In 2017, the average Australian spent roughly 10 hours per week online. By 2021, this number increased to more than 6 hours per day, with a non-trivial chunk of time devoted to social media. That social media are a hotbed for the spread of fake-news, medical misinformation, conspiracy theories, extremist sentiments and other epistemically troubling content is well known. What remains more elusive - and constitutes the core of our research - are the patterns, pathways, and dynamics via which such content propagates, contaminating the epistemic networks on which most of us have come to depend.

Reliance on such networks is not merely unavoidable. In the best cases, it is empowering: greatly increasing the scope of our knowledge. But while there are benefits to distributing one’s cognitive load, doing so is also fraught with dangers. Other agents sometimes have reason to mislead, and are themselves sometimes misled. In an increasingly digital world, these dangers are exacerbated by a tension between greater scope for reliance on the one hand, and greater uncertainty as to whom we can trust on the other. 

Tackling these challenges trades on developing philosophical models of trust that take these issues into account. It also requires investigating the structure and information flows of real online communities in order to test these philosophical models and identify feasible intervention strategies.

To this end, our research draws on a broad assortment of methods, ranging from conceptual analysis to natural language processing, network modelling, and much else. This multi-pronged approach reflects both the interdisciplinary makeup of our team, and our commitment to producing empirically informed philosophy.