Online "Wormholes": How Scientific Publishing Is Weaponized to Fuel COVID-19 Disinformation

[Nevilledog]

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AdiCo.
@adico11
One of the strengths of our comms environment, is our rapid access to a lot of info, scientific studies included. But this decentralized system is easily abused. Wrote about this for @techpolicypress, in light of the pandemic. Some insights: /1

Online “Wormholes”: How Scientific Publishing Is Weaponized to Fuel COVID-19 Disinformation
Mitigating this challenge requires more effort by scientific publishers, rather than just tech platforms and fact checkers, says Adi Cohen.
techpolicy.press
11:30 AM · Sep 2, 2021

https://techpolicy.press/online-wormholes-how-scientific-publishing-is-weaponized-to-fuel-covid-19-disinformation/

Earlier this year at a school board meeting in Indiana, Dan Stock, who calls himself “a private practice family medicine physician”, argued that mask wearing causes more harm than catching COVID-19 and that vaccines are dangerous. Videos of his speech went viral and gained millions of views before many were taken down by YouTube and Facebook. Alongside posts about his speech, viewers shared links to 22 articles Dr. Stock referenced in support of his arguments. Ten links on the list referred to scientific papers on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) website, and two at the New England Journal of Medicine.

Multiple fact checkers subsequently debunked Dr. Stock’s arguments, providing more scientific context and corrections to rebut his statements. It turns out that one of the sources Dr. Stock referred to is a retracted paper on the NIH website. The paper, “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis”, is the most shared link from the NCBI- the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information- and the PubMed NCBI papers database on Facebook and Twitter for the year 2021 to date. Despite the retraction note (and reports on the study’s falsehoods by fact checkers), it continues to be shared by thousands as a proof point to make the argument that even the NIH website shows mask wearing is damaging.

Unfortunately, this is not a unique case. Even prior to the Covid-19 era, providing links to scientific studies that confirm certain viewpoints was common practice for vaccine skeptics and proponents of health misinformation. But the pandemic further exposed how decentralized, fragmented, open-access online scientific literature systems provide opportunities to manipulate perceptions around scientific evidence and conclusions. Sharing a selection of hyperlinks to scientific papers, with the request from the user to “do your own research” fulfills a position similar to the notion of “wormholes” in science fiction. They transport the user between Facebook, Twitter and other messaging and social media apps, jumbling science and facts in transit.

Just as the supposed physics of wormholes includes traversing time, these behaviors also exploit a temporal dimension to the presence of scientific information online– sharing anachronistic, unrelated, or just cherry picked studies, in a new context. This tactic has been proven effective in driving different conversations revolving around “alternative facts” about COVID treatments, most recently about Ivermectin and mRNA vaccine risks. Mitigating this challenge might require more efforts by the scientific publishers, rather than just tech platforms and fact checkers.

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