Stellenbosch University
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Stellenbosch Forum Webinar: Whose responsibility is it anyway? Truth and social media.
Start: 30/09/2021, 13:00
End: 30/09/2021, 14:00
Contact:Whitney Prins -
Location: MS Teams

​Thursday, 30 September 2021 

13:00 - 14:00

Register: https://bit.ly/3z9yzZ2

Enquiries: Whitney Prins, drdcomm@sun..ac.za

A MS Teams link will be sent to all participants via e-mail.

 

Millar (2019), makes a convincing case for why many ordinary social media users are not (completely) blameworthy for their false beliefs, gained from such platforms. This is because such individuals have not violated any plausible epistemic obligations (i.e. duties relating to one's acquisition of knowledge) in acquiring such beliefs.  On the other hand, social media and other online companies that provide information seem to eschew responsibility for providing content that may lead to false beliefs, often claiming that they leave it up to their users to “make up their own minds". The result is an epistemic environment highly conducive to the forming of false beliefs, with its accompanying real-world implications, with no-one to hold responsible, or to blame, whether epistemically or morally. This is untenable, as recent political events around the world have shown. In this forum lecture, I assess the degree to which both the users and the providers of online information can be held epistemically (and perhaps morally) responsible for the epistemic beliefs that users come to hold.

Bio

Dr. Tanya de Villiers-Botha is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University. She obtained her DPhil at Stellenbosch University (SU) in 2006. Her research interests include: philosophy of mind and cognitive science, philosophy of evolutionary biology and the ethics of AI. She is currently the coordinator of the Data and Computational Ethics Research Group of the Stellenbosch University Philosophy Department and a member of the Global AI Ethics Consortium of the Institute for the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Munich.

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