A very interesting recent report in Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01452-z
discusses the current infodemic in the context of COVID (According to The World Health Organization: “An over-abundance of information — some accurate and some not — rendering it difficult to find trustworthy sources of information and reliable guidance.”), but this can but put in the context of a great threat to our entire way of life.
Why is it so hard to slow the speed at which fake news spread? Are there real practical solutions to lower the spread of that disease? It seems extremely dangerous to me, and definitely a problem worth discussing. What can we do as scientists to help? Any ideas or references would be greatly appreciated.
And if someone can point me to references about why is it that bots are even allowed to exist within say a social media outlet like Twitter I'd be happy to hear about them. Why can't each person only be allowed to have one account say? Maybe a naive question, but I would like to know about mechanisms that could allow to implement it or that exist and prevent it from happening.
I think social media are principally not the right medium to address questions of concern. What we can do as scientists is to send out messages correctly that are within our field of research and dismantle lies that we see.
But in the end we must press strongly for not using these media for questions of concern. For scientific questions established processes like peer review exists and it should be our focus to educate the general public about how it works. Otherwise scientists appear like people that fight among each other, send out contradicting messages and fulfill in that way the general criteria of being untrustworthy.
At our museum we have teamed up for instance with three other scientific institutions to educate journalists about processes in the Baltic Sea. That was received fine and led to hundreds of correct articles, TV spots and so forth causing then also social media entries with correct information. And we should abandon those journalists that transmit wrong information.
Since not every scientist will become a media professional we should think about including aspects of transferring information into the public in various ways into all research study fields.
This will take time...
As scientists we have to focus on our work. Then, we have to send a positive messages for others.
The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) coronavirus pandemic continues. Currently, the second wave of the pandemic is developing in many countries. When will the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus vaccine be developed? Will there be a lockdown? Will an increase in influenza infections increase the pandemic risk of an increase in Covid-19 disease? What are the economic effects of the second wave of the pandemic? Is the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the result of research carried out in virology laboratories? etc. There are still many unanswered questions. Fake news based on incomplete, unreliable and scientifically unverified information appear and are reproduced on social media portals. When faced with many unanswered questions, various conspiracy theories emerge.
Greetings,
Dariusz Prokopowicz