I’ve reported on infectious diseases for 15 years, but during the covid-19 pandemic and even more during the global outbreak of mpox clade IIb, I was shocked by the amount of misinformation I was seeing. Misinfo had always been part of any outbreak, but this felt different.
I ended up spending almost a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow to try and understand misinformation/disinformation better, to - I hope - be a better infectious disease journalist.
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It’s been an interesting experience in turns fascinating and frustrating and when I went back to full-time science writing earlier this year I decided to try and put at least some of what I’ve learnt into words.
Those stories are coming out this week in
Science Magazine and I will try and do something I haven’t done in a while and delve deeper in a few threads.
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The first story is up now: It’s a look at the work of Kate Starbird and her team, who study rumors at the University of Washington, specifically rumors around the US elections.
https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-election-looms-rumor-researcher-tracks-falsehoods-and-counters-them-real-time
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Second story from my trio on misinformation research covers what I see as the 5 biggest challenges facing the field. It is up here now:
https://www.science.org/content/article/five-biggest-challenges-facing-misinformation-researchers
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Final story is up now too. It’s about inoculation, its roots in Cold War psychology research and what if anything we can expect from this and other psychological interventions…
https://www.science.org/content/article/can-people-be-inoculated-against-misinformation
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@kakape I look forward to reading this. Kate Starbird is a rock star. And thank you for your reporting, always.
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@kakape Very interesting work! Thanks for sharing.
Editorial: The paragraph that starts "But another rumor was already starting..." is a duplicate of the next paragraph.
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@mjausson Thanks! Fixing that now! 🙏
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