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How to Amplify Knowledge in a World of Misinformation
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How to Amplify Knowledge in a World of Misinformation
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WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm Will Schweitzer, Silverchair's Chief Product and Customer Success Officer. Silverchair is proud to sponsor this year's SSP annual meeting, and to support SSP's Generation fund which provides sustainable funding for SSP scholarship and mentoring programs. This digital meeting is another great example of how our industry has adapted to challenging circumstances, and how we'll be stronger as a result. I'm inspired by the thought and care that has gone into planning this meeting, and we're looking forward to seeing you in SSP's exciting sessions and networking events over the next few days.
WILL SCHWEITZER: While you're here, we hope you're able to reconnect with our friends, or make new ones; learn; and take time to reflect on the past year. We've enjoyed working with our industry colleagues on the SSP Annual Meeting, Education, and Marketing committees. The SSP volunteers who pulled together this meeting and SSP's other programming are inspiring and represent the breadth, depth, and diversity of those gathered here.
WILL SCHWEITZER: The Silverchair team will bring insights from this annual meeting and our work with SSP not only to our client community events, but to our own digital event series, Platform Strategies, which we kicked off earlier this month. If you were unable to join our first Platform Strategies events, we hope you'll join the next three. More information is available at silverchair.com. Finally, we are honored to get these few minutes before today's keynote speaker, Dr. Laura Helmuth, will speak to an essential issue for all the scholars and publishers in our space.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're very excited to hear from her, so thank you for joining, and we're looking forward to meeting everyone in person at the 44th annual meeting in Chicago. [MUSIC PLAYING]
YAEL FITZPATRICK: It is my honor and pleasure to welcome our opening keynote speaker, Dr. Laura Helmuth. Dr. Helmuth received her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California Berkeley, but eventually decided to transition to science journalism. She attended the Science Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to be an editor at Science Magazine, Smithsonian, Slate National Geographic, and The Washington Post.
YAEL FITZPATRICK: Last year, Dr. Helmuth became only the ninth Editor in Chief of Scientific American in its 175-year history. She serves on the boards of High Country News, Spectrum, and Sideline, is a member of the Standing Committee on Advancing Science Communication at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and is a past President of the National Association of Science Writers. Dr. Helmuth is an avid birder and gardener, and is truly one of the kindest people I know.
YAEL FITZPATRICK: Her moral compass points due North, and she does not tolerate injustice. We were thrilled when Dr. Helmuth accepted our invitation to deliver a keynote address at the 2020 SSP annual meeting in Boston. After the cancellation of that meeting, we were even more thrilled when she, like Dr. Joseph Williams, accepted our re-invitation to speak at this year's virtual annual meeting.
YAEL FITZPATRICK: Please welcome Dr. Laura Helmuth.
LAURA HELMUTH: Thank you so much, Yael for the great introduction. Thank you to SSP. Thank you to the organizers for gathering us all together, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to talking with you at the Q&A after this presentation. Ask me anything. I'd be delighted to talk about any part of journalism, misinformation, what's happening in the world of the pandemic, or anything else we touch on today.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I hope you're having a great conference. So I'm delighted to be here with you today. I'm going to focus on misinformation and journalism, how we're covering the pandemic, and how all of us have a shared mission as publishers, as journalists, as people who care about reality. We're all working together to amplify reality and help people understand how the world actually works, help them discover it, share it, reveal it, and make it outcompete the forces of misinformation that have been so dangerous.
LAURA HELMUTH: I mean, the pandemic has shown, this year-- year and a half-- that misinformation is literally deadly, and so our work is more important than it ever has been, and it's changing. I think all of us here at this conference have had big changes to how we do our work, and new understanding of the urgency of it. So I want to talk about some of that, and with a focus on what's been happening in journalism.
LAURA HELMUTH: So I'm the Editor in Chief of Scientific American. It is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. We just celebrated our 175th anniversary, which is also known as our demisemiseptcentennial. So we had a big special issue about this back in September of 2020 and looked at some of our history, really brought back up some of the interesting articles we published in the past.
LAURA HELMUTH: We've published more than 200 Nobel Prize winners, and Scientific American historically has been a place where scientific experts come and write about their own fields and have the definitive explanation of what's happening in general relativity, for instance. We had Einstein write for us. And we still do that. We still have features by the world's leading experts, but we also do a lot of news coverage.
LAURA HELMUTH: So in 1845, one of our first stories was about the telegraph, and this year-- just a couple weeks ago-- we had a story about a measurement of the muon-- the wobble of the muon-- that suggests there could be new physics to be yet discovered. So those are news stories. We also run a lot of opinion pieces, and increasingly we're expanding our definition of what counts as science-- mostly to include a lot more social science, which we think is increasingly important.
LAURA HELMUTH: Obviously we hope that science can solve a lot of the world's problems, but really, social science, within science, is where we see that some of the biggest conflicts and problems and potential for making the world a better place can be better understood and revealed. So we had a cover story back in March-- this was our first cover story that was specifically about sociology. It's about the social justice movements and how the Civil Rights movement succeeded, and what lessons it has for the Black Lives Matter movement.
LAURA HELMUTH: It was written by sociologist Aldon Morris, who's one of the leading scholars of the Civil Rights movement, and it's very satisfying. We've heard that a lot of sociology classes are going to use this story in their teaching this coming year, so we're delighted about that. And we're also covering a lot of mental health and psychology, because obviously, during the pandemic, the physical health toll has been tremendous, but so has the psychological health toll, so we're covering that quite a bit.
LAURA HELMUTH: This is an example of one of our opinion pieces. And so with the feature stories that are written by experts, they talk about the research in their field and how it came about, what they're discovering, what the big questions are. But we really also try to-- have been expanding our presentation of articles by scientists talking about why science matters. And this is something that I think has really changed in the world of science-- frankly, since the Trump administration began.
LAURA HELMUTH: Some of you may have participated in or watched the March for Science in 2017, and it was a really interesting moment in the history of science, because it was a time when scientists and scientific organizations said, yeah, actually, we just sort of assumed that science was important, but we're going to get out literally by a million people and come and make funny signs and march on Washington, and march all around the world to say, science is important.
LAURA HELMUTH: We're sick of misinformation. We're sick of conspiracy theories. There is no planet to be. We need to heed the science on climate especially, and in the environment. Those were the big focuses for that particular march, and it came shortly after the Trump administration began, when there was almost immediately some threats to science that just amplified over the course of those four years.
LAURA HELMUTH: So it's been really interesting to see scientists realize that they have to engage more with the public and really explain what they do, defend what they do, and stand up for the importance of reality. And this was even before the pandemic. I think one thing that journalism has been reckoning with-- and I think a lot of scholarly publishing too, and a lot of industries right now-- is we need to really think about who are we amplifying?
LAURA HELMUTH: What ideas are we sharing? And how can we use our platforms to make the world a better place, to not just improve the ratio of information to misinformation in the world, but how can we really work to eliminate structural racism, to fix some of the structural biases in STEM? And as part of that, we at Scientific American have been publishing more early career researchers, more women, more people of color as expert writers.
LAURA HELMUTH: We're quoting them more, and just making sure that we're being more inclusive. And this is an example of a feature story we ran recently by graduate students. And you might think, well, what does a graduate student have to say about this study of ancient galaxy clusters? But it's a really delightful story. It talks about the thrill of discovery of science, and how hard it is, and the challenges of having to wake up at 4:00 o'clock in the morning and race to an observatory so that you can get your time on the telescope and capture a certain piece of the sky so you can understand what's happening in this weird galaxy cluster.
LAURA HELMUTH: So I think everybody's trying to do their part. There's so much more work to be done, but I think that's something we'll certainly talk about throughout this conference, is how could we do better? How can we make scholarly publishing research, communication-- the whole conversation-- more inclusive and more just? So when it comes to the pandemic, it's been a really challenging year and a half for all of us.
LAURA HELMUTH: For journalism, the big challenges are pretty clear-- and many of these challenges are shared across the publishing industry, scholarly and popular. This is a confusing disease. It is new. The virus does not behave like other viruses or other infectious diseases. And so we have to keep up with the constantly-changing science, provide the best evidence-- ideally life-saving evidence.
LAURA HELMUTH: The stakes have never been higher to get this right, to make sure that experts and the best evidence is being presented in a way that's engaging and sticky, and more memorable than the misinformation that's circulating so widely; find ways to debunk the misinformation. And then one thing that's been really tricky for psychological reasons is as we've learned more and more about the pandemic and about the vaccines, we have to constantly be updating outdated information with new information, and explaining the process of research, and how it's iterative and self-correcting, and something that we said based on the best available evidence a year ago might be not true today.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that's a hard message to get across. I'm going to talk a little bit about how we've done that, and what some of the challenges have been. I was talking about which experts we amplify, and of course, I don't at all mean to imply that we're not still amplifying the voices of and quoting and interviewing highly credentialed, knowledgeable senior white male academics and experts.
LAURA HELMUTH: We certainly are. And so we at Scientific American, almost from the beginning-- this is from January 2020-- we interviewed Tony Fauci about what is this weird, new disease? How worried do we have to be? What do we know so far? And this was before he was a household name-- except to health reporters and people in the infectious disease world.
LAURA HELMUTH: So we brought him out right away to tell us what we know so far. And also, one of the many other challenges-- which I should have put on that list, actually-- of the pandemic has there's been so much racism and xenophobia from the very beginning, which is just so contrary to the spirit of science-- or the ideal spirit of science. Science is the most international endeavor in all of human history.
LAURA HELMUTH: Scientists from all around the world immediately started collaborating on understanding where the virus was coming from, sharing the genetic code, sharing resources, sharing samples, sharing vaccine strategies. And of course there's competition too, but I think this was just the most collaborative time in the history of science. And one of the most important scientists, from the very beginning, is a researcher at the Wuhan Virology Institute named Shi Zhengli, and she was one of the world's experts even before the pandemic on coronaviruses, and she had done a lot of research on coronaviruses from bats identifying the original SARS.
LAURA HELMUTH: She's gone to bat caves around the world collecting samples and sequencing coronaviruses, and she's been warning for years that look, these diseases, these viruses, are very variable. There's a lot of them, and they can infect humans, and we really need to be monitoring for them and preparing for them. And so when the pandemic began-- when some doctors in Wuhan noticed these weird cases of pneumonia that weren't any disease they had seen before-- she immediately came in and identified the virus, shared it with the world.
LAURA HELMUTH: And the reason that many of us have vaccines today is because of the work she did, and some of her colleagues did. Unfortunately, a lot of misinformation and conspiracy theories circulated about her almost immediately, claiming that, oh, she created the virus. She intentionally released it into the world. It was a lab accident. There's no evidence whatsoever that it's a lab accident. There's a lot of evidence that these viruses are just ubiquitous in bats, and in other mammal species, and that they easily jump from mammal to mammal.
LAURA HELMUTH: So the route of transmission seems to have been through a pangolin. There's no evidence, again, that it came through a lab. But this was a long way of saying this was a profile we published very early in the pandemic to show how the science is happening, who's doing it, and what we know so far. One of the other things that the pandemic has-- one of the many things the pandemic has exposed, but probably the most important-- is that structural racism is also deadly-- literally deadly.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I think people who looked at epidemiology in the past, or paid attention to life expectancy, were aware of this fact. Obviously there's been a long history of racial disparities in health care, and what are some of the causes for them? What are some of the consequences, and what are some of the ways to address this? The pandemic just really exposed how horrific these discrepancies are, and they also blew apart an idea that frankly a lot of health journals had bought into-- this idea that when there are differences in death rates or in sickness rates for various diseases by, basically, socially-imposed racial category, maybe there's a gene that explains why Black people are more likely to die of stroke.
LAURA HELMUTH: And there are certainly some diseases that have more or less of a risk factor depending on certain genes that are more associated with certain ethnic backgrounds or historic family backgrounds. And so a couple cases-- sickle cell anemia, or the BRCA genes. But when it comes to most causes of disease, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, COVID, it's racism and not race, or not some specific gene, that is the risk factor.
LAURA HELMUTH: And the racism you see at every stage-- at pre-existing conditions and access to health care, at what kind of jobs do you work, what kind of resources do you have to protect yourself from an infectious disease? And so we've run a lot of stories trying to help people who hadn't thought about it before get their heads around it, and really amplify this as one of the most important realizations and one of the most important opportunities to help control and minimize the horrific cost of this pandemic.
LAURA HELMUTH: So one thing that a lot of journalists try to do when there's a scary or abstract or confusing story is to humanize it. And at the beginning of the pandemic especially, there were a lot of people saying, oh, it's a hoax. A lot of people in very powerful positions were saying it's a hoax. It's not real. It's just a bad cold.
LAURA HELMUTH: It's just like the flu. And one of the things we did early on is interview several health care workers, emergency room workers, nurses who were dealing with patients and had been in New York, and seen just the horrific death toll. And we had audio recordings. We had several stories where we heard, in their own words, what they'd been experiencing.
LAURA HELMUTH: It was really moving, and this is just a reminder that it's really important to show the human side of any disaster, both to help your audience comprehend it, and to do justice to what's actually happening in the world. The science is important. We ran a lot of stories-- or, continue to run a lot of stories-- about the structure of the virus or the immune system.
LAURA HELMUTH: But the stories that, often, people find memorable, that can make a big impact and help people comprehend the magnitude of a disaster, are when you actually talk to people and share their stories. Another technique we use to make complicated information more comprehensible is graphics. And this is just a graphic showing that flu, basically, there was no flu last year for the first time in recorded history.
LAURA HELMUTH: Or the first time in recently recorded history. There's just zero flu. And so we ran a series of graphics showing the typical curves and showing that in 2020, there just was basically zero flu recorded. And it's the restrictions, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Especially the early restrictions that were inspired by COVID.
LAURA HELMUTH: No know, don't go out if you're sick, monitoring people for fever, wash your hands. Stay home. These didn't prevent COVID from spreading around the world, certainly spreading in the United States. But they were really effective against the flu. And part of the reason for that is the COVID recommendations early on were based on what we know about other infectious diseases.
LAURA HELMUTH: COVID turned out to be much more sneaky and much more difficult to stop. But flu wasn't. So one of the important outcomes here is this is sort of a message that we don't have to have 30,000 to 50,000 to 60,000 people die in the United States every year from flu. Maybe there are things, obviously, we don't want to shut down and quarantine everybody.
LAURA HELMUTH: But this is an infectious disease. We've learned a lot this year, and let's use this information moving forward to protect ourselves and children and people who are immune compromised, especially, from all the other infectious diseases that are circulating in the world. So as I said, and as you all remember, the pandemic has really changed our understanding of how the virus is spreading.
LAURA HELMUTH: And at the beginning, the best advice was wash your hands. Sing Happy Birthday twice while you're washing your hands. Watch your fever. Monitor for symptoms. And, at first, we really didn't know that people could spread the disease while they were asymptomatic. So this is just a story from our partner publication, Nature. This is back in March, saying, it looks like actually infections are spreading between people who don't have symptoms.
LAURA HELMUTH: Either before they have symptoms or, in some cases, people seem to not have symptoms at all. And we hadn't observed that before. Hadn't observed that with the flu or with Norovirus or other diseases that typically spread symptomatically, and can spread through touch. Much better than Coronavirus. And we've discovered Coronavirus seems to be spreading through the air.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that's why the initial recommendations were, you don't need to wear a mask, save the masks for the people who are first responders, people working in health care who really need the masks. So don't hoard masks. If you're not exposed, if you're not sick, if you don't know anybody who's sick, you don't have to wear a mask. And that was based on the best evidence at the time.
LAURA HELMUTH: But by April, by May of last year, we started realizing, oh wait. The best advice we had, based on previous diseases, don't really apply now to this disease. Which seems to be spreading through these super spreader events where people are singing together in a choir, rather than shaking hands. That seems to be the method.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, what I'm showing you, in all of these slides, what I'm showing you is just screenshots of articles that have been published. That, in most cases, the only words you can probably see are the headlines. And that's typically what people see of a story. Is the first 3 to 15 words of any story. Or the most important of any one, because of the way that stories circulate on social media, and just what you see if you're browsing quickly on a homepage of a publication.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, one of the kind of structures that has become a really good signal this year is what we know so far. And this is just reinforcing the message that this pandemic is changing really quickly. The science about it is changing quickly. Our understanding is growing all the time. And this is our pledge to you as journalists. We're going to tell you the latest, which might be different from what we told you last month.
LAURA HELMUTH: And the what we know so far also implies that there's more to know, there are more open questions, and we're going to come back and tell you more about what we learn as soon as we learn it. And so here's another what we know so far story. And this combines kind of two tropes of science and health journalism, or really any kind of journalism. Which is, what we know so far, and nine important things. Or eight important things.
LAURA HELMUTH: We've got an example of that later. 27 reasons to fear this or know that. And it's one of the oldest kind of formulas in journalism. If you look at magazines from 100 years ago, they're full of lists. People really love lists and quizzes. And it's sort of a demystifying and welcoming and kind of non intimidating way to present complicated information.
LAURA HELMUTH: And especially when people are looking on their mobile devices or scanning through social media. It's also a promise that we're not going to waste your time, these are going to be quick bullet point, short explanations of a certain number of things. And it also is, it's sort of a curiosity. It's like a prompt. When you see one of these list headlines. You might think, nine things?
LAURA HELMUTH: I can think of three or four, but I wonder what all nine are. So it's sort of like a way to lure people in to read the story. And to make it to the ninth thing. And this story, it's one that has to do with that whole issue of, there are things we thought we knew at the beginning of the pandemic that turned out to not be true. And there's a psychological bias called anchoring bias.
LAURA HELMUTH: Where if there's some new thing you're learning about, particularly if it's dramatic, if it's scary, if it's really shocking, the first things you learn about it tend to be really sticky. And it's very hard to overwrite the first things you know. And that's one of the reasons why they're still alcohol wipes all over the place. Because at the beginning, based on Norovirus, based on flu, really seemed to be that if you just wash your hands, you'd be safe.
LAURA HELMUTH: And you didn't necessarily need a mask. And of course all those things turned out to not be true. So this article explicitly says, here's something we thought at first, here's why we thought it then, here's what evidence has come out since, and this is the new understanding. The new understanding is, it spreads through the air. The new understanding is, it spreads before you ever know you're sick.
LAURA HELMUTH: You may never know you're sick and you can still pass it along, potentially kill someone while being unaware of it. And that's why you need to wear a mask. And this whole concept that science is iterative and self-correcting and complicated, in the intersection of journalism trying to give you the latest science, can sometimes lead to the feeling of kind of ping ponging.
LAURA HELMUTH: And this is common. People often complain that one day red wine is good for you, one day it's bad. Same with coffee, same with chocolate. What do scientists know anyway? And so, one thing that the health and science reporters have been trying to explain, constantly, is that science is really hard. And the best knowledge can change.
LAURA HELMUTH: During the pandemic, about nutrition, about eggs. And that doesn't mean that science is broken, it means that that's just how it works. And we're trying to keep up with it. Now at the same time, especially the really professional science and health journalists, and environmental journalists too and technology journalists to some extent, are starting to- are recognizing the danger of covering single studies, particularly mouse studies.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that's partly because of the whole issue of replication failures. That sometimes really dramatic stories, for instance, about coffee being really good or bad for you. That a single study often will fail to replicate, or will be contradicted by the next study. And so, now, we still do cover new studies that come out in scientific journals, but we tend to use them just as the occasion for a story.
LAURA HELMUTH: And we'll talk about, here's the latest evidence, but then include a lot of other studies from that field to show how the lattice work fits into the larger body of knowledge, rather than just chasing after the latest detail. And the goal is to provide more context and to avoid hype. And to, frankly, recognize that a lot of the stories we've published in the past have turned out not to be true.
LAURA HELMUTH: And nobody wants to do that. You know, we want to be trustworthy. We want to make people understand the body of knowledge, not just the latest thing. So when we're dealing with helping people understand what's real about the world and what isn't, one of the other challenges, which is sort of a delightful challenge, is that the world is really weird.
LAURA HELMUTH: This is a study that came out a while ago, just this year. That scientists went to dig a core deep below the sea floor. They brought up a bunch of mud. There were some bacteria in it. They gave them some food and the bacteria woke up and started reproducing. They are a hundred million years old. So this is a true thing about the world, or at least as true is as we can understand it to be at this point.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it's just a reminder that the world is really bizarre. And it's kind of no wonder that people who aren't familiar with how research works or scholarship works can get fooled by science-y looking things that aren't necessarily real science. And it's all of our responsibility to sort of help explain how we know what we know and what's real, and delight in the bizarre-ness of the world, while also kind of debunking the bizarre falsehoods about the world.
LAURA HELMUTH: So at the beginning of the pandemic, from the beginning, there were conspiracy theories, lies, misinformation, disinformation. Some of it was commercially motivated. A lot of anti vaccine groups or anti vaccine activists. They make a lot of money off of their attempts to mislead people about the safety of vaccines. Often by saying, you know, don't vaccinate your child against measles, instead buy my vitamin C supplements.
LAURA HELMUTH: And they immediately jumped into this as a new opportunity to make a lot of money. There was, as you may remember, a lot of political claims by the Trump administration, especially that it was a hoax, that it was China virus. A lot of xenophobia and misdirection. Some intentional, some not. And BuzzFeed, to its credit, jumped in and started a list. And as I mentioned, lists are very effective and very welcoming.
LAURA HELMUTH: Of just, here's a bunch of lies that are circulating. And they did a nice job of presenting each one with an X through it or a red dash to show don't believe this, it's false. And, from the beginning, it was miracle cures that was the big problem. So, there's been a lot of debunking. Debunking has become sort of an art form. Debunking and fact checking over the course of the pandemic.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that didn't start with the pandemic. And it really was amplified by a lot of the misinformation that was circulating during the Trump administration, even before then. But the pandemic really elevated debunking to an art form. And that's partly, so that's within the journalism world that we got much better at debunking. And a lot of the strategies that journals are using are based on research about misinformation.
LAURA HELMUTH: Which has been the hottest area of research for a few years. Unfortunately, because there's just so much to study, there's so much misinformation circulating out there, especially on social media platforms, from the highest levels. A lot of it was amplified or shared by the White House during the Trump administration. And so, scientists have had a lot to work with. And they're really starting to understand how it works, where it comes from, how it goes, how to debunk it.
LAURA HELMUTH: And so, journals are covering this as a subject area, as a really interesting field of study. But also as a way to improve our own craft and understand how we can compete with misinformation. And one of the big decisions that journals face all the time is, when there's a conspiracy theory, do you bother to debunk it, do you try to counter it, or is it better to just ignore it? And typically it is better.
LAURA HELMUTH: If you have a big platform, it's typically better to ignore something if it's not circulating very widely. And so you're kind of constantly monitoring it to see, is it starting to go viral on Facebook, is YouTube circulating a bunch of misinformation, has a celebrity gotten involved? And I used to work at the Washington Post before I started at Scientific American. And there, one of the, unfortunately, one of the kind of hurdles that misinformation had to jump over before we would cross it was, is a prominent politician repeating the falsehood?
LAURA HELMUTH: And so as soon as they do, then the Post would jump in to debunk it. So scientists have been really tireless in fighting the misinformation and trying to provide good science from the beginning. This is an article about a program called Ask a Scientist that's a grassroots voluntary effort to help people with just basic questions to connect them with scientists who can answer those questions in a clear and quick way.
LAURA HELMUTH: So that people have trusted sources they can go to, rather than getting on very bad Facebook groups where they can share and spread misinformation. And so that story before was from last year. This is from this year. And it's still the case. Researchers are trying new organizations, new ways of outreach, and trying to improve their skills all the time to figure out what are some of the best ways to curb disinformation?
LAURA HELMUTH: And so it's really an arms race between the forces of good and evil, of real information versus disinformation. And both sides are constantly improving their ability to grab people's attention. And it's not just long time anti-vaxxers who are complete quacks who are circulating misinformation. There are also some people who have credentials, who are scientists, technically.
LAURA HELMUTH: They have the titles, they have the degrees. But they're sharing misinformation. And so, there was a horrible mock documentary called The Plandemic that involved a couple of people with science degrees. And there are several who are spreading lies about the pandemic, trying to work people up about it. And, so this is an article about what are some of the conditions that have allowed that to happen, and how can we help people understand that just because somebody has a PhD, doesn't mean they know what they're talking about.
LAURA HELMUTH: This is an article also on the same issue. This is by a researcher, one of the authors of this is a researcher named Dunning. And you may have heard of the Dunning Kruger effect. This is a psychological phenomenon that people who are really confident that they- or people who very little about a field are often very confident in what they know. And, we had a kind of a problem, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, with what he was calling armchair epidemiologists.
LAURA HELMUTH: So people who don't actually know anything about epidemiology but have expertise in another field, they are scientists and they can do a little math. But they would basically just do back of the envelope calculations and come up with wacky ideas about how and where and when the pandemic, the virus was spreading. And it was really a problem. And I think part of it is the Dunning Kruger effect, that people are overly confident about things they don't know.
LAURA HELMUTH: But it's also that people were just scared. And there was a lack of information, and a lot of questions. And so people rush in to fill the gaps and maybe fill them with what they think is real information, but it isn't. And that's been a constant struggle throughout the pandemic to help people understand that some of their questions just don't have answers yet.
LAURA HELMUTH: And of course, a lot of myths are really sticky. Some of the reason conspiracy theories are so intriguing is they're dramatic, they're memorable, they have anecdotes that are emotional. They make you feel like you're in the know, and they answer those questions that don't have answers. And so, here's another story we did in Scientific American using the nine tropes. And the just won't go away.
LAURA HELMUTH: And so we used the research on misinformation showing how to replace a false information, false bit of information, with something true. And so we had nine examples. And for each one. This is this is tiny type, I apologize. But, basically, we used kind of a formula of saying, OK, here's a myth. This is a myth, this is not true.
LAURA HELMUTH: It's not the case that wealthy elites are profiting from the vaccine. And then we explained, where did this belief come from? Why we know it's not true, and here's what is true instead. So the goal is to identify something is false, explain you may be seeing it in a lot of places, you may be seeing it on social media, hearing it from your cousin. This is why it's circulating.
LAURA HELMUTH: Here's how we know it isn't actually true about the world. And here's what is true about the world. And that's based on research on misinformation. Tricks that are the best, most effective ways to help people get rid of some of the sticky conspiracy theories and myths that have been circulating. And the research on misinformation, this is from before the pandemic, shows that fake news is really good at what it does.
LAURA HELMUTH: This was a study on Twitter, which is the most accessible platform for researchers to study because of the openness. Facebook has been much less cooperative. And, of course, Facebook has all these closed groups where people can share misinformation. Twitter, things tend to be more open. It's easier to kind of follow the spread of misinformation. And it spreads really well.
LAURA HELMUTH: And this isn't to say that Twitter is worse than the other platforms. It's probably better. But it's a really nice kind of Petri dish to study where these things happen. And this is another article we ran about the Dunning Kruger effect. And this idea that people who are incompetent may come off as extremely confident, and you know, and naturally when you're hearing somebody opine on a radio program or some news channels and saying with great confidence something that's not true, you may think, well they seem so confident they must know what they're talking about.
LAURA HELMUTH: But it's actually not a good signal of expertise. The experts also, we hope, sound confident and convincing and easy to follow. But you can't use that as a signal that somebody knows what they're talking about. So one of the psychological issues that has really extended the pandemic, especially in the US and in some parts of Europe and a few other places around the world, is this idea that masks are a sign of weakness.
LAURA HELMUTH: That masks show you're afraid of the virus. And that masks are some kind of violation of your personal liberty. And that idea is really, it's like a perfect illustration of this concept of toxic masculinity. That this kind of horrible idea that men have to be powerful and unemotional and tough all the time, and therefore, they shouldn't go to the doctor and they shouldn't take any precautions against a global pandemic that's of historic proportions that has killed so many people around the world.
LAURA HELMUTH: And so this is kind of a psychological study of where is this coming from, why are men thinking. And I quickly say not all men. And this is just a certain subset of men who are susceptible to this message. And certainly women too and non-binary people too. There's plenty of people who are pissed off about masks. But it's a certain kind of messaging that's just been really, really dangerous.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, so, this. We're trying to evaluate it, expose it, and find ways to get around it. To kind of recommend other kind of good qualities of masculinity, like protecting your family, protecting your community. And masks should be a symbol of that, rather than a symbol of fear. So we had a big special issue on confronting misinformation a few months ago.
LAURA HELMUTH: And one of the fun stories. And I realize, these are coming by pretty quickly. But if you get a chance, this one is by one of our editors at Scientific American. She was in a drill for the election. This was a journalistic group that deals with misinformation. Brought a bunch of journals together to kind of do a war games type of simulation. It's election night and you're pretending that you are working at different organizations.
LAURA HELMUTH: And they're kind of doing a real time mock example of how misinformation spreads. And she decided to be a bad actor. And to just make things up, accuse her rivals of being fake, amplify all kinds of misinformation. And whenever anybody tried to debunk what she was saying about the election, then she'd accuse them of lying.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, anyhow, it was very effective. And she immediately just disrupted the entire simulation because everybody spent all their time trying to say, oh no, no, no, you're wrong. And just making her message even louder. So it really kind of showed, in real time, how easy it is- if you're a bad actor, if you want to spread disinformation. People are really good at it.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it doesn't take a lot of skill, and you can cause a lot of damage. And so we all need to recognize it and try to protect ourselves. We had a little bit more of a positive article by Kathleen Hall Jameson a couple of months ago. And this was- this article is very practical. And kind of hopeful. And her message here is that everybody can do their part to help stop misinformation from spreading.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it really is something that happens socially and that happens in small group settings, and family settings. With your neighbors, with your acquaintances. A lot of misinformation is spreading person to person. It certainly gets amplified by powerful institutions, but that seems to be the biggest risk. And so she has just six or seven steps, how you can sort of prepare yourself to identify misinformation, explain where to find real information, help people kind of question where they heard something, and reframe the ideas.
LAURA HELMUTH: And sort of explain where the misinformation is coming from. In really practical and non-threatening ways, so that you don't end up estranged from your cousin, but hopefully helping your cousin come around to understand that no, Tony Fauci doesn't want to put a chip in your neck and control your life. It's a process. And it's not like people instantly come around and understand what's happening.
LAURA HELMUTH: But it's something that all of us can kind of be deputized to do. So there are certainly things that individuals can and should do to kind of improve our own ecosystems, to improve the signal to noise ratio in our worlds. But there are also a lot of institutional efforts happening. One of my favorites is the international fact checking network, which is run by the Poynter Institute, a journalism research institute and foundation.
LAURA HELMUTH: And they established a new holiday a few years ago called international fact checking day. And it is every year on April 2nd. The day after April Fool's Day. So, you kind of celebrate by sharing facts and emphasizing the importance of factuality and evidence and showing your work. So, yeah, there are some very urgent, some lighthearted. But a lot of effort's been put into it at the research level, at the implementation level, certainly among journalists, among scholarly publishers, policy makers.
LAURA HELMUTH: So I think there's more and more awareness that misinformation is a huge problem, and that we all need to be aware of it, help other people understand it, improve media literacy teaching in schools. The Poynter Institute also has a media literacy training program for seniors, because they're so often victimized by scams. And misinformation and conspiracies. So it's only growing. The research has continued to grow.
LAURA HELMUTH: The policy issues are continuing to grow. Certainly the journalism misinformation is one of the big issues we'll be covering, potentially for our careers. Alongside climate change, infectious disease, systemic racism. Those are kind of the big issues that, of our day, that can we hope can be improved by better understanding, by research, by smart policies that are informed by the best knowledge.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I want to end on a sort of happy note. Two happy notes. One is that you may have heard that a few years ago, this idea that the Earth is flat. Started circulating and getting more and more attention, especially really tragically among teenagers and young people. And, I enjoy this tweet. In the 90s, we were all excited because we cloned a sheep and we landed a robot on Mars.
LAURA HELMUTH: And scientists today, for the last time, the Earth is round. So this was a problem that had gone away. People understood that the Earth was round. Of course, there were flat Earthers, but it was kind of a joke. And then it became a really common belief that was circulating on social media, and that was because of YouTube. And so, there was a lot of reporting, a lot of exposure of YouTube's algorithms were promoting these videos.
LAURA HELMUTH: And once somebody saw one, they would be presented with a whole lot of others. And so YouTube changed its algorithms and it de-platformed a lot of these flat Earth videos. And it really helped. De-platforming is a very powerful mechanism. It certainly has been effective after the January 6 insurrection, when the social media platforms de-platformed Trump.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that instantly decreased the amount of misinformation that was circulating. And it's still there. I mean, people want to seek out QAnon theories, they are certainly going to find them. But it means that fewer people will be exposed. Fewer people will be at risk. And then the one actually really good message, I think, is one of the battles that we had back around the turn of the last century in the 2000s and before then was dealing with creationism being taught in school as, not just an alternative to evolution, but as the way that the world was created.
LAURA HELMUTH: School kids were being taught that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that it was created in seven days, and that evolution, Earth science, most of biology, most of chemistry, most of physics was a conspiracy, was made up, was the devil's work. Literally satanic. And so a lot of people put a lot of time into fighting this. A lot of evolutionary biologists testified to school boards, scholarly publishers and journalists, did a great job of explaining how evolution works, how we know it works, why we know that the Earth is actually 4.6 billion years old.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it took a while. And it took a lot of effort. But the percentage of school teachers who are now teaching evolution as the explanation for how life came about on Earth and why humans are human, how we came up with this great diversity of species on the planet, it's much more common now. The number doubled, basically, of teachers who are teaching it as the basis of all biology of all life on Earth.
LAURA HELMUTH: So things can get better. It's a lot of work. But it's good work, it's important work. And I'm just really delighted to be here speaking with all of you who are engaged in that work. There are some things you can do in addition to what we already talked about. If you would ever like to write for the public through Scientific American or through other places like the Conversation or newspaper opinion pages, I encourage you to do so.
LAURA HELMUTH: I know everybody's got their own job and it's a lot of work to do what you're already doing at work, but if you have a message that you'd like the world to hear that you think needs more attention, do you consider writing or appearing on podcasts. And also encourage the authors, the specialists, the experts that you're working with to do the same. And when you're out on social media, share good information. When you can, debunk bad information.
LAURA HELMUTH: And just know we're all in this together. And hopefully we'll all be getting better at it, at some point. And we will stay engaged in this great battle. Thank you so much for listening. Like I said, I'm really looking forward to your questions. And I think we'll have a lot to talk about. So feel free to ask me anything. And thanks again for coming.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I hope you have a great conference this year.
Segment:0 .
WILL SCHWEITZER: I'm Will Schweitzer, Silverchair's Chief Product and Customer Success Officer. Silverchair is proud to sponsor this year's SSP annual meeting, and to support SSP's Generation fund which provides sustainable funding for SSP scholarship and mentoring programs. This digital meeting is another great example of how our industry has adapted to challenging circumstances, and how we'll be stronger as a result. I'm inspired by the thought and care that has gone into planning this meeting, and we're looking forward to seeing you in SSP's exciting sessions and networking events over the next few days.
WILL SCHWEITZER: While you're here, we hope you're able to reconnect with our friends, or make new ones; learn; and take time to reflect on the past year. We've enjoyed working with our industry colleagues on the SSP Annual Meeting, Education, and Marketing committees. The SSP volunteers who pulled together this meeting and SSP's other programming are inspiring and represent the breadth, depth, and diversity of those gathered here.
WILL SCHWEITZER: The Silverchair team will bring insights from this annual meeting and our work with SSP not only to our client community events, but to our own digital event series, Platform Strategies, which we kicked off earlier this month. If you were unable to join our first Platform Strategies events, we hope you'll join the next three. More information is available at silverchair.com. Finally, we are honored to get these few minutes before today's keynote speaker, Dr. Laura Helmuth, will speak to an essential issue for all the scholars and publishers in our space.
WILL SCHWEITZER: We're very excited to hear from her, so thank you for joining, and we're looking forward to meeting everyone in person at the 44th annual meeting in Chicago. [MUSIC PLAYING]
YAEL FITZPATRICK: It is my honor and pleasure to welcome our opening keynote speaker, Dr. Laura Helmuth. Dr. Helmuth received her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California Berkeley, but eventually decided to transition to science journalism. She attended the Science Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to be an editor at Science Magazine, Smithsonian, Slate National Geographic, and The Washington Post.
YAEL FITZPATRICK: Last year, Dr. Helmuth became only the ninth Editor in Chief of Scientific American in its 175-year history. She serves on the boards of High Country News, Spectrum, and Sideline, is a member of the Standing Committee on Advancing Science Communication at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and is a past President of the National Association of Science Writers. Dr. Helmuth is an avid birder and gardener, and is truly one of the kindest people I know.
YAEL FITZPATRICK: Her moral compass points due North, and she does not tolerate injustice. We were thrilled when Dr. Helmuth accepted our invitation to deliver a keynote address at the 2020 SSP annual meeting in Boston. After the cancellation of that meeting, we were even more thrilled when she, like Dr. Joseph Williams, accepted our re-invitation to speak at this year's virtual annual meeting.
YAEL FITZPATRICK: Please welcome Dr. Laura Helmuth.
LAURA HELMUTH: Thank you so much, Yael for the great introduction. Thank you to SSP. Thank you to the organizers for gathering us all together, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to talking with you at the Q&A after this presentation. Ask me anything. I'd be delighted to talk about any part of journalism, misinformation, what's happening in the world of the pandemic, or anything else we touch on today.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I hope you're having a great conference. So I'm delighted to be here with you today. I'm going to focus on misinformation and journalism, how we're covering the pandemic, and how all of us have a shared mission as publishers, as journalists, as people who care about reality. We're all working together to amplify reality and help people understand how the world actually works, help them discover it, share it, reveal it, and make it outcompete the forces of misinformation that have been so dangerous.
LAURA HELMUTH: I mean, the pandemic has shown, this year-- year and a half-- that misinformation is literally deadly, and so our work is more important than it ever has been, and it's changing. I think all of us here at this conference have had big changes to how we do our work, and new understanding of the urgency of it. So I want to talk about some of that, and with a focus on what's been happening in journalism.
LAURA HELMUTH: So I'm the Editor in Chief of Scientific American. It is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. We just celebrated our 175th anniversary, which is also known as our demisemiseptcentennial. So we had a big special issue about this back in September of 2020 and looked at some of our history, really brought back up some of the interesting articles we published in the past.
LAURA HELMUTH: We've published more than 200 Nobel Prize winners, and Scientific American historically has been a place where scientific experts come and write about their own fields and have the definitive explanation of what's happening in general relativity, for instance. We had Einstein write for us. And we still do that. We still have features by the world's leading experts, but we also do a lot of news coverage.
LAURA HELMUTH: So in 1845, one of our first stories was about the telegraph, and this year-- just a couple weeks ago-- we had a story about a measurement of the muon-- the wobble of the muon-- that suggests there could be new physics to be yet discovered. So those are news stories. We also run a lot of opinion pieces, and increasingly we're expanding our definition of what counts as science-- mostly to include a lot more social science, which we think is increasingly important.
LAURA HELMUTH: Obviously we hope that science can solve a lot of the world's problems, but really, social science, within science, is where we see that some of the biggest conflicts and problems and potential for making the world a better place can be better understood and revealed. So we had a cover story back in March-- this was our first cover story that was specifically about sociology. It's about the social justice movements and how the Civil Rights movement succeeded, and what lessons it has for the Black Lives Matter movement.
LAURA HELMUTH: It was written by sociologist Aldon Morris, who's one of the leading scholars of the Civil Rights movement, and it's very satisfying. We've heard that a lot of sociology classes are going to use this story in their teaching this coming year, so we're delighted about that. And we're also covering a lot of mental health and psychology, because obviously, during the pandemic, the physical health toll has been tremendous, but so has the psychological health toll, so we're covering that quite a bit.
LAURA HELMUTH: This is an example of one of our opinion pieces. And so with the feature stories that are written by experts, they talk about the research in their field and how it came about, what they're discovering, what the big questions are. But we really also try to-- have been expanding our presentation of articles by scientists talking about why science matters. And this is something that I think has really changed in the world of science-- frankly, since the Trump administration began.
LAURA HELMUTH: Some of you may have participated in or watched the March for Science in 2017, and it was a really interesting moment in the history of science, because it was a time when scientists and scientific organizations said, yeah, actually, we just sort of assumed that science was important, but we're going to get out literally by a million people and come and make funny signs and march on Washington, and march all around the world to say, science is important.
LAURA HELMUTH: We're sick of misinformation. We're sick of conspiracy theories. There is no planet to be. We need to heed the science on climate especially, and in the environment. Those were the big focuses for that particular march, and it came shortly after the Trump administration began, when there was almost immediately some threats to science that just amplified over the course of those four years.
LAURA HELMUTH: So it's been really interesting to see scientists realize that they have to engage more with the public and really explain what they do, defend what they do, and stand up for the importance of reality. And this was even before the pandemic. I think one thing that journalism has been reckoning with-- and I think a lot of scholarly publishing too, and a lot of industries right now-- is we need to really think about who are we amplifying?
LAURA HELMUTH: What ideas are we sharing? And how can we use our platforms to make the world a better place, to not just improve the ratio of information to misinformation in the world, but how can we really work to eliminate structural racism, to fix some of the structural biases in STEM? And as part of that, we at Scientific American have been publishing more early career researchers, more women, more people of color as expert writers.
LAURA HELMUTH: We're quoting them more, and just making sure that we're being more inclusive. And this is an example of a feature story we ran recently by graduate students. And you might think, well, what does a graduate student have to say about this study of ancient galaxy clusters? But it's a really delightful story. It talks about the thrill of discovery of science, and how hard it is, and the challenges of having to wake up at 4:00 o'clock in the morning and race to an observatory so that you can get your time on the telescope and capture a certain piece of the sky so you can understand what's happening in this weird galaxy cluster.
LAURA HELMUTH: So I think everybody's trying to do their part. There's so much more work to be done, but I think that's something we'll certainly talk about throughout this conference, is how could we do better? How can we make scholarly publishing research, communication-- the whole conversation-- more inclusive and more just? So when it comes to the pandemic, it's been a really challenging year and a half for all of us.
LAURA HELMUTH: For journalism, the big challenges are pretty clear-- and many of these challenges are shared across the publishing industry, scholarly and popular. This is a confusing disease. It is new. The virus does not behave like other viruses or other infectious diseases. And so we have to keep up with the constantly-changing science, provide the best evidence-- ideally life-saving evidence.
LAURA HELMUTH: The stakes have never been higher to get this right, to make sure that experts and the best evidence is being presented in a way that's engaging and sticky, and more memorable than the misinformation that's circulating so widely; find ways to debunk the misinformation. And then one thing that's been really tricky for psychological reasons is as we've learned more and more about the pandemic and about the vaccines, we have to constantly be updating outdated information with new information, and explaining the process of research, and how it's iterative and self-correcting, and something that we said based on the best available evidence a year ago might be not true today.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that's a hard message to get across. I'm going to talk a little bit about how we've done that, and what some of the challenges have been. I was talking about which experts we amplify, and of course, I don't at all mean to imply that we're not still amplifying the voices of and quoting and interviewing highly credentialed, knowledgeable senior white male academics and experts.
LAURA HELMUTH: We certainly are. And so we at Scientific American, almost from the beginning-- this is from January 2020-- we interviewed Tony Fauci about what is this weird, new disease? How worried do we have to be? What do we know so far? And this was before he was a household name-- except to health reporters and people in the infectious disease world.
LAURA HELMUTH: So we brought him out right away to tell us what we know so far. And also, one of the many other challenges-- which I should have put on that list, actually-- of the pandemic has there's been so much racism and xenophobia from the very beginning, which is just so contrary to the spirit of science-- or the ideal spirit of science. Science is the most international endeavor in all of human history.
LAURA HELMUTH: Scientists from all around the world immediately started collaborating on understanding where the virus was coming from, sharing the genetic code, sharing resources, sharing samples, sharing vaccine strategies. And of course there's competition too, but I think this was just the most collaborative time in the history of science. And one of the most important scientists, from the very beginning, is a researcher at the Wuhan Virology Institute named Shi Zhengli, and she was one of the world's experts even before the pandemic on coronaviruses, and she had done a lot of research on coronaviruses from bats identifying the original SARS.
LAURA HELMUTH: She's gone to bat caves around the world collecting samples and sequencing coronaviruses, and she's been warning for years that look, these diseases, these viruses, are very variable. There's a lot of them, and they can infect humans, and we really need to be monitoring for them and preparing for them. And so when the pandemic began-- when some doctors in Wuhan noticed these weird cases of pneumonia that weren't any disease they had seen before-- she immediately came in and identified the virus, shared it with the world.
LAURA HELMUTH: And the reason that many of us have vaccines today is because of the work she did, and some of her colleagues did. Unfortunately, a lot of misinformation and conspiracy theories circulated about her almost immediately, claiming that, oh, she created the virus. She intentionally released it into the world. It was a lab accident. There's no evidence whatsoever that it's a lab accident. There's a lot of evidence that these viruses are just ubiquitous in bats, and in other mammal species, and that they easily jump from mammal to mammal.
LAURA HELMUTH: So the route of transmission seems to have been through a pangolin. There's no evidence, again, that it came through a lab. But this was a long way of saying this was a profile we published very early in the pandemic to show how the science is happening, who's doing it, and what we know so far. One of the other things that the pandemic has-- one of the many things the pandemic has exposed, but probably the most important-- is that structural racism is also deadly-- literally deadly.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I think people who looked at epidemiology in the past, or paid attention to life expectancy, were aware of this fact. Obviously there's been a long history of racial disparities in health care, and what are some of the causes for them? What are some of the consequences, and what are some of the ways to address this? The pandemic just really exposed how horrific these discrepancies are, and they also blew apart an idea that frankly a lot of health journals had bought into-- this idea that when there are differences in death rates or in sickness rates for various diseases by, basically, socially-imposed racial category, maybe there's a gene that explains why Black people are more likely to die of stroke.
LAURA HELMUTH: And there are certainly some diseases that have more or less of a risk factor depending on certain genes that are more associated with certain ethnic backgrounds or historic family backgrounds. And so a couple cases-- sickle cell anemia, or the BRCA genes. But when it comes to most causes of disease, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, COVID, it's racism and not race, or not some specific gene, that is the risk factor.
LAURA HELMUTH: And the racism you see at every stage-- at pre-existing conditions and access to health care, at what kind of jobs do you work, what kind of resources do you have to protect yourself from an infectious disease? And so we've run a lot of stories trying to help people who hadn't thought about it before get their heads around it, and really amplify this as one of the most important realizations and one of the most important opportunities to help control and minimize the horrific cost of this pandemic.
LAURA HELMUTH: So one thing that a lot of journalists try to do when there's a scary or abstract or confusing story is to humanize it. And at the beginning of the pandemic especially, there were a lot of people saying, oh, it's a hoax. A lot of people in very powerful positions were saying it's a hoax. It's not real. It's just a bad cold.
LAURA HELMUTH: It's just like the flu. And one of the things we did early on is interview several health care workers, emergency room workers, nurses who were dealing with patients and had been in New York, and seen just the horrific death toll. And we had audio recordings. We had several stories where we heard, in their own words, what they'd been experiencing.
LAURA HELMUTH: It was really moving, and this is just a reminder that it's really important to show the human side of any disaster, both to help your audience comprehend it, and to do justice to what's actually happening in the world. The science is important. We ran a lot of stories-- or, continue to run a lot of stories-- about the structure of the virus or the immune system.
LAURA HELMUTH: But the stories that, often, people find memorable, that can make a big impact and help people comprehend the magnitude of a disaster, are when you actually talk to people and share their stories. Another technique we use to make complicated information more comprehensible is graphics. And this is just a graphic showing that flu, basically, there was no flu last year for the first time in recorded history.
LAURA HELMUTH: Or the first time in recently recorded history. There's just zero flu. And so we ran a series of graphics showing the typical curves and showing that in 2020, there just was basically zero flu recorded. And it's the restrictions, which we'll talk about in a little bit. Especially the early restrictions that were inspired by COVID.
LAURA HELMUTH: No know, don't go out if you're sick, monitoring people for fever, wash your hands. Stay home. These didn't prevent COVID from spreading around the world, certainly spreading in the United States. But they were really effective against the flu. And part of the reason for that is the COVID recommendations early on were based on what we know about other infectious diseases.
LAURA HELMUTH: COVID turned out to be much more sneaky and much more difficult to stop. But flu wasn't. So one of the important outcomes here is this is sort of a message that we don't have to have 30,000 to 50,000 to 60,000 people die in the United States every year from flu. Maybe there are things, obviously, we don't want to shut down and quarantine everybody.
LAURA HELMUTH: But this is an infectious disease. We've learned a lot this year, and let's use this information moving forward to protect ourselves and children and people who are immune compromised, especially, from all the other infectious diseases that are circulating in the world. So as I said, and as you all remember, the pandemic has really changed our understanding of how the virus is spreading.
LAURA HELMUTH: And at the beginning, the best advice was wash your hands. Sing Happy Birthday twice while you're washing your hands. Watch your fever. Monitor for symptoms. And, at first, we really didn't know that people could spread the disease while they were asymptomatic. So this is just a story from our partner publication, Nature. This is back in March, saying, it looks like actually infections are spreading between people who don't have symptoms.
LAURA HELMUTH: Either before they have symptoms or, in some cases, people seem to not have symptoms at all. And we hadn't observed that before. Hadn't observed that with the flu or with Norovirus or other diseases that typically spread symptomatically, and can spread through touch. Much better than Coronavirus. And we've discovered Coronavirus seems to be spreading through the air.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that's why the initial recommendations were, you don't need to wear a mask, save the masks for the people who are first responders, people working in health care who really need the masks. So don't hoard masks. If you're not exposed, if you're not sick, if you don't know anybody who's sick, you don't have to wear a mask. And that was based on the best evidence at the time.
LAURA HELMUTH: But by April, by May of last year, we started realizing, oh wait. The best advice we had, based on previous diseases, don't really apply now to this disease. Which seems to be spreading through these super spreader events where people are singing together in a choir, rather than shaking hands. That seems to be the method.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, what I'm showing you, in all of these slides, what I'm showing you is just screenshots of articles that have been published. That, in most cases, the only words you can probably see are the headlines. And that's typically what people see of a story. Is the first 3 to 15 words of any story. Or the most important of any one, because of the way that stories circulate on social media, and just what you see if you're browsing quickly on a homepage of a publication.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, one of the kind of structures that has become a really good signal this year is what we know so far. And this is just reinforcing the message that this pandemic is changing really quickly. The science about it is changing quickly. Our understanding is growing all the time. And this is our pledge to you as journalists. We're going to tell you the latest, which might be different from what we told you last month.
LAURA HELMUTH: And the what we know so far also implies that there's more to know, there are more open questions, and we're going to come back and tell you more about what we learn as soon as we learn it. And so here's another what we know so far story. And this combines kind of two tropes of science and health journalism, or really any kind of journalism. Which is, what we know so far, and nine important things. Or eight important things.
LAURA HELMUTH: We've got an example of that later. 27 reasons to fear this or know that. And it's one of the oldest kind of formulas in journalism. If you look at magazines from 100 years ago, they're full of lists. People really love lists and quizzes. And it's sort of a demystifying and welcoming and kind of non intimidating way to present complicated information.
LAURA HELMUTH: And especially when people are looking on their mobile devices or scanning through social media. It's also a promise that we're not going to waste your time, these are going to be quick bullet point, short explanations of a certain number of things. And it also is, it's sort of a curiosity. It's like a prompt. When you see one of these list headlines. You might think, nine things?
LAURA HELMUTH: I can think of three or four, but I wonder what all nine are. So it's sort of like a way to lure people in to read the story. And to make it to the ninth thing. And this story, it's one that has to do with that whole issue of, there are things we thought we knew at the beginning of the pandemic that turned out to not be true. And there's a psychological bias called anchoring bias.
LAURA HELMUTH: Where if there's some new thing you're learning about, particularly if it's dramatic, if it's scary, if it's really shocking, the first things you learn about it tend to be really sticky. And it's very hard to overwrite the first things you know. And that's one of the reasons why they're still alcohol wipes all over the place. Because at the beginning, based on Norovirus, based on flu, really seemed to be that if you just wash your hands, you'd be safe.
LAURA HELMUTH: And you didn't necessarily need a mask. And of course all those things turned out to not be true. So this article explicitly says, here's something we thought at first, here's why we thought it then, here's what evidence has come out since, and this is the new understanding. The new understanding is, it spreads through the air. The new understanding is, it spreads before you ever know you're sick.
LAURA HELMUTH: You may never know you're sick and you can still pass it along, potentially kill someone while being unaware of it. And that's why you need to wear a mask. And this whole concept that science is iterative and self-correcting and complicated, in the intersection of journalism trying to give you the latest science, can sometimes lead to the feeling of kind of ping ponging.
LAURA HELMUTH: And this is common. People often complain that one day red wine is good for you, one day it's bad. Same with coffee, same with chocolate. What do scientists know anyway? And so, one thing that the health and science reporters have been trying to explain, constantly, is that science is really hard. And the best knowledge can change.
LAURA HELMUTH: During the pandemic, about nutrition, about eggs. And that doesn't mean that science is broken, it means that that's just how it works. And we're trying to keep up with it. Now at the same time, especially the really professional science and health journalists, and environmental journalists too and technology journalists to some extent, are starting to- are recognizing the danger of covering single studies, particularly mouse studies.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that's partly because of the whole issue of replication failures. That sometimes really dramatic stories, for instance, about coffee being really good or bad for you. That a single study often will fail to replicate, or will be contradicted by the next study. And so, now, we still do cover new studies that come out in scientific journals, but we tend to use them just as the occasion for a story.
LAURA HELMUTH: And we'll talk about, here's the latest evidence, but then include a lot of other studies from that field to show how the lattice work fits into the larger body of knowledge, rather than just chasing after the latest detail. And the goal is to provide more context and to avoid hype. And to, frankly, recognize that a lot of the stories we've published in the past have turned out not to be true.
LAURA HELMUTH: And nobody wants to do that. You know, we want to be trustworthy. We want to make people understand the body of knowledge, not just the latest thing. So when we're dealing with helping people understand what's real about the world and what isn't, one of the other challenges, which is sort of a delightful challenge, is that the world is really weird.
LAURA HELMUTH: This is a study that came out a while ago, just this year. That scientists went to dig a core deep below the sea floor. They brought up a bunch of mud. There were some bacteria in it. They gave them some food and the bacteria woke up and started reproducing. They are a hundred million years old. So this is a true thing about the world, or at least as true is as we can understand it to be at this point.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it's just a reminder that the world is really bizarre. And it's kind of no wonder that people who aren't familiar with how research works or scholarship works can get fooled by science-y looking things that aren't necessarily real science. And it's all of our responsibility to sort of help explain how we know what we know and what's real, and delight in the bizarre-ness of the world, while also kind of debunking the bizarre falsehoods about the world.
LAURA HELMUTH: So at the beginning of the pandemic, from the beginning, there were conspiracy theories, lies, misinformation, disinformation. Some of it was commercially motivated. A lot of anti vaccine groups or anti vaccine activists. They make a lot of money off of their attempts to mislead people about the safety of vaccines. Often by saying, you know, don't vaccinate your child against measles, instead buy my vitamin C supplements.
LAURA HELMUTH: And they immediately jumped into this as a new opportunity to make a lot of money. There was, as you may remember, a lot of political claims by the Trump administration, especially that it was a hoax, that it was China virus. A lot of xenophobia and misdirection. Some intentional, some not. And BuzzFeed, to its credit, jumped in and started a list. And as I mentioned, lists are very effective and very welcoming.
LAURA HELMUTH: Of just, here's a bunch of lies that are circulating. And they did a nice job of presenting each one with an X through it or a red dash to show don't believe this, it's false. And, from the beginning, it was miracle cures that was the big problem. So, there's been a lot of debunking. Debunking has become sort of an art form. Debunking and fact checking over the course of the pandemic.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that didn't start with the pandemic. And it really was amplified by a lot of the misinformation that was circulating during the Trump administration, even before then. But the pandemic really elevated debunking to an art form. And that's partly, so that's within the journalism world that we got much better at debunking. And a lot of the strategies that journals are using are based on research about misinformation.
LAURA HELMUTH: Which has been the hottest area of research for a few years. Unfortunately, because there's just so much to study, there's so much misinformation circulating out there, especially on social media platforms, from the highest levels. A lot of it was amplified or shared by the White House during the Trump administration. And so, scientists have had a lot to work with. And they're really starting to understand how it works, where it comes from, how it goes, how to debunk it.
LAURA HELMUTH: And so, journals are covering this as a subject area, as a really interesting field of study. But also as a way to improve our own craft and understand how we can compete with misinformation. And one of the big decisions that journals face all the time is, when there's a conspiracy theory, do you bother to debunk it, do you try to counter it, or is it better to just ignore it? And typically it is better.
LAURA HELMUTH: If you have a big platform, it's typically better to ignore something if it's not circulating very widely. And so you're kind of constantly monitoring it to see, is it starting to go viral on Facebook, is YouTube circulating a bunch of misinformation, has a celebrity gotten involved? And I used to work at the Washington Post before I started at Scientific American. And there, one of the, unfortunately, one of the kind of hurdles that misinformation had to jump over before we would cross it was, is a prominent politician repeating the falsehood?
LAURA HELMUTH: And so as soon as they do, then the Post would jump in to debunk it. So scientists have been really tireless in fighting the misinformation and trying to provide good science from the beginning. This is an article about a program called Ask a Scientist that's a grassroots voluntary effort to help people with just basic questions to connect them with scientists who can answer those questions in a clear and quick way.
LAURA HELMUTH: So that people have trusted sources they can go to, rather than getting on very bad Facebook groups where they can share and spread misinformation. And so that story before was from last year. This is from this year. And it's still the case. Researchers are trying new organizations, new ways of outreach, and trying to improve their skills all the time to figure out what are some of the best ways to curb disinformation?
LAURA HELMUTH: And so it's really an arms race between the forces of good and evil, of real information versus disinformation. And both sides are constantly improving their ability to grab people's attention. And it's not just long time anti-vaxxers who are complete quacks who are circulating misinformation. There are also some people who have credentials, who are scientists, technically.
LAURA HELMUTH: They have the titles, they have the degrees. But they're sharing misinformation. And so, there was a horrible mock documentary called The Plandemic that involved a couple of people with science degrees. And there are several who are spreading lies about the pandemic, trying to work people up about it. And, so this is an article about what are some of the conditions that have allowed that to happen, and how can we help people understand that just because somebody has a PhD, doesn't mean they know what they're talking about.
LAURA HELMUTH: This is an article also on the same issue. This is by a researcher, one of the authors of this is a researcher named Dunning. And you may have heard of the Dunning Kruger effect. This is a psychological phenomenon that people who are really confident that they- or people who very little about a field are often very confident in what they know. And, we had a kind of a problem, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, with what he was calling armchair epidemiologists.
LAURA HELMUTH: So people who don't actually know anything about epidemiology but have expertise in another field, they are scientists and they can do a little math. But they would basically just do back of the envelope calculations and come up with wacky ideas about how and where and when the pandemic, the virus was spreading. And it was really a problem. And I think part of it is the Dunning Kruger effect, that people are overly confident about things they don't know.
LAURA HELMUTH: But it's also that people were just scared. And there was a lack of information, and a lot of questions. And so people rush in to fill the gaps and maybe fill them with what they think is real information, but it isn't. And that's been a constant struggle throughout the pandemic to help people understand that some of their questions just don't have answers yet.
LAURA HELMUTH: And of course, a lot of myths are really sticky. Some of the reason conspiracy theories are so intriguing is they're dramatic, they're memorable, they have anecdotes that are emotional. They make you feel like you're in the know, and they answer those questions that don't have answers. And so, here's another story we did in Scientific American using the nine tropes. And the just won't go away.
LAURA HELMUTH: And so we used the research on misinformation showing how to replace a false information, false bit of information, with something true. And so we had nine examples. And for each one. This is this is tiny type, I apologize. But, basically, we used kind of a formula of saying, OK, here's a myth. This is a myth, this is not true.
LAURA HELMUTH: It's not the case that wealthy elites are profiting from the vaccine. And then we explained, where did this belief come from? Why we know it's not true, and here's what is true instead. So the goal is to identify something is false, explain you may be seeing it in a lot of places, you may be seeing it on social media, hearing it from your cousin. This is why it's circulating.
LAURA HELMUTH: Here's how we know it isn't actually true about the world. And here's what is true about the world. And that's based on research on misinformation. Tricks that are the best, most effective ways to help people get rid of some of the sticky conspiracy theories and myths that have been circulating. And the research on misinformation, this is from before the pandemic, shows that fake news is really good at what it does.
LAURA HELMUTH: This was a study on Twitter, which is the most accessible platform for researchers to study because of the openness. Facebook has been much less cooperative. And, of course, Facebook has all these closed groups where people can share misinformation. Twitter, things tend to be more open. It's easier to kind of follow the spread of misinformation. And it spreads really well.
LAURA HELMUTH: And this isn't to say that Twitter is worse than the other platforms. It's probably better. But it's a really nice kind of Petri dish to study where these things happen. And this is another article we ran about the Dunning Kruger effect. And this idea that people who are incompetent may come off as extremely confident, and you know, and naturally when you're hearing somebody opine on a radio program or some news channels and saying with great confidence something that's not true, you may think, well they seem so confident they must know what they're talking about.
LAURA HELMUTH: But it's actually not a good signal of expertise. The experts also, we hope, sound confident and convincing and easy to follow. But you can't use that as a signal that somebody knows what they're talking about. So one of the psychological issues that has really extended the pandemic, especially in the US and in some parts of Europe and a few other places around the world, is this idea that masks are a sign of weakness.
LAURA HELMUTH: That masks show you're afraid of the virus. And that masks are some kind of violation of your personal liberty. And that idea is really, it's like a perfect illustration of this concept of toxic masculinity. That this kind of horrible idea that men have to be powerful and unemotional and tough all the time, and therefore, they shouldn't go to the doctor and they shouldn't take any precautions against a global pandemic that's of historic proportions that has killed so many people around the world.
LAURA HELMUTH: And so this is kind of a psychological study of where is this coming from, why are men thinking. And I quickly say not all men. And this is just a certain subset of men who are susceptible to this message. And certainly women too and non-binary people too. There's plenty of people who are pissed off about masks. But it's a certain kind of messaging that's just been really, really dangerous.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, so, this. We're trying to evaluate it, expose it, and find ways to get around it. To kind of recommend other kind of good qualities of masculinity, like protecting your family, protecting your community. And masks should be a symbol of that, rather than a symbol of fear. So we had a big special issue on confronting misinformation a few months ago.
LAURA HELMUTH: And one of the fun stories. And I realize, these are coming by pretty quickly. But if you get a chance, this one is by one of our editors at Scientific American. She was in a drill for the election. This was a journalistic group that deals with misinformation. Brought a bunch of journals together to kind of do a war games type of simulation. It's election night and you're pretending that you are working at different organizations.
LAURA HELMUTH: And they're kind of doing a real time mock example of how misinformation spreads. And she decided to be a bad actor. And to just make things up, accuse her rivals of being fake, amplify all kinds of misinformation. And whenever anybody tried to debunk what she was saying about the election, then she'd accuse them of lying.
LAURA HELMUTH: And, anyhow, it was very effective. And she immediately just disrupted the entire simulation because everybody spent all their time trying to say, oh no, no, no, you're wrong. And just making her message even louder. So it really kind of showed, in real time, how easy it is- if you're a bad actor, if you want to spread disinformation. People are really good at it.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it doesn't take a lot of skill, and you can cause a lot of damage. And so we all need to recognize it and try to protect ourselves. We had a little bit more of a positive article by Kathleen Hall Jameson a couple of months ago. And this was- this article is very practical. And kind of hopeful. And her message here is that everybody can do their part to help stop misinformation from spreading.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it really is something that happens socially and that happens in small group settings, and family settings. With your neighbors, with your acquaintances. A lot of misinformation is spreading person to person. It certainly gets amplified by powerful institutions, but that seems to be the biggest risk. And so she has just six or seven steps, how you can sort of prepare yourself to identify misinformation, explain where to find real information, help people kind of question where they heard something, and reframe the ideas.
LAURA HELMUTH: And sort of explain where the misinformation is coming from. In really practical and non-threatening ways, so that you don't end up estranged from your cousin, but hopefully helping your cousin come around to understand that no, Tony Fauci doesn't want to put a chip in your neck and control your life. It's a process. And it's not like people instantly come around and understand what's happening.
LAURA HELMUTH: But it's something that all of us can kind of be deputized to do. So there are certainly things that individuals can and should do to kind of improve our own ecosystems, to improve the signal to noise ratio in our worlds. But there are also a lot of institutional efforts happening. One of my favorites is the international fact checking network, which is run by the Poynter Institute, a journalism research institute and foundation.
LAURA HELMUTH: And they established a new holiday a few years ago called international fact checking day. And it is every year on April 2nd. The day after April Fool's Day. So, you kind of celebrate by sharing facts and emphasizing the importance of factuality and evidence and showing your work. So, yeah, there are some very urgent, some lighthearted. But a lot of effort's been put into it at the research level, at the implementation level, certainly among journalists, among scholarly publishers, policy makers.
LAURA HELMUTH: So I think there's more and more awareness that misinformation is a huge problem, and that we all need to be aware of it, help other people understand it, improve media literacy teaching in schools. The Poynter Institute also has a media literacy training program for seniors, because they're so often victimized by scams. And misinformation and conspiracies. So it's only growing. The research has continued to grow.
LAURA HELMUTH: The policy issues are continuing to grow. Certainly the journalism misinformation is one of the big issues we'll be covering, potentially for our careers. Alongside climate change, infectious disease, systemic racism. Those are kind of the big issues that, of our day, that can we hope can be improved by better understanding, by research, by smart policies that are informed by the best knowledge.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I want to end on a sort of happy note. Two happy notes. One is that you may have heard that a few years ago, this idea that the Earth is flat. Started circulating and getting more and more attention, especially really tragically among teenagers and young people. And, I enjoy this tweet. In the 90s, we were all excited because we cloned a sheep and we landed a robot on Mars.
LAURA HELMUTH: And scientists today, for the last time, the Earth is round. So this was a problem that had gone away. People understood that the Earth was round. Of course, there were flat Earthers, but it was kind of a joke. And then it became a really common belief that was circulating on social media, and that was because of YouTube. And so, there was a lot of reporting, a lot of exposure of YouTube's algorithms were promoting these videos.
LAURA HELMUTH: And once somebody saw one, they would be presented with a whole lot of others. And so YouTube changed its algorithms and it de-platformed a lot of these flat Earth videos. And it really helped. De-platforming is a very powerful mechanism. It certainly has been effective after the January 6 insurrection, when the social media platforms de-platformed Trump.
LAURA HELMUTH: And that instantly decreased the amount of misinformation that was circulating. And it's still there. I mean, people want to seek out QAnon theories, they are certainly going to find them. But it means that fewer people will be exposed. Fewer people will be at risk. And then the one actually really good message, I think, is one of the battles that we had back around the turn of the last century in the 2000s and before then was dealing with creationism being taught in school as, not just an alternative to evolution, but as the way that the world was created.
LAURA HELMUTH: School kids were being taught that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that it was created in seven days, and that evolution, Earth science, most of biology, most of chemistry, most of physics was a conspiracy, was made up, was the devil's work. Literally satanic. And so a lot of people put a lot of time into fighting this. A lot of evolutionary biologists testified to school boards, scholarly publishers and journalists, did a great job of explaining how evolution works, how we know it works, why we know that the Earth is actually 4.6 billion years old.
LAURA HELMUTH: And it took a while. And it took a lot of effort. But the percentage of school teachers who are now teaching evolution as the explanation for how life came about on Earth and why humans are human, how we came up with this great diversity of species on the planet, it's much more common now. The number doubled, basically, of teachers who are teaching it as the basis of all biology of all life on Earth.
LAURA HELMUTH: So things can get better. It's a lot of work. But it's good work, it's important work. And I'm just really delighted to be here speaking with all of you who are engaged in that work. There are some things you can do in addition to what we already talked about. If you would ever like to write for the public through Scientific American or through other places like the Conversation or newspaper opinion pages, I encourage you to do so.
LAURA HELMUTH: I know everybody's got their own job and it's a lot of work to do what you're already doing at work, but if you have a message that you'd like the world to hear that you think needs more attention, do you consider writing or appearing on podcasts. And also encourage the authors, the specialists, the experts that you're working with to do the same. And when you're out on social media, share good information. When you can, debunk bad information.
LAURA HELMUTH: And just know we're all in this together. And hopefully we'll all be getting better at it, at some point. And we will stay engaged in this great battle. Thank you so much for listening. Like I said, I'm really looking forward to your questions. And I think we'll have a lot to talk about. So feel free to ask me anything. And thanks again for coming.
LAURA HELMUTH: And I hope you have a great conference this year.
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