This article aims to provide a coherent and comprehensive theoretical framework of the main socio-epistemic features of social media. The first part consists of a concise discussion of the main epistemic consequences of personalised information filtering, with a focus on echo chambers and their many different implications. The middle section instead hosts an analytical investigation of the cognitive and epistemic environments of these platforms aimed at establishing whether, and to what extent, they allow their users to be epistemically vigilant with (...) respect to their sources and the content recommended to them. Finally, in the last part, of a more exquisitely normative nature, some strategies are proposed and discussed that, by reducing the epistemic opacity of social media, could contribute to greater epistemic justice within social media and, concurrently, to augmenting the epistemic autonomy of users. (shrink)

Some scholars endorse the idea that a necessary condition for qualifying as fake news is being consumed by a minimum number of people. Call this requirement ‘the minimum audience condition’. I claim that each version of this condition is either incompatible with the damage that fake news does to our beliefs or unable to capture the case of outlandish fake stories. Drawing inspiration from an online scam, I then propose to distinguish the audience of fake news from its target. Lastly, (...) I replace the minimum audience condition with a new requirement stating that fake news must be designed and published in a way that is conducive to the goal of persuading one or more target groups, regardless of its audience. (shrink)