2019
DOI: 10.1080/0020174x.2019.1685231
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Why we should keep talking about fake news

Abstract: In response to Habgood-Coote (2019. "Stop Talking about Fake News!" Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9-10): 1033-1065.) and a growing number of scholars who argue that academics and journalists should stop talking about fake news and abandon the term, we argue that the reasons which have been offered for eschewing the term 'fake news' are not sufficient to justify such abandonment. Prima facie, then, we take ourselves and others to be justified in continuing to talk about fake news.

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Cited by 16 publications
(10 citation statements)
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“…Over the past years, the literature on truth, facts, and fake has grown exponentially, with particularly high outputs after the 2016 US presidential election. Initial resistance against accepting fake news as an academic term due to its perceived imprecision (Habgood-Coote, 2019;Tandoc et al, 2018) appears to have given way to a certain normalisation (Egelhofer and Lecheler, 2019;Egelhofer et al, 2020;Pepp et al, 2019). In this article, the term fake news is understood broadly as false information, regardless of content categories, disseminators' intentions, or affected interests.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 93%
“…Over the past years, the literature on truth, facts, and fake has grown exponentially, with particularly high outputs after the 2016 US presidential election. Initial resistance against accepting fake news as an academic term due to its perceived imprecision (Habgood-Coote, 2019;Tandoc et al, 2018) appears to have given way to a certain normalisation (Egelhofer and Lecheler, 2019;Egelhofer et al, 2020;Pepp et al, 2019). In this article, the term fake news is understood broadly as false information, regardless of content categories, disseminators' intentions, or affected interests.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 93%
“…First, it is an expression with a changing meaning, since, before 2016, it referred only to satirical news, with the intention of entertaining the audience through humor and satire [22,23], later acquiring different meanings, intentions, and productions that threaten journalism [24,25] and democracy itself [26,27]. Second, the expression fake news has become a buzzword [3,12,[28][29][30], an empty word, recurrently associated with something bad or simply false [19], with a "floating" meaning that is sensitive to various contexts [31]. Third, the political burden that the term entails, in the sense that the expression is recurrently used in the discourse of political actors mainly to discredit opposing ideas or parties, as a kind of weapon in the battlefield of contemporary political debate [32,33], has been one of the major obstacles to its definition, as well as serving as an argument for other authors to refute the validity of the concept (see [12,34]).…”
Section: Defining Fake News: a Current Problemmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…A group of experts from the European Commission, precisely because of its polysemic nature, chose to use the term disinformation instead of "fake news" [14]; Meel and Vishwakarma [8] opted for the terminology "information pollution", while Wardle and Derakhshan [10] opted for "information disorder" and Kapantai et al [11] preferred the use of the terminology "false information". However, for other authors, the concept of fake news continues to deserve to be used, even if the complexity of its meaning is recognized and a common definition is incessantly sought, albeit without great success [2,6,[15][16][17][18][19][20]. With the popularity that the term has reached, several academics have focused on the topic, namely with attempts to create a univocal definition.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Although the term "fake news" is contested by some journalists and academics [67]- [69], it is still relevant to promote debates on digital literacy and encourage scholarly work on the issue [70]. Moreover, the justification behind the call for a ban has been demonstrated to be insufficient for abandoning the term [71].…”
Section: Misinformation and Fake Newsmentioning
confidence: 99%