RAW TALK PODCAST
Can misinformation and censorship in the media be effectively managed? By Vaidhehi Veena Sanmugananthan, Junayd Hussain, Sumiha Karunagaran
P
icture this: you’re going about your day when you suddenly hear your phone go off. A shocking news notification about the number of people dying from vaccines draws you in. Alarmed, you forward the story to all your friends and family to warn them about this new revelation on vaccines. The next day, you are scrolling through your feed, and come across a well-known scientist debunking yesterday’s vaccine story you recently shared. However, by this point the falsified information has been spread to your network and there’s no way of taking it back. This is the sad reality of how quickly misinformation travels today. Social media has made it very easy to spread news widely. According to a report published by the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University in 2020, 94% of Canadian adults sampled from over 1500 survey responses had at least one account on a social media platform.1 This highlights the dense online interconnectivity that exists among Canadian adults today. Despite its convenience, the above anecdote illustrates how social media can catalyze the spread of unsubstantiated facts and sensationalized news quickly. How can we regulate and stop this spread? More importantly, is it even possible to do so in such an interconnected digital environment? This article, and the accompanying Raw Talk Podcast episode #104, “Science on Social Media”, aims to explore this question with insights from 36 | IMS MAGAZINE WINTER 2022 MEN’S HEALTH
media researchers and scientists that are active on social media. Firstly, what is misinformation? Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that has been spread without intent to deceive others. Dr. Eric Merkley, an assistant professor in Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Dr. Anna Blakney, an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, shared their insights on this topic. Dr. Merkley spoke about how social media can accelerate the propagation of misinformation throughout the public: “Historically, when people viewed the news, they cared a lot about source credibility…but now, through social media algorithms, people can kind of ignore the brand and…look at who in their social network is sharing this information as an alternative signal of credibility… scholars call this a credibility cascade”. Dr. Merkley also notes that spread of misinformation can stem from prominent figures like politicians or celebrities: “If you’re going to share misinformation, especially if you’re an elite voice, you got to do your due diligence…whatever they do, propagates much more fully through the media ecosystem. With great power comes great responsibility”. Current efforts to manage misinformation dissemination do exist within social media platforms and external organizations. For example, the Canadian Government runs initiatives that provide funding for creating
workshops and learning materials that improve media literacy.3 Twitter launched a pilot initiative called Birdwatch that allows users to write notes about Tweets that could be misleading.4 Clearly, there are existing initiatives being run to tackle misinformation dissemination. However, misinformation remains a persistent problem in society. Are the current efforts at slowing this spread effective or are there still improvements to be made? Given the complexity of this issue, the episode team decided to discuss their opinions on the idea of regulating misinformation on social media platforms. Junayd Hussain, a Science Writer on this episode, shared his insight on the topic of flagging potentially misinformed tweets on Twitter: “What these warnings are effective at is getting people to pause for a second, and to really think…about the implications of if they shared something that might be inaccurate or might be sort of harmful”. Jason Lo Hog Tian, a Show Host on the episode, addressed the concern of introducing biases through regulation implemented by social media platforms themselves: “We have to remember that…there are companies behind these platforms. And just like in traditional media, they can regulate however they like. So that introduces some bias potentially”. Regulation can be biased towards company interests and can affect what information is shared. The concern of censorship inevitably arises too, where opinions may be canceled to Graphic design by Michie (Xingyu) Wu
