Abstract
Half-truths, misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories. Keywords that have been on everyone’s lips since the US presidential election in 2016 at the latest. In the context of the current Covid-19 pandemic, all of these terms have once again gained increasing attention. The World Health Organization (WHO) refers to the enormous amount of information of different quality in this context as an ‘infodemic’.
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Notes
- 1.
An overview of media usage in the USA can be found, for example, at the following Internet addresses:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/
- 2.
Communication science research is not unanimous about the functional role of journalism within society. There are various designs that, in the sense of Luhmann, try to describe journalism as a social system, whereas there are also attempts to locate journalism within a functional public sphere system (for a summary see Hoffjann and Arlt 2015). However, for the purposes of this article, this debate is not of further relevance.
- 3.
For a further discussion of different types of information, see, for example, Posetti and Bontcheva 2020.
- 4.
We are aware that this portrayal is a strong simplification of the process of scientific discovery.
- 5.
For an overview of publications on Covid-19, see, for example: https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/how-coronavirus-is-changing-research-practices-and-publishing.
- 6.
This does not mean that there are not also a number of problems within science that are related to the acquisition of knowledge. However, it seems relatively unproblematic to claim that scientific knowledge (with all its weaknesses) is the most stable and reliable knowledge that we are able to generate (cf. Douglas 2009).
- 7.
The classical media have also been criticized for the fact that they largely reported in conformity and left little room for divergent opinions (cf. e.g. https://vimeo.com/471959768, https://www.corona-in-der-schweiz.ch).
- 8.
It also seems that a number of other fundamental questions remain unanswered: Who, for example, determines the proportionality of measures and on the basis of which criteria? Can the proportionality be announced by the executive, is it determined by the courts and what role should citizens play in this process? At the latest when the entire Covid-19 pandemic is under control, these and other questions must be clarified in a discourse with the entire public in order to act more sovereignly in future scenarios than was the case in many countries at times.
- 9.
Eleven European countries were examined: Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Austria, Sweden, Spain and Switzerland.
- 10.
It should be noted at this point that the term “conspiracy theory” is sometimes used as a kind of argument of last resort to deprive positions of their argumentative basis.
- 11.
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Wäscher, S., Nguyen, T., Biller-Andorno, N. (2023). ‘Infodemics’: Dealing with Information in Pandemic Times from an Ethical Perspective. In: Reis, A., Schmidhuber, M., Frewer, A. (eds) Pandemics and Ethics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66872-6_13
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