testo_di_prova3.txt

 to believe. However, the intention to deceive does not require that effect. According to condition B2, the publisher is required to intend to deceive his audience. Whether he is successful in achieving this is immaterial. That said, let us investigate the nature of the intention. As I have explained, a fake news publisher does not necessarily seek to deceive us about the facts. As a bullshitter, however, “What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is,” in Frankfurt’s words, “his enterprise.” He “misrepresents what he is up to” (Frankfurt 2005: 54). While he is, in fact, truth-indifferent (in the sense of truth-indifferent 1 ), he tries to come across as someone who is concerned with the truth. There are various ways to do this. One is to lie. The fake news publisher may, for example, provide false information about himself or his publication (e.g., in the “About Us” section of his website). Another method is to work with false implicatures, for example, by citing fake sources to create the impression that one pays heed to the evidence. These two examples, however, are not the only methods a publisher can use to deceive us about his intent. On the traditional definition of deception, “To deceive = df to intentionally cause to have a false belief that is known or believed to be false”[26] (Mahon 2016). Accordingly, a fake news publisher does not even have to say anything to deceive us about his enterprise. He can, for example, misrepresent what he is up to by having a misleading web address—one that “sounds legit”—or by mimicking website addresses and designs of acknowledged news sources.[27] Finally, it is not even clear that a fake news publisher needs to do anything to deceive his audience. If he purposely refrains, for example, from putting up a disclaimer on his website which states that his stories are fictitious, this, too, is, arguably, intentionally deceptive. To sum up, B2 does not require that the publisher is successful in deceiving anyone. It does, however, require that he try. As we have seen, there are various things he can do to this end. He can lie, mislead, or refrain from accurately classifying the information provided.\n\nAssertion Condition (A) It may seem at first glance as though my analysis implies that any bullshit in the form of a news publication has to be classed as fake news. This consequence, a critic might argue, is unwelcome. We should, after all, allow for the category of bullshit journalism. Intuitively, at least, there should be such a category because in some cases, we would probably go so far as to call some bad and biased journalism “bullshit,” without going so far as to call it “fake news.” This concern can be answered by distinguishing between bullshit assertions and bullshit implicatures (Webber 2013). When somebody asserts bullshit, they are indifferent regarding the truth of their statements. In contrast, when somebody implicates bullshit, they are indifferent to the truth of the implicatures of their statements.[28] Note, however, that, on A, it is a necessary condition for fake news that the bullshit content is asserted rather than merely implicated. Thus, it makes room for the category of bullshit journalism. If journalists assert bullshit in their publications, then, I propose, they should be seen as peddling fake news. If, in contrast, they merely implicate it, they should be viewed as practising bullshit journalism. To illustrate, consider a variation of ACUPUNCTURE from Section 1—call it ACUPUNCTURE*. In this case, let us assume, the documentarians were hell-bent on avoiding false assertions but entirely indifferent about misleading their audience through conversational implicatures. They omitted important facts and did not care whether or not their story created a false impression. In this case, there is, by stipulation, still no bullshit assertion. Hence, it is still not a case of fake news. However, the documentarians were, as we assumed, indifferent to the truth of the implicatures that their audience might draw from their work. That means that there is now a bullshit implicature such that the case qualifies as an instance of bullshit journalism. Hence, as ACUPUNCTURE* illustrates, my analysis does, in fact, allow for cases that fall into the category of bullshit journalism without falling into the category of fake news. This is ensured by Condition A.\n\nPublication Condition (P) Finally, consider P. It states that a story has to be presented in the form of a news publication to qualify as fake news. What does this mean, however? One approach to clarifying this is to compile a list of possible distribution channels for news publications—for example, newspapers, news programmes (on television and radio), news websites—and to say that anybody who spreads bullshit assertions using these distribution channels spreads fake news. Social media websites make things