Article from BBC
Understanding or misunderstanding scientific issues and making health decisions can have life or death consequences.
Unvaccinated people, as a result of reading misleading information online, have ended up in the hospital or even died.
And inaccurate or completely fabricated claims about 5G and the origins of Covid-19 have been linked to violence and vandalism.
But the complete removal of such information can seem very much like censorship, especially to scientists whose careers are based on the understanding that facts can and should be contested, and that evidence varies.
The Royal Society is the world's oldest continuously operating scientific institution and is struggling to meet the challenges posed by our newest ways of communicating information.
In a new report, the organization advises that social media companies should not remove content that is “legal but harmful.” Instead, the report’s authors believe, social media sites should adjust their algorithms to prevent it from going viral — and stop people from making money off of false claims.
But not everyone agrees with this view – especially researchers who are experts in tracking how misinformation spreads online and how it harms people.
The Center Against Digital Hate (CCDH) says that there are times when the best thing to do is to remove content that is considered highly harmful, clearly wrong, and widely disseminated.
Plandemic – a video that went viral early in the pandemic, made dangerous and false claims designed to scare people away from effective ways to reduce the harm from the virus, such as vaccines and masks. The video was later removed from the digital space.
“It’s a political question… what balance do we see between individual freedoms and some form of restrictions on what people can and cannot say,” says Prof Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Prof Nielsen acknowledges that, although it is a relatively small part of people's media diets, science misinformation can lead to disproportionate harm.
But, he adds, lack of trust in institutions is a major driver of disinformation: "I imagine there are enough citizens whose worst suspicions about how society works would be confirmed if the established institutions were given much more powers."
(Full article at BBC)