Media and Fakery Symposium

From fake news to the deepfake, the digital era’s expanded possibilities for fabrication and falsehood are bedevilling the fourth estate as its parameters expand to include a host of new and often concealed sources, spreading via manipulable social media algorithms. Media scholars have called on us all to reject the pejorative term “fake,” which is used to conduct mistrust and accusations toward institutions that we have traditionally relied upon to shine a light on powerful interests. However, we are at the same time being ushered into a more generalised media-critical thought, as unreliable reportage proliferates in many of the places we turn to for trustworthy information. How do we balance acknowledgement of media fakery with our need for reasonable information that we can trust?

This one-day symposium aims to address some of the more urgent philosophical issues arising in an era marked by proliferating resources for media fakery.