Ciudadanía digital y bulos. Respuesta desde la ética cívica

This thesis aims to offer a reflection from the perspective of moral philosophy on one of the information disorders with the greatest impact on the public sphere: fake news. This alternative view to journalistic ethics or political communication is civic ethics. The guiding thread of this itinerary will no longer be media modernisation with its implications for users, as proposed by mediation theory, but rather technologisation through social networks and artificial intelligence. This thesis is based on the premise that the generation of public opinion no longer falls exclusively to the media industry, but also to the users. The second problem of digitalisation is the dilution of truth precisely because internet users lack the journalistic criteria, rigour and responsibility to obtain information and share it on social networks, on the one hand, and on the other, the huge supply of disinformation that has emerged through pirate news websites, ghost accounts of bots or radical political groups that feed polarisation and this happens by emulating the journalistic technique of writing and aesthetics. In this maelstrom of disinformation, the digital analphanaut is immersed, a user lacking the media skills to access, analyse, use and create content with critical thinking and responsibility. Chapter 1 refutes the idea that disinformation is a problem exclusive to journalism and proposes an approach based on critical theory. This first section defends the idea that fake news is a social pathology, since it is not just a matter of mimicking the language and style of journalism in order to deceive, but also of making the reader an accomplice by inducing him or her to share disinformation. And this choice is always personal; cognitive, political and psychological factors come into play. In chapter 2, two journalistic technical responses are presented: fact-checking and media literacy. The criticism is when what Ortega y Gasset called the technicality of the technique occurs, so I will argue that the culmination of fact-checking is in its pedagogical capacity and not only in the corroboration of the veracity of a statement; on media literacy, it cannot remain only in instructing users in technical skills, but also in ethical-civic competences. Chapter 3 will deal with the shaping of a digital citizen who is equipped with civic ethics and is able to fight against the impoverishment of public debate and to take on a leading role in the digital public sphere. Chapter 4 aims to account for the epistemological deficit of civic ethics by proposing a cordial infoethics that reconciles media skills and moral skills with epistemic responsibility, hermeneutic capacity and discernment between truthfulness (appropriateness) and the moral dimension of an emancipatory practical truth.