Trustworthiness and Truth: The Epistemic Pitfalls of Internet Accountability

Since anonymous agents can spread misinformation with impunity, many people advocate for greater accountability for internet speech. This paper provides a veritistic argument that accountability mechanisms can cause significant epistemic problems for internet encyclopedias and social media communities. I show that accountability mechanisms can undermine both the dissemination of true beliefs and the detection of error. Drawing on social psychology and behavioral economics, I suggest alternative mechanisms for increasing the trustworthiness of internet communication. Introduction Internet anonymity can encourage people to act in bad faith. For epistemologists, this raises concerns about the trustworthiness of internet communication. If anonymity makes it easy for agents to lie, makes it difficult for audiences to judge the competence of speakers, and prevents us from providing real-world punishments for those who undermine epistemic practices, then, so this concern goes, the internet provides a poor medium for the production and dissemination of knowledge. Wikipedia vandalism, Twitter pranks, and hoax blogs are now 1 I thank P. D. Magnus, Ben Almassi, the works-in-progress group at Hobart & William Smith, and an anonymous reviewer for Episteme for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.