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How thinking about information as a garden can aid us cope with disinformation
Jul
Now that you have 61 per cent of Canadians have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccineWe are on the path to herd immunity. Unfortunately, this trend may be threatened by vaccine disinformation, which has made some people hesitant to take the vaccine.
Read more: COVID-19 vaccine opponents apply the same arguments as 135 years ago
When people try to address vaccine disinformation, they often ignore the efforts. That’s because vaccine hesitancy, like all disinformation, is a complicated problem. To address it, we need to think about a wide range of different contributing factors that are systemic and interact with each other. We could say that this problem is ecological.
We live in an information environment that is increasingly complicated and subject to active, intersecting systems and processes. Gardening provides a helpful metaphor to aid us understand how disinformation can be seen as part of this information ecology.
Sowing the Seeds of Vaccine Science
To apply a gardening metaphor, the seed of knowledge is the science of vaccination. And that seed can be influenced by many different factors.
Individual beliefs and knowledge are the soil in the garden, which must be fertile for the seed to take root. In the ecology of information, how fertile the soil is for the development of ideas about vaccine safety and efficacy will depend on individual history and experiences, Education, values AND worldview.
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Communities and relationships are helpful or harmful visitors to the garden (e.g. pollinators or pests). They determine how much a plant can grow and develop. Influencers can be pollinators or pests that can help or hinder the spread of information about vaccines. As do community members, colleagues, and people we come into contact with through social media algorithms.
Read more: How Canadians can apply social media to aid debunk COVID-19 misinformation
Government regulations and policies are the gardeners who aid root out bad ideas before they take root. Policies that a guide on how social media platforms should respond to disinformationOr policies affecting media consolidationFor example, antitrust laws are essential in the context of eliminating disinformation from the information ecosystem.
Policies that strengthen or weaken public education also have a role to play. Citizens must have good scientific knowledge and access to media that can provide the best information related to vaccines.
Finally, culture is the sun and the rain: it surrounds us all and can aid information flourish or leave it withering and susceptible to the growth of misinformation. Cultural metaphors such as market of ideas — the assumption that information competition always leads to the flourishing of the best ideas — may unwittingly create fertile ground for disinformation to flourish.
Disinformation, in this metaphor, is an invasive species. It takes root when conditions are right, and once it has established itself, it can be very tough to get rid of.
Taking into account the entire information environment
Most interventions that focus on disinformation tend to be aimed primarily at individual news consumers or social media platforms. That is, they rely on people to debunk information when they see it, emphasize the individual’s information and digital skills, and focus on technical fixes that platforms can make to their algorithms to stop the spread of disinformation.
Read more: The first step to curbing COVID vaccine misinformation is to identify who is most susceptible. Our research sheds some lithe
These interventions are undoubtedly essential, but without government and cultural interventions, individual and platform solutions are less effective – we need all parts of the information ecology to come together. Returning to the garden as a metaphor, if we have good soil and helpful pollinators, but no gardener to pull the weeds, and no lithe or water, our seeds will not grow.
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Growing our seeds
What does this mean for those of us who study disinformation? It means that research and initiatives that address the psychology of individuals and the beliefs that drive information should continue, alongside approaches based on technology platforms and community initiatives – such as #LearnFirstan initiative aimed at encouraging scientists to engage in public communication about their work.
But in addition to these tactics, scientists and science communicators who want to address the problem of vaccine misinformation need to make sure they are also looking at policy and cultural interventions.
What might that look like? On the political side, sociologist Joan Donovan a society-wide approach shows how civil society organisations can combat disinformation by working with citizens, healthcare providers and technology platforms.
Likewise, it’s time for researchers to do more work to understand the connections between, for example, public school funding and large-scale disinformation, or media deregulation and disinformation. While journalists tell us they see a connection, finding ways to investigate these issues is critical.
On the cultural side, we need to think about how we approach cultural frameworks like the marketplace of ideas. Scholars need to shed lithe on the role they play in providing protection against malicious disinformation. Policymakers and journalists need to discuss free speech in a way that also allows us to address the harms of speech, such as disinformation and harassment. This requires understanding and finding better ways to communicate the complicated ways in which ideas intersect with power and money—beyond the dichotomy of more good speech, less bad speech.
When we pay as much attention to the politics and culture of the disinformation ecosystem as we do to individual and platform elements, we will ensure that our science communication seeds receive the lithe, water, and nurture they need to flourish, and disinformation is stopped before it can take root.
