Abstract

A lot of people across many academic and professional disciplines argue that we should stop saying ‘fake news’. Although most of them do not take themselves to be doing conceptual engineering, that is exactly what they are doing. I consider some of the reasons for and against abandoning ‘fake news’, focusing specifically on the debate between those who agree that ‘fake news’ is a weaponized concept, but disagree about whether weaponization is reason to abandon or reason to retain it. This involves developing some new possibilities for conceptual engineering and outlining a theory of weaponized concepts.