Introduction

News matters. Democracies need independent, fact-based news to provide a voice for a diverse range of people, to watchdog the powerful, and to keep members of a society informed. Much of the news surrounding us today does not, for one reason or the other, meet the standards of epistemically valuable news. Our media environments are polluted by fake news and other forms of mis- and disinformation. We have a problem of fake news. This chapter presents the motivations and challenges for giving an account of fake news that can be useful to science. It then argues that a specific epistemology of fake news is needed as a new branch of social epistemology. The chapter presents a rough sketch of how the contours of such an epistemology of fake news may look like. It also gives an overview of the chapters of this volume.