Can we inoculate against fake science?

Scroll through your Facebook newsfeed and you will encounter many clickbait headlines, inevitably some of which are completely untrue. Fake news has been credited to play a role in influencing how people vote in referendums and presidential elections. The pandemic of fake news has long been in ‘scientific news’, with misleading reports such as ‘‘vaccines linked to autism”. More recently a nonsense physics paper written by IOS autocomplete was accepted for a conference. It is so easy for false information to be absorbed as truth, leading scientists to ask the question- how can we decipher fact from fiction?

Understanding the process of vaccination and applying it to fake news could offer insight. The MMR vaccine, although not responsible for autism, is effective in protecting us from measles, mumps and rubella through a process called immunisation. Immmunisation works by exposing the body to a weakened version of the disease (a vaccine), allowing the immune system to build up antibodies against it. If you then come into contact with the disease later in life, the immune system will immediately produce the antibodies needed to fight the disease and this prevents you from becoming ill. A group of researchers at Cambridge University have exploited the process of vaccination to determine whether we can inoculate against false facts on climate change.

In a recent study, researchers compared reactions to the accurate statement "97% of scientists agree on man-made climate change” to the false statement that there is no general consensus. Participants were asked to guess the percentage of consensus between scientists on the issue. In a group that was presented with the false statement after the accurate statement, there was no shift in participants initial opinions about the consensus- suggesting the lie cancelled out the truth. When participants were warned with a specific or general ‘inoculation’ against fake facts, the misinformation presented had less influence on the participants’ estimation of a consensus. By providing a warning against misinformation the researchers effectively protected against fake facts. Maybe we should take note of this warning to avoid falling susceptible to fake facts, and be wary of believing every ‘fact’ we read.