, and search providers, who should bear which responsibilities? Second, given the technology's epistemically relevant features and potential harms, how should search terms be autocompleted? Our analysis reveals that epistemic responsibility lies mostly with search providers, which should eliminate three categories of autosuggestions: those that result from organized attacks, those that perpetuate damaging stereotypes, and those that associate negative characteristics with specific individuals.

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Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsible epistemic technologies: A social-epistemological analysis of autocompleted web search

Miller

Record

2016

New Media & Society

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“…For starters, see(Pariser 2011;Miller and Record, 2013;Frost-Arnold 2014;Frost-Arnold 2016;Rini 2017;Nguyen 2018b). Many of these emphasize the degree to which trust is mediated by these technologies, but I think that is, in part, due to the lack of theoretical resources available to make sense of trust in objects…”

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confidence: 99%

Trust as an Unquestioning Attitude

Nguyen¹

2022

Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 7

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According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency—for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency.

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“…Other discussions of Twitter have focused on the enforced shortness of tweets, the influence of hidden algorithmic filtering, the promotion of group polarization, the lack of accountability mechanisms, and the collapse of conversational contexts (Sunstein, 2009, 46-96;Marwick and boyd, 2011;Miller and Record, 2013;Frost-Arnold, 2014;Rini, 2017). I would like to focus on another basic feature of Twitter -one whose importance and impacts, I think, has not been adequately appreciated.…”

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confidence: 99%

How Twitter Gamifies Communication

Nguyen¹

2021

Applied Epistemology

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In this chapter, C. Thi Nguyen argues that Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values shift from the complex and pluralistic values of communication to the narrower quest for popularity and virality. Twitter’s gamification bears some resemblance with the phenomena of echo chambers and moral outrage porn. In all these phenomena, we are instrumentalizing our ends for hedonistic reasons. We have shifted our aims in an activity, not because the new aims are more valuable, but in exchange for extra pleasure.

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Trustworthiness and Truth: The Epistemic Pitfalls of Internet Accountability

Cited by 15 publications

References 43 publications

Responsible epistemic technologies: A social-epistemological analysis of autocompleted web search

Responsible epistemic technologies: A social-epistemological analysis of autocompleted web search

Trust as an Unquestioning Attitude

How Twitter Gamifies Communication

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