This weeks post is by Dr. Lena Wimmer, University of Würzburg. Presenting her recent paper Why Disinformation, Fake News, and Conspiracy Theories are not Fiction: A View From Philosophical Aesthetics and Literary Studies published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology
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Lena Wimmer |
Not just in everyday conversations, but also in academic discussions, unreliable information – like misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories – is often compared to fiction. I want to question whether that comparison really holds up.
First, let us clarify what we mean by these different kinds of unreliable information. All of them operate at the level of individual claims or statements. Misinformation is the broadest category: it simply refers to false information, no matter whether the person sharing it means to mislead or not. Disinformation is more specific – it is false information shared deliberately to deceive. Fake news is a form of disinformation that pretends to be real news, often by imitating journalistic formats. Conspiracy theories are beliefs that two or more people have secretly worked together to cause some outcome that affects the public but remains hidden from it. Importantly, conspiracy theories are not necessarily false by definition. However, they are epistemically risky because they often deal with complex events where the full truth is hard, or even impossible, to verify.
If we look at the intentions behind sharing these kinds of information, disinformation and fake news clearly aim to deceive. They are presented as true even though the person spreading them knows they are false. With conspiracy theories, things are less clear-cut: the claims may not be obviously false, so we cannot always assume an intention to deceive. Still, those who promote conspiracy theories usually present them as accurate accounts of reality. Misinformation, by contrast, does not involve any specific intent. It can simply result from misunderstanding or error.
So how does fiction fit into all of this? Can it really be treated the same way as these forms of unreliable information? According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, “fiction” has two main meanings. One is “something that is invented or imagined and not true.” This is the everyday sense of the word, and it lines up fairly well with misinformation – false information that is not necessarily shared with any particular purpose. The second meaning refers to fiction as “a type of literature that describes imaginary people and events, not real ones”.
Scholars in literary studies and philosophy have spent a lot of time thinking about what defines fiction in this second sense. While there is no single agreed-upon definition, many agree that fiction involves a kind of deliberate signalling: authors make it clear that their work as a whole is not meant to be taken as a literal account of the real world. This idea echoes Philip Sidney’s famous “now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth”. From this perspective, fiction as literature cannot be equated with disinformation, fake news, or conspiracy theories, since those are all presented as true. It also does not really match misinformation, because fiction operates at the level of entire works, not individual claims.
In short, only the everyday use of the word “fiction” overlaps with unreliable information. Fiction as a literary genre does not.