2025/07/14 by Aaron Hyzen, Hilde Van den Bulck, Manuel Puppis +2 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Social Media and Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/ct/qtaf018
openalex publication_date 2025/07/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/23
Abstract Working with the concept of epistemic welfare, defined as creating and maintaining the conditions and capabilities for individuals’ epistemic agency in the public sphere, this contribution provides a theoretical framework to demonstrate a way out of what has been described as an epistemic crisis, illustrating this with the case of algorithmic recommender systems used by media organizations. First, we identify the processes of datafication, algorithmization and platformization and their impact on the public sphere, specifically how they disrupt knowledge production, dissemination and acquisition. Next, we combine social epistemology, welfare studies and communication research to build a framework that allows analyzing how well communicative social practices, procedures and institutions fulfill epistemic standards and, thus, contribute to individuals’ opportunities to exercise their epistemic agency and reach epistemically valuable states. Finally, we discuss epistemic welfare’s implications for media governance, i.e., building conditions and capabilities that ensure epistemic agency.