Disinformation campaigns are undermining democracy. Here’s how we can fight back

Misinformation is debated everywhere and has justifiably sparked concerns. It can polarise the public, reduce health-protective behaviours such as mask wearing and vaccination, and erode trust in science. Much of misinformation is spread not by accident but as part of organised political campaigns, in which case we refer to it as disinformation.

But there is a more fundamental, subversive damage arising from misinformation and disinformation that is discussed less often.

It undermines democracy itself. In a recent paper published in Current Opinion in Psychology, we highlight two important aspects of democracy that disinformation works to erode.

The integrity of elections

The first of the two aspects is confidence in how power is distributed – the integrity of elections in particular.

In the United States, recent polls have shown nearly 70% of Republicans question the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. This is a direct result of disinformation from Donald Trump, the loser of that election.

Democracy depends on the people knowing that power will be transferred peacefully if an incumbent loses an election. The “big lie” that the 2020 US election was stolen undermines that confidence.

Depending on reliable information

The second important aspect of democracy is this – it depends on reliable information about the evidence for various policy options.

One reason we trust democracy as a system of governance is the idea that it can deliver “better” decisions and outcomes than autocracy, because the “wisdom of crowds” outperforms any one individual. But the benefits of this wisdom vanish if people are pervasively disinformed.

Disinformation about climate change is a well-documented example. The fossil fuel industry understood the environmental consequences of burning fossil fuels at least as early as the 1960s. Yet they spent decades funding organisations that denied the reality of climate change. This disinformation campaign has delayed climate mitigation by several decades – a case of public policy being thwarted by false information.

We’ve seen a similar misinformation trajectory in the COVID-19 pandemic, although it happened in just a few years rather than decades. Misinformation about COVID varied from claims that 5G towers rather than a virus caused the disease, to casting doubt on the effectiveness of lockdowns or the safety of vaccines.

The viral surge of misinformation led to the World Health Organisation introducing a new term – infodemic – to describe the abundance of low-quality information and conspiracy theories.

A common denominator of misinformation

Strikingly, some of the same political operatives involved in denying climate change have also used their rhetorical playbook to promote COVID disinformation. What do these two issues have in common?

One common denominator is suspicion of government solutions to societal problems. Whether it’s setting a price on carbon to mitigate climate change, or social distancing to slow the spread of COVID, contrarians fear the policies they consider to be an attack on personal liberties.

An ecosystem of conservative and free-market think tanks exists to deny any science that, if acted on, has the potential to infringe on “liberty” through regulations.

There is another common attribute that ties together all organised disinformation campaigns – whether about elections, climate change or vaccines. It’s the use of personal attacks to compromise people’s integrity and credibility.

Election workers in the US were falsely accused of committing fraud by those who fraudulently claimed the election had been “stolen” from Trump.

Climate scientists have been subject to harassment campaigns, ranging from hate mail to vexatious complaints and freedom-of-information requests. Public health officials such as Anthony Fauci have been prominent targets of far-right attacks.

The new frontier in attacks on scientists

It is perhaps unsurprising there is now a new frontier in the attacks on scientists and others who seek to uphold the evidence-based integrity of democracy. It involves attacks and allegations of bias against misinformation researchers.

Such attacks are largely driven by Republican politicians, in particular those who have endorsed Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.

The misinformers are seeking to neutralise research focused on their own conduct by borrowing from the climate denial and anti-vaccination playbook. Their campaign has had a chilling effect on research into misinformation.

How do we move on from here?

Psychological research has contributed to legislative efforts by the European Union, such as the Digital Services Act or Code of Practice, which seek to make democracies more resilient against misinformation and disinformation.

Research has also investigated how to boost the public’s resistance to misinformation. One such method is inoculation, which rests on the idea people can be protected against being misled if they learn about the rhetorical techniques used to mislead them.

In a recent inoculation campaign involving brief educational videos shown to 38 million citizens in Eastern Europe, people’s ability to recognise misleading rhetoric about Ukrainian refugees was frequently improved.

It remains to be seen whether these initiatives and research findings will be put to use in places like the US, where one side of politics appears more threatened by research into misinformation than by the risks to democracy arising from misinformation itself.


We’d like to acknowledge our colleagues Ullrich Ecker, Naomi Oreskes, Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden who coauthored the journal article on which this article is based.The Conversation

Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and John Cook, Senior Research Fellow, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Coronavirus conspiracy theories are dangerous – here’s how to stop them spreading

 

Conspiracy theories increase the likelihood that people won’t follow expert advice. Shutterstock

The number of coronavirus infections and deaths continues to rise at an alarming rate, reminding us that this crisis is far from over. In response, the global scientific community has thrown itself at the problem and research is unfolding at an unprecedented rate.

The new virus was identified, along with its natural origins, and tests for it were rapidly developed. Labs across the world are racing to develop a vaccine, which is estimated to be still around 12 to 18 months away.

At the same time, the pandemic has been accompanied by an infodemic of nonsense, disinformation, half-truths and conspiracy theories that have spread virally through social networks. This damages society in a variety of ways. For example, the myth that COVID-19 is less dangerous than the seasonal flu was deployed by US president Donald Trump as justification for delaying mitigation policies.

The recent downgrading of COVID-19 death projections, which reveal the success of social-distancing policies, has been falsely used to justify premature relaxing of social distancing measures. This is the logical equivalent of throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because it’s kept you dry until then.

The new conspiracy theory that blames COVID-19 on the 5G broadband system is one of the most bizarre pieces of misinformation. There are several strains of this theory, ranging from the claims that 5G alters people’s immune systems to the idea that 5G changes people’s DNA, making them more susceptible to infection. Then there’s the idea that secret messages about 5G and coronavirus were hidden in the design of the new £20 note in the UK. In reality, 5G relates to viruses and bank notes as much as the tooth fairy relates to zoology – not at all.

The 5G conspiracy theory originated in early March when an American physician, Thomas Cowan, proposed it in a YouTube video (which has since been taken down by YouTube according to their new policy). Some people have taken this conspiracy theory so seriously that it led to people setting 5G towers in the UK on fire and threatening broadband engineers.

The conspiracy theory has begun to penetrate mainstream society. Among other celebrities, UK TV personality Eamonn Holmes and US actor Woody Harrelson have given fuel to the idea.

Inoculating against conspiracy theories

As we document in our recent Conspiracy Theory Handbook, there is a great deal of scientific research into why people might be susceptible to conspiracy theories. When people suffer loss of control or feel threatened, it makes them more vulnerable to believing conspiracies. Unfortunately, this means that pandemics have always been breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, from antisemitic hysteria during the Black Death to today’s 5G craze.

An effective strategy for preventing conspiracy theories from spreading through social networks is, appropriately enough, inoculation. As we document in the Conspiracy Theory Handbook, if we inoculate the public by pre-emptively warning them of misleading misinformation, they develop resilience and are less likely to be negatively influenced. Inoculating messages can take several forms. As well as giving people the right facts, inoculation can also be logic-based and source-based.

Questioning the sources

The source-based approach focuses on analysing the people who push the conspiracy theory and the cultural infrastructure from which they emerged.

For example, the 5G theory began with Thomas Cowan, a physician whose medical licence is on a five-year probation. He is currently prohibited from providing cancer treatment to patients and supervising physician assistants and advanced practice nurses. So we can question his credentials.

His 5G video was from a talk he presented at a pseudo-scientific conference featuring a who’s who of science deniers. One of the headliners was Andrew Wakefield, a debarred former physician and seminal figure in the anti-vaccination movement who promotes highly damaging misinformation about vaccination based on data that he is known to have falsified.

Another attendee of this meeting was the president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, an organisation famous for bestowing awards onto fossil-fuel funded climate deniers and for giving a platform to a speaker who denied the link between HIV and AIDS, claiming that the link was invented by government scientists who wanted to cover up other health risks of “the lifestyle of homosexual men.”

For the public to be protected against the 5G conspiracy theory, it is important to understand its emergence from the same infrastructure that also supports AIDS denial, anti-vaccination conspiracies and climate denial.

It is therefore unsurprising that the rhetorical techniques that are deployed against the seriousness of climate change are similar to those used to mismanage the COVID-19 crisis.

Yale Climate ConnectionsAuthor provided

 

Questioning the logic

Another way to neutralise conspiracy theories is through logic-based inoculation. This involves explaining the rhetorical techniques and tell-tale traits to be found in misinformation, so that people can flag it before it has a chance to mislead them. In the Conspiracy Theory Handbook, we document seven traits of conspiratorial thinking. Spotting these can help people identify a baseless theory.

Conspiracy Theory HandbookAuthor provided

One trait that is particularly salient in the 5G conspiracy theory is re-interpreting randomness. With this thought pattern, random events are re-interpreted as being causally connected and woven into a broader, interconnected pattern.

For example, the introduction of 5G in 2019 coincided with the origin of COVID-19 and hence is interpreted to be causally related. But by that logic, other factors that were introduced in 2019 – say, the global phenomenon of Baby Yoda – could also be interpreted as a possible cause of COVID-19.

Correlation does not equal causation. The 5G conspiracy theory is also immune to evidence, despite having been debunked extensively. To illustrate, some of the countries worst affected by the pandemic (such as Iran) do not have any 5G technology.

Of course, 5G has nothing to do with a virus. In the US, T-Mobile’s low-band 5G data is transmitted using old UHF TV channels. UHF TV did not cause coronavirus and neither does 5G.

John CookAuthor provided

 

The crucial role of social media platforms

Social media platforms contribute to the problem of misinformation by providing the means for it to quickly and freely disseminate to the general public. Given that 330,000 lives were lost in relation to AIDS in South Africa during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki, when denying the disease’s link to HIV was official state policy. Given that people in the UK are now vandalizing potentially life-saving communication infrastructure, social media companies should not aid and abet the life-threatening disinformation that is spewed by a nexus of science deniers and conspiracy theorists.

To their credit, these firms are making an effort to be part of the solution to the problem of misinformation. For example, YouTube has announced that it will take down any video that espouses the 5G conspiracy theory. This is a move in the right direction.

There is considerable room for improvement, however. A recent test by the non-profit Disinfo.eu laboratory found much conspiratorial content on various social media platforms, and we were able to find hundreds of YouTube videos promulgating the 5G nonsense with a few keystrokes.

Much remains to be done.The Conversation

—————————————
This blog was written by Cabot Institute member Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol and John Cook, Research Assistant Professor, Center for Climate Change Communication, George Mason UniversityThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky
Dr John Cook

Global warming ‘hiatus’ is the climate change myth that refuses to die

File 20181210 76977 hkxl6p.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
riphoto3 / shutterstock

The record-breaking, El Niño-driven global temperatures of 2016 have given climate change deniers a new trope. Why, they ask, hasn’t it since got even hotter?

In response to a recent US government report on the impact of climate change, a spokesperson for the science-denying American Enterprise Institute think-tank claimed that “we just had […] the biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years.”

These claims are blatantly false: the past two years were two of the three hottest on record, and the drop in temperature from 2016 to 2018 was less than, say, the drop from 1998 (a previous record hot year) to 2000. But, more importantly, these claims use the same kind of misdirection as was used a few years ago about a supposed “pause” in warming lasting from roughly 1998 to 2013.

At the time, the alleged pause was cited by many people sceptical about the science of climate change as a reason not to act to reduce greenhouse pollution. US senator and former presidential candidate Ted Cruz frequently argued that this lack of warming undermined dire predictions by scientists about where we’re heading.

However, drawing conclusions on short-term trends is ill-advised because what matters to climate change is the decade-to-decade increase in temperatures rather than fluctuations in warming rate over a few years. Indeed, if short periods were suitable for drawing strong conclusions, climate scientists should perhaps now be talking about a “surge” in global warming since 2011, as shown in this figure:

Global temperature observations compared to climate models. Climate-disrupting volcanoes are shown at the bottom, and the purported hiatus period is shaded. 2018 values based on year to date (YTD).
NASA; Berkeley Earth; various climate models., Author provided

The “pause” or “hiatus” in warming of the early 21st century is not just a talking point of think-tanks with radical political agendas. It also features in the scientific literature, including in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and more than 200 peer-reviewed articles.

Research we recently published in Environmental Research Letters addresses two questions about the putative “pause”: first, is there compelling evidence in the temperature data alone of something unusual happening at the start of the 21st century? Second, did the rise in temperature lag behind projections by climate models?

In both cases the answer is “no”, but the reasons are interesting.

Reconstructing a historical temperature record from instruments designed for other purposes, such as weather forecasting, is not always easy. Several problems have affected temperature estimates for the period since 2000. The first of these was the fact that uneven geographical distribution of weather stations can influence the apparent rate of warming. Other factors include changes in the instruments used to measure ocean temperatures. Most of these factors were known at the time and reported in the scientific literature, but because the magnitudes of the effects were unknown, users of temperature data (from science journalists to IPCC authors) were in a bind when interpreting their results.

‘This glacier was here in 1908’: warming might fluctuate, but the long-term trend is clear.
Matty Symons/Shutterstock

A more subtle problem arises when we ask whether a fluctuation in the rate of warming is a new phenomena, rather than the kind of variation we expect due to natural fluctuations of the climate system. Different statistical tests are needed to determine whether a phenomena is interesting depending on how the data are chosen. In a nutshell, if you select data based on them being unusual in the first place, then any statistical tests that seemingly confirm their unusual nature give the wrong answer. (The statistical issue here is similar to the fascinating but counterintuitive “Monty Hall problem”, which has caught out many mathematicians).

When the statistical test is applied correctly, the apparent slowdown in warming is no more significant than other fluctuations in the rate of warming over the past 40 years. In other words, there is no compelling evidence that the supposed “pause” period is different from other previous periods. Neither is the deviation between the observations and climate model projections larger than would be expected.

That’s not to say that such “wiggles” in the temperature record are uninteresting – several of our team are involved in further studies of these fluctuations, and the study of the “pause” has yielded interesting new insights into the climate system – for example, the role of changes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

There are lessons here for the media, for the public, and for scientists.

For scientists, there are two lessons: first, when you get to know a dataset by using it repeatedly in your work, make sure you also still remember the limitations you read about when first downloading it. Second, remember that your statistical choices are always part of a cascade of decisions, and at least occasionally those decisions must be revisited.

For the public and the media, the lesson is to check claims about the data. In particular, when claims are made based on short periods or specific datasets, they are often designed to mislead. If someone claims the world hasn’t warmed since 1998 or 2016, ask them why those specific years – why not 1997 or 2014? Why have such short limits at all? And also check how reliable similar claims have been in the past.

The technique of misinformation is nicely described in a quote attributed to climate researcher Michael Tobis:

“If a large data set speaks convincingly against you, find a smaller and noisier one that you can huffily cite.”

Global warming didn’t stop in 1998. Don’t be fooled by claims that it stopped in 2016 either. There is only one thing that will stop global warming: cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.The Conversation

———————————
This blog is written by Kevin Cowtan, Professor of Chemistry, University of York and Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol Cabot Institute. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Kevin Cowtan
Stephan Lewandowsky

How to communicate effectively about climate change uncertainty

Have you ever struggled with the communication of climate change uncertainties? Are you frustrated by climate sceptics using uncertainty – inherent in any area of complex science – as a justification for delaying policy responses? Then the new ‘Uncertainty Handbook’ – a collaboration between the University of Bristol and its Cabot Institute and the Climate Outreach & Information Network (COIN) – is for you.

The handbook was authored by Dr. Adam Corner (COIN), Professor Stephan Lewandowsky (Cabot Institute, University of Bristol), Dr Mary Phillips (University of Bristol) and Olga Roberts (COIN). All have expertise relating to the role of uncertainty in climate change or how best to communicate it.

The Handbook distills the most important research findings and expert advice on communicating uncertainty into a few pages of practical, easy-to-apply techniques, providing scientists, policymakers and campaigners with the tools they need to communicate more effectively around climate change. Download the report here, and check out our 12 principles for more effectively communicating climate change uncertainty:

  1. Manage your audience’s expectations

People expect science to provide definite ‘answers’, whereas in reality it is a method for asking questions about the world. So manage people’s expectations, and use plenty of analogies from ‘everyday life’ so people can see that uncertainties are everywhere – not just in climate science.

  1. Start with what you know, not what you don’t know

Too often, communicators give the caveats before the take-home message. On many fundamental questions — such as ‘are humans causing climate change?’ and ‘will we cause unprecedented changes to our climate if we don’t reduce the amount of carbon that we burn?’— the science is effectively settled.

  1. Be clear about the scientific consensus

Having a clear and consistent message about the scientific consensus is important as it influences whether people see climate change as a problem that requires an urgent societal response. Use clear graphics like a pie-chart, use a ‘messenger’ who is trustworthy to communicate the consensus, and try to find the closest match between the values of your audience and those of the person communicating the consensus message.

  1. Shift from ‘uncertainty’ to ‘risk’

Most people are used to dealing with the idea of ‘risk’. It is the
language of the insurance, health and national security sectors. So for many audiences — politicians, business leaders, or the military — talking about the
risks of climate change is likely to be more effective than talking about the uncertainties.

  1. Be clear about the type of uncertainty you are talking about

A common strategy of sceptics is to intentionally confuse and conflate different types of uncertainty. So, it’s critical to be clear what type of uncertainty you’re talking about – causes, impacts, policies or solutions – and adopt appropriate language for each.

  1. Understand what is driving people’s views about climate change

Uncertainty about climate change is higher among people with right-leaning political values. However, a growing body of research points to ways of communicating
about climate change that do not threaten conservative belief systems, or which use language that better resonates with the values of the centre-right.

  1. The most important question for climate impacts is ‘when’, not ‘if’

Climate change predictions are usually communicated using a standard ‘uncertain outcome’ format. So a statement might say that sea levels will rise by “between 25 and 68cm, with 50cm being the average projection, by 2072”. But flip the statement around — using an ‘uncertain time’ framing — and suddenly it is clear that the
question is when not if sea levels will rise by 50cm: “Sea levels will rise by at least 50 cm, and this will occur at some time between 2060 and 2093”.

8. Communicate through images and stories
Most people understand the world through stories and images, not lists of numbers, probability statements or technical graphs, and so finding ways of translating and interpreting the technical language found in scientific reports into something more engaging is crucial. A visual artist can capture the concept of sea-level rise better than any graph, and still be factually accurate if they use scientific projections to inform their work.

9. Highlight the ‘positives’ of uncertainty

Research has found that uncertainty is not an inevitable barrier to action, provided communicators frame climate change messages in ways that trigger caution in the face of uncertainty. A ‘positive’ framing of uncertain information would indicate that losses might not happen if preventative action was taken.

  1. Communicate effectively about climate impacts

The question ‘is this weather event caused by climate change?’ is misplaced. When someone has a weak immune system, they are more susceptible to a range of diseases, and no one asks whether each illness was ‘caused’ by a weak immune system. The same logic applies to climate change and some extreme weather events: they are made more likely, and more severe, by climate change.

  1. Have a conversation, not an argument

Despite the disproportionate media attention given to ‘sceptics’, most people simply don’t talk or think about climate change all that much. This means that the very act of having a conversation about climate change — not an argument or repeating a ‘one-shot’ slogan — can be a powerful method of public engagement.

12.  Tell a human story not a scientific one

The amount of carbon dioxide that is emitted over the next 50 years will determine the extent to which our climate changes. So what we choose to do — and how quickly we can muster the collective willpower to do it — is an uncertainty that dwarfs all others.

———————–

This blog was written by Adam Corner and reproduced with kind permission from Adam and COIN.  View the original blog.

Dr Adam Corner is COIN’s Research Director, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University. Adam manages COIN’s research portfolio, oversees the ‘Talking Climate’ project website, and directs COIN’s collaborations with academic partners. He writes regularly for the national media, including The Guardian and New Scientist magazine.

Responding and adapting to climate change: Recognizing and managing uncertainty in the physical, social, and public spheres

A meeting of international experts at the University of Bristol addresses one of the crucial issues facing humanity.

“Uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty … so why should we bother to act?”

Who hasn’t heard politicians or media personalities appeal to uncertainty to argue against climate mitigation? And indeed, why should we interfere with the global economy when there is uncertainty about the severity of climate change?

Some 20 leading experts from around the world will be meeting in Bristol late in September to discuss the implications of scientific uncertainty on the proper response to climate change.

This is particularly crucial because in contrast to the widespread public perception that uncertainty is an invitation to delay action on climate change, recent work suggests that scientific uncertainty actually provides an impetus to engage in mitigative action. Specifically, the greater the scientific uncertainty, the greater are the risks from climate change.

This conflict between people’s common perceptions of uncertainty and its actual implications is not altogether uncommon, and there are many situations in which people’s risk perception deviates from best scientific understanding.

The Bristol meeting brings together scientists and practitioners with the goal of (a) developing more effective means to communicate uncertainty and (b) to explore how decision making under uncertainty can be better informed by scientific constraints.

To address the scientific, cultural, health, and social issues arising from climate change requires an in-depth and cross-disciplinary analysis of the role of uncertainty in all of the three principal systems involved: The physical climate system, people’s cognitive system and how that construes and potentially distorts the effects of uncertainty, and the social systems underlying the political and public debates surrounding climate change.

The results of the meeting will become publicly available through scientific publication channels, with the details to be announced closer to the time of the meeting. In addition, two attendees at the meeting will be presenting public lectures at the University of Bristol:

Friday 19 September, 6:00-7:30 pm. Dogma vs. consensus: Letting the evidence speak on climate change.

In this Cabot Institute public lecture, we are pleased to present John Cook, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, and owner of the Skeptical Science blog, in what promises to be a fascinating talk.

In 2013, John Cook led the Consensus Project, a crowd-sourced effort to complete the most comprehensive analysis of climate research ever conducted. They found that among relevant scientific articles that expressed a position on climate change, 97% endorsed the consensus that humans were causing global warming. When this research was published, it was tweeted by President Obama and received media coverage all over the world, with the paper being awarded the “best article” prize by the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2013. However, the paper has also been the subject of intense criticism by people who reject the scientific consensus. Hundreds of blog posts have criticised the results and newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe have published negative op-eds. Organisations who deny or reject current science on human-caused climate change, such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK and the Heartland Institute in the US, have published critical reports, and the Republican Party organised congressional testimony against the consensus research on Capitol Hill. This sustained campaign is merely the latest episode in over 20 years of attacks on the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. John Cook will discuss his research, both on the 97% consensus and on the cognitive psychology of consensus. He will also look at the broader issue of scientific consensus and why it generates such intense opposition.

Register for this free event.

Tuesday 23 September 2014, 6 pm to 7.30 pm. The Hockey Stick and the climate wars—the battle continues…

In this Cabot Institute lecture, in association with the Bristol Festival of Ideas, Professor Michael E Mann will discuss the science, politics, and ethical dimensions of global warming in the context of his own ongoing experiences as a figure in the centre of the debate over human-caused climate change.

Dr. Michael E Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. He is author of more than 160 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published books include Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming in 2008 and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines in 2012. He is also a co-founder and avid contributor to the award-winning science website RealClimate.org.

Register for this free event.

————————————————
This blog is by Cabot Institute member, Prof Stephan Lewandowsky of the School of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol.  You can also view this blog on the Shaping Tomorrow’s World blog.
Prof Stephan Lewandowsky