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pause your own thoughts for a minute and really try to get into the mind of that person and think about how you could sort of chip away at their understanding?”
hipping away is all you can do in personal con- versations, too. If people in your life are always spouting off misinformation, meet them where they are, Prentice says. Start asking questions
and get them talking about what they know about the world, and how they’ve come to know it. “If you’re too forceful, and you’re not having a conversation with the person, you’re only going to do more harm than good.”
But while misinformation spread around the dining room table can ruin Thanksgiving, misinformation spread by authority figures can ruin lives.
“It’s really important to recognize that, in terms of practical consequences, misinformation is killing people.” For decades, University of Alberta Professor of Health Law and Science Policy Timothy Caulfield has studied and written books on the effects of scientific misinformation, and re- ceives regular hate mail and death threats for doing so. But in recent years, his research has shown a “huge uptick” in health and science misinformation for at least two reasons.
One is the sheer mass of misinformation available to most humans for the first time in history, and the social- media companies that happily spread it for revenue.
The other reason might be as old as society itself.
In a 2017 interview on his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, European historian Timothy Snyder said that what “we’re dealing with now about the alternative facts and post-factuality is pretty familiar to the 1920s. It’s a vision that’s very similar to the central premise of the fascist vision.”
Caulfield agrees. “The goal of the misinformation mongers, as I call them, is to create distrust in institutions. There have been many studies showing how state actors like Russia — their goal is to create distrust in our health, scientific and democratic institutions, because that creates chaos, division, and polarization,” Caulfield says, adding that he thinks it’s only going to get worse, because it’s become ideological. “Look at jurisdictions like Florida, where they’re passing laws to outlaw masks or calling to outlaw vaccine mandates. Misinformation has become an official part of the party platform. And we’re starting to see that here, too.”
His words echo what Snyder also said in 2017: “Without trust, without respect for journalists or doctors or politicians, a society can’t hang together.”
If COVID didn’t exist, it would still be a good idea to mask during flu seasons to ensure fewer grandparents pass away each year. But from people portraying masks as tyranny, to using their last breaths to say “fuck you” to doctors about to put breathing tubes down their throats, to Caulfield, it’s clear: The misinformation mongers are winning.
“The COVID vaccines are held up as some kind of big pharma crime,” he says, “when the reality is, it was a remarkable scientific achievement that demonstrated what the world can do when we have the will and resources. The strength of the misinformation is phenomenal.”
Misinformation also messes up the economy. Because when democracies spend money on disproving misinforma- tion, it hurts innovation.
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“In terms of practical conse- quences, misinfor- mation is killing people.” — Timothy Caulfield
“Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine — we had to spend tens of millions of dollars researching that, because of
the misinformation that suggested they were efficacious. And there’s evidence that came from state actors, too. So think of what a success that is, if you’re trying to screw up a country by causing it to spend resources on something that was implausible to begin with.”
Caulfield emphasizes that making the public think there is some huge divide in the scientific community when it comes to COVID, climate change or anything else is the misinformation mongers’ entire goal. Because if “Who can really say?” becomes the average person’s response, it’s only a matter of time before a wannabe dictator stands up and replies, “I can.”
State actors and online trolls can send bot armies to drown signals of truth in noise. But the scientific method, and democracy itself, are slow and messy things. So Caulfield says that journalists equating scientific rigour with baseless claims out of fear of appearing “biased” only compounds the problem. If someone says the Earth is flat, he says, or vaccines cause autism, putting that person on TV to “debate” an expert awards that side victory before anyone says a word.
“Those pushing misinformation don’t have to worry about facts, and that makes it easier. They use fear mon- gering to play to our emotions and make their message more palatable than a nuanced discussion of how evidence evolves.”
“Scientific consensus” is not a memo that all researchers get from some head scientist, Caulfield says — it’s indepen- dent scientists doing independent research and coming to the same conclusions. “But that’s less sexy than someone going on Joe Rogan — the single most popular podcast — with sound bites that might get tweeted around the world, all while claiming they’ve been ‘cancelled.’ I would love to have my message be that ‘cancelled.’”
With fire season starting early again, and long COVID doing long-term damage, science communicators may be fighting in the most important battle of our time — one that, for now, people like Caulfield and Prentice are losing. But they’ll never give up the fight.
“Just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take up the cause,” Caulfield — who helped create Science- UpFirst, a national collective of experts working to stop the spread of misinformation (TWOSE is also a member) — says. “It’s a call to arms, and we need to partner with artists, writers and comedians to create science-informed, exciting, engaging content. I think we can do it.”
But Caulfield clarifies that while we “shouldn’t pull any punches” when it comes to wannabe dictators and podcast supplement sellers, when it comes to personal relation- ships, “it’s so important to listen to other people, to really get a sense of what their concerns are and to empathize with what brought them to this place.”
Back at Telus World of Science, Prentice still thinks about the children he sees every day, and his Meteor Man from years ago — without much difference. “The kids might
have less of a shared vocabulary, but they also don’t have this hard-to-break-down scaffolding most people have after years of building up preconceived beliefs. I think we should treat adults like kids and kids like adults, because we’re all on our journeys of scientific discovery, and we can all experience that child-like wonder, no matter our age.” ED.