Digital Slot Machines: Social Media Platforms as Attentional Scaffolds

In this paper we introduce the concept of attentional scaffolds and show the resemblance between social media platforms and slot machines, both functioning as hostile attentional scaffolds. The first section establishes the groundwork for the concept of attentional scaffolds and draws parallels to the mechanics of slot machines, to argue that...

Toxic Online Environments are what Makes Rational Persuasion Become Wrongful

Suppose you wanted to switch to a healthier diet and searched for ideas online. You will unavoidably find some posts and videos where various influencers weigh in on this topic on social media platforms. Going down the rabbit hole of online searches, you see that the most vocal debate occurrs between two camps: the high fat versus the high...

Hic sunt leones. User orientation as a design principle for emerging institutions on social media platforms

The phenomenon of missed interactions between online users is a specific issue occurring when users of different language games interact on social media platforms. We use the lens of institutional theory to analyze this phenomenon and argue that current online institutions will necessarily fail to regulate user interactions in a way that...

The moral source of collective irrationality during COVID-19 vaccination campaigns

Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the collective irrationality of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as partisanship and ideology, exposure to misinformation and conspiracy theories or the effectiveness of public messaging. This paper presents a complementary explanation to epistemic accounts of collective irrationality, focusing on...

Enactive Principles for the Ethics of User Interactions on Social Media: How to Overcome Systematic Misunderstandings Through Shared Meaning-Making

This paper proposes three principles for the ethical design of online social environments aiming to minimise the unintended harms caused by users while interacting online, specifically by enhancing the users’ awareness of the moral load of their interactions. Such principles would need to account for the strong mediation of the digital...

Feeling and thinking on social media: emotions, affective scaffolding, and critical thinking

It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we...

Self-Trust and Critical Thinking Online: A Relational Account

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user’s side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it...

How to Do Things with Information Online. A Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Social Networking Platforms as Epistemic Environments

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms...

A Digital Picture to Hold Us Captive?: A Flusserian Interpretation of Misinformation Sharing on Social Media

In this article I investigate online misinformation from a media philosophy perspective. I, thus move away from the debate focused on the semantic content, concerned with what is true or not about misinformation. I argue rather that online misinformation is the effect of an informational climate promoted by user micro-behaviours such as liking,...

Sharing (mis) information on social networking sites. An exploration of the norms for distributing content authored by others

This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original...

Emotions and Digital Well-Being: The Rationalistic Bias of Social Media Design in Online Deliberations

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity,...