There are epistemic manipulators in the world. These people are actively attempting to sacrifice epistemic goods for personal gain. In doing so, manipulators have led many competent epistemic agents into believing contrarian theories that go against well-established knowledge. In this paper, I explore one mechanism by which manipulators get epistemic agents to believe contrarian theories. I do so by looking at a prominent empirical model of trustworthiness. This model identifies three major factors that epistemic agents look for when trying to determine who is trustworthy. These are (i) ability, (ii) benevolence, and (iii) moral integrity. I then show how manipulators can manufacture the illusion that they possess these factors. This leads epistemic agents to view manipulators as trustworthy sources of information. Additionally, I argue that fact-checking will be an ineffective – or even harmful – practice when correcting the beliefs of epistemic agents who have been tricked by this illusion of epistemic trustworthiness. I suggest that in such cases we should use an alternative correction, which I call trust undercutting.

This study investigates the effect of political misinformation as propaganda on the legitimacy of the Chinese government. A survey experiment (n = 2,236) was conducted to analyse the effect of positively spun misinformation on citizens’ perceptions and support for the government on two pivotal issues: the economy and air pollution. Results show that spreading positively spun misinformation is beneficial to the regime, as it leads to positive perceptions of the issue and increased support for the government. Interestingly, even when misinformation is exposed through credibly sourced corrections, trust and support for the government remain as high or higher than for the control groups. These effects are significant and hold constant in two issue types, underscoring the strategic value of disseminating positively spun yet false information in China. These findings have rich implications for studies of misinformation and fact-checking in general and China's information politics in particular.

Usage of large language models and chat bots will almost surely continue to grow, since they are so easy to use, and so (incredibly) credible. I would be more comfortable with this reality if we encouraged more evaluations with humans-in-the-loop to come up with a better characterization of when the machine can be trusted and when humans should intervene. This article will describe a homework assignment, where I asked my students to use tools such as chat bots and web search to write a number of essays. Even after considerable discussion in class on hallucinations, many of the essays were full of misinformation that should have been fact-checked. Apparently, it is easier to believe ChatGPT than to be skeptical. Fact-checking and web search are too much trouble.

The advent of COVID-19 vaccination meant a moment of hope after months of crisis communication. However, the context of disinformation on social media threatened the success of this public health campaign. This study examines how heads of government and fact-checking organizations in four countries managed communications on Twitter about the vaccination. Specifically, we conduct a content analysis of their discourses through the observation of propaganda mechanisms. The research draws on a corpus of words related to the pandemic and vaccines in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States (n = 2,800). The data were captured for a five-month period (January–May 2021), during which COVID-19 vaccines became available for elderly people. The results show a trend of clearly fallacious communication among the political leaders, based on the tools of emphasis and appeal to emotion. We argue that the political messages about the vaccination mainly used propaganda strategies. These tweets also set, to a certain extent, the agendas of the most relevant fact-checking initiatives in each country.

Politics is full of people who don't care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes literally. After first outlining an account of bullshit, I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters. I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives. I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable.

This paper employs survey experiments to examine how contextualizing the claims made in negative political advertising affects perceptions of their fairness. This has implications for the components of fairness judgments, e.g., if “truth” is a component of fairness, being informed that a claim is untrue should undermine perceptions of its fairness, as well as for the efficacy of “fact-checking.” Our experiments on a random national telephone sample show some effects of being informed that a claim is untrue but few if it is characterized as taken out of context or as irrelevant. These findings imply that: (a) while evaluations of the truth of claims appear to be a component of fairness, considerations such as whether claims are the “whole story” or “relevant” to the decision at hand do not, and (b) contextualizing of the claims of ads in fact-checks has very little impact on perceptions of their fairness.