Misinformation and disinformation are diminishing public trust in science and becoming an existential threat to the planet, researchers warned this week.
We suspect it can be said of many countries around the world that the majority of residents get their news and information from social media and elsewhere on the internet. It should also be said, that academic literature is not immune to misinformation, conspiracy theories and whacky ideas. This was demonstrated during the pandemic. The current faulty retraction system means that compromised research outputs have enduring impacts, even when they have been retracted. Nevertheless, we need a way to do with all the misinformation and dross floating in the public consciousness.
- At the same time, a gap in trust of scientists is widening along political lines: In a Pew Research survey last September, 24% of Republicans said they think scientific experts are typically better than others at making good policy decisions about scientific issues, compared to 55% of Democrats.
- The causes and the effects of these intersecting trends — with the added force of generative AI — were the focus of a three-day meeting this week in Washington, D.C., organized by the Nobel Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.
Details: Speakers described how the attention economy’s business model intersects with the very human desire to belong — fueling an information environment riddled with misinformation and disinformation.
- “The real problem isn’t people. It’s the reward structure on social platforms,” said Gizem Ceylan, a behavioral scientist at Yale University.
- In a study published this year, Ceylan found the rewards — attracting attention and recognition in the form of likes and comments — of sharing online create habits that drive people’s behavior more than their motivations do. For example, the top 15% of habitual news sharers were involved in 30% to 40% of the false news shared in the study.
- Earlier research zeroed in on people’s desire to be a source of novel information — which was more likely to be false — as helping to drive the spread of misinformation and disinformation on Twitter.
- Ceylan and her collaborators argue “social media sites could be restructured to build habits to share accurate information.”
