Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news

By Dietram A. Scheufele, Nicole M. Krause. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019

743 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Concerns about public misinformation in the United States—ranging from politics to science—are growing. Here, we provide an overview of how and why citizens become (and sometimes remain) misinformed about science. Our discussion focuses specifically on misinformation among individual citizens. However, it is impossible to understand individual information processing and acceptance without taking into account social networks, information ecologies, and other macro-level variables that provide important social context. Specifically, we show how being misinformed is a function of a person’s ability and motivation to spot falsehoods, but also of other group-level and societal factors that increase the chances of citizens to be exposed to correct(ive) information. We conclude by discussing a number of research areas—some of which echo themes of the 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Communicating Science Effectively report—that will be particularly important for our future understanding of misinformation, specifically a systems approach to the problem of misinformation, the need for more systematic analyses of science communication in new media environments, and a (re)focusing on traditionally underserved audiences.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98b3621e16c2e0f2461003f1b959d0a60a6712c5

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Citations in the corpus

Believing and sharing misinformation, fact-checks, and accurate information on social media: The role of anxiety during COVID-19 (2021, background): “Misinformation is a multidimensional concept (Scheufele and Krause, 2019).”
Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects (2020, positive): “At the same time, researchers find that online misinformation can spread faster and deeper than factual information, making it harder for scientific facts to reach the entire population (Lewandowsky et al., 2019; Scheufele & Krause, 2019; Vosoughi et al., 2018).”
The Debunking Handbook 2020 (2020, neutral): “Tailor the message to the audience and use a messenger trusted by the target group 65 .”
Synthetic Lies: Understanding AI-Generated Misinformation and Evaluating Algorithmic and Human Solutions (2023, background): “In addition, this defnitional difculty can be further complicated by LLMs’ ability to adapt to diferent scenarios in an agile fashion [14], as context is crucial in considering and evaluating misinformation [69, 94].”
Effects of misinformation on COVID-19 individual responses and recommendations for resilience of disastrous consequences of misinformation (2020, background): ““Misinformation” is defined in several ways [61,64,76].”
Can science literacy help individuals identify misinformation in everyday life? (2020, background): “…article, which is the individual; it ignores group-level effects, such as the sharing of misinformation by trusted peers within internet discussion forums, and structural effects, such as the changing role of mass media as a potential gatekeeper against misinformation (Scheufele & Krause, 2019).”