Article in Science by evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom. Extracts below and a comment from me. Read online: https://www.science.org/content/article/studying-fighting-misinformation...
One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans. “Our ability to convince people that this was a vaccine that was going to save a lot of lives and that everyone needed to take was much, much worse than most of us imagined,” Bergstrom says.
He is convinced this catastrophic failure can be traced to social media networks and their power to spread false information—in this case about vaccines—far and fast. “Bullshit” is Bergstrom’s umbrella term for the falsehoods that propagate online—both misinformation, which is spread inadvertently, and disinformation, designed to spread falsehoods deliberately...
“Misinformation has reached crisis proportions,” Bergstrom and his UW colleague Jevin West wrote in a 2021 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “It poses a risk to international peace, interferes with democratic decision-making, endangers the well-being of the planet, and threatens public health.”...
Bergstrom sees social media, like many other things in life, through an evolutionary lens. The popular platforms exploit humanity’s need for social validation and constant chatter, a product of our evolution, he says. He compares it to our craving for sugar, which was beneficial in an environment where sweetness was rare and signaled nutritious food, but can make us sick in a world where sugar is everywhere...
Online networks also undermine traditional rules of thumb about communication... “In the physical world, it would be almost impossible to meet anyone else who thinks the world is flat,” Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, wrote in an email. “But online, I can connect with the other .000001% of people who hold that belief, and may gather the (false) impression that it is widely shared.”...
In 2018, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study in Science showing false news spreads “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth.” The reason is that people like novelty, and false stories are likely to be more novel, the authors suggested...
Reining in such thoughtless sharing is the goal of two approaches to tackling misinformation. One, known in the field as “nudging,” includes anything from flagging suspicious information — for example because it’s based on few or anonymous sources — to making it harder to share something... The other approach, “boostering,” is designed to improve users’ critical skills...
COMMENT (NPW): A third approach is of course to improve the availability and use of reliable healthcare information. This is of course linked to the second approach - critical skills - but the ability to differentiate reliable information from unreliable information should be driven not only by people's individual health literacy, but also by providers of reliable healthcare inforamtion making such information more visible and identifiable.
Best wishes, Neil
Neil Pakenham-Walsh, HIFA Coordinator, neil@hifa.org www.hifa.org
