Science communication: disinformation and fake news

Being well informed as a citizen or not depends on our ability and motivation to detect falsehood, but also on other social factors that increase or decrease the chances that we are exposed to the correct information. This is the conclusion of the recently published study entitled Sciences audiences, misinformation and fake news 1. Its objective has been to review what is known about the misinformation that exists in scientific issues to improve the communication of science and identify what is missing in it.

The study offers a panoramic view on how and why citizens are incorrectly informed on issues related to science. In the first place it warns of the terms: misinformation, disinformation and uniformed. All refer to the erroneous information but they have differences. Misinformation is the one that probably arose by accident; disinformation is a type of misinformation that arises intentionally false and uninformed, which can be accidental or intentional. The distinctions between these terms, as well as other concepts such as “rumor” or “fake news”, have not always been clearly defined in research related to these topics, which makes it difficult sometimes to compare some data with others.

As the authors of the study say, handling incorrect information can have specific causes and consequences, especially if the citizen is especially active at the time of transmitting information and, especially, if this citizen is, on that information that is disseminated, poorly informed. For the authors, both characteristics imply that this citizen will hardly abandon his beliefs and opinions to accept new ones. This is related to what he calls “epistemic knowledge” of science, that is, the levels of information or misinformation that non-experts have about the scientific process and how they transform that information into knowledge based on the findings produced by science. An example of epistemic knowledge is that which is reflected in the results of the survey of US Science and Engineering Indicators. This survey measures general knowledge about scientific facts and its authors consider that it is related to the level of formal education of citizens and the scientific training they have. The latest survey reflects results such as the following: one in three Americans misunderstood the concept of probability; half of the population was not able to make a correct description of a scientific experiment and three out of four could not describe the main topic of a scientific study.

Another issue about the existence and dissemination of false scientific news is that of the belief in conspiracy theories, that is, those created intentionally by a group of people seeking a common benefit. According to the study, those who believe in these theories are people who, on the one hand, trust more in their intuition than in their conscious reasoning and, on the other, do not believe in falsehoods but rather support these theories to defend their ideology or to affirm your membership in a group. As the study states, the persistence of these conspiratorial beliefs is the result of politicians, the media and other agents who use them as fallacious tools to reinforce their ideas.

To this it is added that citizens have a low level of media literacy, that is, they can not analyze and evaluate the messages they receive in terms of truthfulness and quality. Therefore, apart from the fact that communication platforms are changing their algorithms, platforms such as Politifact.com and Factcheck.org have also emerged, as a countermeasure, to verify the information and disprove the fake news or hoaxes.

Naukas