THE GOLDEN AGE OF JUNK SCIENCE
CONFUSED? IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT
IN A RECENT Economist/YouGov poll, 20 per cent of US citizens surveyed said they believe that COVID vaccines contain a microchip. Think about that. A fifth of respondents subscribe to a theory that has its roots in the idea that Bill Gates wants to track your activities. This survey also found that only 46 per cent of Americans were willing to say that the microchip thing is definitely false. Even though there’s no plausible way it could be happening.
These stats are troubling. But given our frenetic information environment, they are also, well, understandable. It is becoming harder and harder to tease out the real from the unreal. Sense from nonsense. Magical thinking from microchips.
Not long ago, I was shocked by a headline about “COVID parties” – people allegedly gathering to intentionally infect themselves and others. Infuriated and without pausing to reflect (or to do sufficient fact-checking), I immediately took to social media to rage about how irresponsible this was. Reality: COVID parties are mostly an urban legend. I was just adding to the noise and our collective angst.
I study misinformation. This is my job at the University of Alberta, where I am a professor of law and public health and specialise in health policy and the public representations of science. I should have known better. But the story played to my values, emotions, interests and professional passions. Cringe.
This is truly the golden era of misinformation. We are, as the World Health Organization declared in early 2020, in the middle of an “infodemic” – a time when harmful misinformation is spreading like an unstoppable infectious disease.
Part of the problem is that we have normalised nonsense in some very subtle and very obvious ways. Heck, there is a host of (very) successful wellness gurus who have embraced pseudoscience as a core brand strategy. And thanks to people like Andrew Wakefield – the disgraced former physician who started the vile “vaccines cause autism” fallacy in a paper published in – misinformation about vaccine safety has continued to spread and find new audiences.
