Truth, Deliberative Democracy, and the Virtues of Accuracy: Is Fake News Destroying the Public Sphere?
| Author | Simone Chambers |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719890811 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719890811
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(1) 147 –163
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719890811
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Truth, Deliberative Democracy,
and the Virtues of Accuracy:
Is Fake News Destroying the
Public Sphere?
Simone Chambers
Abstract
Do fake news and what some have labeled our post-truth predicament represent a new and deadly
challenge to the epistemic presuppositions of the public sphere? While many commentators have
invoked Hannah Arendt to help answer this question, I argue that Arendt is the wrong place to
look. Instead, I suggest that, on one hand, deliberative democracy and Jürgen Habermas’ idea of
democracy as truth-tracking offer a more helpful framework for assessing and combating the
threat of fake news and, on the other hand, Bernard Williams’ virtues of accuracy identify the
citizen virtues necessary to counteract fake news. The virtues of accuracy, I contend, can be
facilitated and encouraged through structural and regulatory features in the public sphere. We are
indeed seeing a recalibration and significant push back on fake news due to both structural changes
and ordinary citizens becoming more epistemically responsible consumers of digital information.
Keywords
fake news, post-truth, deliberative democracy, public sphere, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas,
Bernard Williams
Accepted: 25 July 2019
Introduction
A February 2017 Dan Piraro cartoon captures the anxiety, the danger, and, in some cases,
the absurdity of the epistemic uncertainty that has accompanied the rise in fake news
(Piraro, 2017). A couple is watching a weather report on television. The weather man
says, “A category 4 hurricane is on track to make landfall by morning and residents are
advised to evacuate. Those who do not trust the media, of course, can just stay put.” As
the cartoon pointedly shows, there are brute facts out there and sometimes having trusted
access to those facts can be the difference between life and death. Less dramatically, the
Department of Political Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Corresponding author:
Simone Chambers, Department of Political Science, University of California–Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
Email: sechambe@uci.edu
890811PSX0010.1177/0032321719890811Political StudiesChambers
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
148 Political Studies 69(1)
cartoon also suggests that citizens generally need facts and accurate knowledge in order
to make practical judgments. And, finally, the cartoon illustrates that citizens’ access to
facts is often highly mediated. This mediation is unavoidable and not a predicament
brought on by new communication technologies, but new communication technologies
have facilitated the spread of fake news. The question I ask in this article is, do the epis-
temic uncertainties connected to fake news represent just another layer to our mediatized
access to factual truth, or is fake news and what some have labeled our post-truth predica-
ment a new and more deadly challenge to the epistemic presuppositions of political com-
munication and the public sphere? The answer I develop in this article is that the
digitalization of the public sphere is indeed a new challenge but that it does not have to be
deadly. Deliberative democracy offers some insight into how to meet that challenge.
I begin by outlining contemporary threats to information acquisition in the public
sphere. These are by now familiar and involve the rise of fake news and epistemic uncer-
tainty connected to the digital expansion of the public sphere, especially the growth of
social media as a major source of information. Layered on top of that are public and pri-
vate actors exploiting the uncertainties and technology of the new digital landscape to
sow doubt about many of the traditional sources of mediated information. Post-truth is a
term that often suggests that the threat to truth is not simply bad actors weaponizing the
Internet but also the declining salience of truth or objective facts for citizens, and elite
opinion and will-formation. Here, the worry is that people do not really care that much
about the truth or they care about other things (partisan causes) more than the truth.
While many commentators have invoked Hannah Arendt to help get a firm conceptual
grasp of our epistemic situation, I argue that Arendt is the wrong place to look. Instead, I
suggest that deliberative democracy and Jürgen Habermas’ idea of democracy as truth-
tracking offer a more helpful framework for assessing and combating the threat of fake
news and post-truth attitudes. With the democracy-as-truth-tracking frame in place, I
return to the threat assessment and suggest that there is empirical evidence that the demo-
cratic public sphere is recalibrating after the epistemic shocks of 2016. This recalibration
involves rethinking, reforming, and regulating social media from the point of view of the
role they play in political communication, truth-tracking, and public opinion formation.
But slowing down, debunking, and exposing fake news will only have an impact if citi-
zens care about, and make efforts to acquire, the truth.
Turning from the structural to the citizen side of the equation, I look at data suggesting
that populist/right-wing social media users are more likely to trade in fake news and per-
haps more likely to believe fake news, but in any case are more likely to hang on to fake
news in the face of debunking and correction than other partisan groups. What can account
for this asymmetry in the relationship of citizens to truth in the public sphere? Empirical
social sciences favor explanations drawn from social psychology that tie resistance to
truth, to cognitive weakness and biases built into our psychological makeup. I suggest
that this strategy is problematic for a number of reasons and turn instead to Bernard
Williams to shed light on this predicament and more importantly to suggest some strate-
gies to combat creeping post-truth. I argue that Williams’ virtues of accuracy are citizen
virtues and a necessary condition for a working public sphere. These virtues are more
important than more commonly identified virtues of deliberation, for example, respect
and civility. The virtues of accuracy can be facilitated and encouraged through structural
and regulatory features in the public sphere. Indeed, the recalibration that we are seeing
is due, I argue, to both structural changes and ordinary citizens exercising the virtues of
accuracy by becoming more knowledgeable about and aware of the ways that digital
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