In the article, “Fake News and Partisan Epistemology”, Regina Rini expresses concerns about the epidemic of fake news being spread so widely and rapidly on social media platforms today. Fake news is deliberately deceptive, it is meant to catch the eye and catch clicks for the purpose of generating revenue for someone’s website. A variety of epistemic virtues are strangely abandoned on the platform of social media. The article investigates what features of social media make it so easy for people to abandon epistemic virtue. Rini points out that partisanship is the reason that people are more likely to surrender epistemic virtue and readily jump upon wild and outrageous conspiracy theories which to anyone with a critical eye would warrant some skepticism. The way partisanship manifests itself as an opponent to truth is when people share particular political affiliations with others. Those people are seen as closer to themselves and are seen as right simply because the receiver of the fake news assumes that anyone who shares their political opinions must be feeding them proper information. This mainly has to do as well with our willingness to believe testimony outright rather than cross checking every bit of information that is fed to us. Believing testimony is individually reasonable and Rini argues that the mechanism of social media takes advantage of this individually reasonable behavior and co-opts the space of testimony in order to spread misinformation. Rini believes a possible solution to this phenomenon is for social media platforms to flag individual accounts which regularly spread misinformation and to create a sort of score which measures credibility thereby making people take more responsibility for the things they post.

This article begins to consider the implications of machines used as military weaponry. Specifically, should machines be able to kill people in combat? It’s clear that even things that are not designed as weapons have the power and potential to be used as weapons..even a toaster. While robots themselves were never intended to replace humans in war they serve as a way to potentially decrease casualties while also being able to make the choice to kill another person at will. The article explains that this is exactly the issue in that robots have no “will” or morality and than even while war literally means death the only people who can be the perpetrators of death must also be willing to be the recipient of it themselves.
After detailing the various background information regarding the types of weapons and the laws of war, the authors proceed to address the major question of their essay: “should we relinquish the decision to kill a human to a non-human machine?” (134). In order to treat this profound question, the authors expound on the philosophical definition of a human being, a being with intrinsic dignity and rights according to Immanuel Kant. Using a robot to kill a human treats a human being as a mere object, and therefore denies human dignity. Furthermore, the authors discuss morality as an essentially human characteristic, and maintain that a robot could only imitate moral actions, without being in itself moral. They also discuss LAWS as being potentially dishonorable, in that they negate the risk of immediate sacrifice inherent in war. Without the potential for sacrifice, the use of robots becomes cowardly, and thus contrary to what is considered honorable military conduct. The authors conclude by postulating a complete ban on autonomous weapons systems, much like the current status of chemical and gas weapons, considered too heinous to be tolerated.