From Fact‐checking to Value‐checking: Normative Reasoning in the New Public Sphere

This article suggests that fact checking is a useful but incomplete framework for delivering an epistemically healthy public sphere. Through a brief history of the fact/value distinction, it is argued that there is no secure justification for limiting interventions aimed at improving the emergent digital public sphere only to factual claims. On this basis, the heuristic principle of ‘value checking’ is outlined, as a complement to fact checking in the epistemic regulation of democratic discourse. Value checking would accept that more sophisticated and deliberative communication is a vital requirement for a well‐functioning public sphere, and that this can be promoted through new forms of epistemic regulation. However, it would reject the notion that fact checking is sufficient to achieve this, suggesting that the promotion of healthy political communication should also extend to value‐based reasoning. The principle of value checking could be added to the fact‐checking paradigm as a means of further enriching the public sphere in the ‘post‐truth’ age.