Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.
Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Apr 16;116(16):7656-7661. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1805868115. Epub 2018 Nov 26.
Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between scientists, policy makers, and the public. To date, efforts have centered on improving the content, accessibility, and delivery of scientific communications. Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no longer the core of the problem. Distrust in the scientific enterprise and misperceptions of scientific knowledge increasingly stem less from problems of communication and more from the widespread dissemination of misleading and biased information. We describe the profound structural shifts in the media environment that have occurred in recent decades and their connection to public policy decisions and technological changes. We explain how these shifts have enabled unscrupulous actors with ulterior motives increasingly to circulate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation with the help of trolls, bots, and respondent-driven algorithms. We document the high degree of partisan animosity, implicit ideological bias, political polarization, and politically motivated reasoning that now prevail in the public sphere and offer an actual example of how clearly stated scientific conclusions can be systematically perverted in the media through an internet-based campaign of disinformation and misinformation. We suggest that, in addition to attending to the clarity of their communications, scientists must also develop online strategies to counteract campaigns of misinformation and disinformation that will inevitably follow the release of findings threatening to partisans on either end of the political spectrum.
在科学界，人们非常关注如何改善科学家、政策制定者和公众之间的沟通。迄今为止，相关努力主要集中在提高科学传播的内容、可及性和传递方式上。在这里，我们认为在当前的政治和媒体环境下，沟通不畅不再是问题的核心。对科学事业的不信任和对科学知识的误解越来越不是源于沟通问题，而是源于误导性和有偏见信息的广泛传播。我们描述了近几十年来媒体环境发生的深刻结构变化，以及这些变化与公共政策决策和技术变革的联系。我们解释了这些变化如何使得心怀不轨、动机不纯的人在网络喷子、机器人和应答者驱动算法的帮助下，越来越多地传播虚假新闻、错误信息和谣言。我们记录了在公共领域中普遍存在的高度党派敌意、隐含的意识形态偏见、政治两极化和出于政治动机的推理，并提供了一个实际的例子来说明，在媒体上通过基于互联网的虚假信息和错误信息运动，如何系统地歪曲明确表述的科学结论。我们建议，除了关注沟通的清晰度之外，科学家们还必须制定在线策略，以对抗必然会在发布对政治光谱两端的党派有威胁的发现后出现的错误信息和虚假信息运动。
