Science, Social Media and Alternative Facts: It Might Take A While (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Misinformation on social media is reshaping the way we think and interact with one another in ways never experienced in human history. Dissemination of misinformation came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and has continued unabated. Other hot topics that have attracted a lot of attention on social media are climate change and who won the 2020 US election. Extremists, advertisers and influencers masterfully publicize on social media to sew doubt into people’s minds through fear, manipulation, entrapment and spreading falsehoods. Repetition has become the new norm for truth. How do we prevent this constant stream of falsehoods from entering our personal space? We argue it is time to return to grass roots to better understand fact versus opinion, truth and falsehood, the power of provisional knowing, and how scientific consensus is reached. In the short-term, legislating social media platforms and improving public messaging may be part of the answer. However, a more effective approach is to create new educational programs, beginning at primary school and upskilling teachers how to debunk falsehoods and conspiracies. If we continue to travel down the road of complacency, historians 100 years from now may write: “the people of the early 21st century became so overwhelmed with digital information that they failed to develop the skills to sufficiently process it to the detriment of their health and society”.