Scientific communication in a post-truth society

Abstract

Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between scientists, policy makers, and the public. To date, efforts have centered on improving the content, accessibility, and delivery of scientific communications. Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no longer the core of the problem. Distrust in the scientific enterprise and misperceptions of scientific knowledge increasingly stem less from problems of communication and more from the widespread dissemination of misleading and biased information. We describe the profound structural shifts in the media environment that have occurred in recent decades and their connection to public policy decisions and technological changes. We explain how these shifts have enabled unscrupulous actors with ulterior motives increasingly to circulate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation with the help of trolls, bots, and respondent-driven algorithms. We document the high degree of partisan animosity, implicit ideological bias, political polarization, and politically motivated reasoning that now prevail in the public sphere and offer an actual example of how clearly stated scientific conclusions can be systematically perverted in the media through an internet-based campaign of disinformation and misinformation. We suggest that, in addition to attending to the clarity of their communications, scientists must also develop online strategies to counteract campaigns of misinformation and disinformation that will inevitably follow the release of findings threatening to partisans on either end of the political spectrum.

Research Trends: Advanced approaches for a better understanding of scientific knowledge transfer in forest and forest-related policy

“…This also means, however, that approaches primarily calling for an improvement of communication (like, e.g. Requier et al, 2020) between science, politics, and practice have their limitations (Iyengar and Massey, 2019). But even if the latter authors note that weak communication is not the only problem and highlight important changes in information technology and the role of actors in serving misleading information (Iyengar and Massey, 2019), they still underestimate the importance of political processes, power and interests of political actors, which cannot be undermined by communication alone.…”

The vaccination debate in the “post‐truth” era: social media as sites of multi‐layered reflexivity

“…The affordances of social networking sites, stimulating the creation of “echo chambers” that amplify and reinforce existing views rather than support confrontation with dissenting perspectives (see e.g. Sunstein ), contribute to a faster and deeper polarisation of opinions, whilst allowing for factually incorrect, misleading or entirely fabricated information to gain the kind of prominence and impact that previous communication technologies could never have provided (Iyengar and Massey , Van Aelst et al . ).…”

“…With claims like these, the anti‐vaccination campaign often shares common ground with conspiracy theories, which Ylä‐Anttila describes as a ‘type of counterknowledge’ – alternative knowledge which challenges dominant epistemic authorities – centred around the conviction that “common people are misled in secrecy by an elite” (Ylä‐Anttila : 361) . Even though the rise of conspiracy theories cannot be associated solely with either the digital age or with the “post‐truth” era, as they date far back into history (Van Prooijen and Douglas ), some authors claim that they are now part of our “contemporary political zeitgeist” (Einstein and Glick ) and that the online environment as well as the anti‐expert climate of epistemic populism offer them particularly conducive conditions to flourish, as the anti‐vaccination campaign arguably demonstrates (Iyengar and Massey , Lewandowsky et al . ).…”

Science communication in a post‐truth world: promises and pitfalls

“…New technology, including algorithms that detect false information, and proactive campaigns against misinformation, may help combat the effects of fake news (Iyengar and Massey 2019). Somewhat unsettling and problematic, however, is that research suggests fake news is spread on social media because humans, not algorithms, choose to circulate false information, because it is perceived as novel (Vosoughi et al 2018).…”