Scientific research and media - fake news, errors, mistranslations, and opportunities

What is it about?

While researchers spend several months executing complex scientific processes, they create text, analyses, images, or graphs that are usually not comprehensible to the lay reader. While journalists undergo extensive training in crafting effective narratives, they usually only have a few hours to understand a complex concept and turn it into a compelling story. Due to the gap between the two, often, errors and mistranslations creep in resulting in fake news and misinformation. In this paper, we systematically uncover the challenges in media translation of scientific works for the general public and talk about HCI design opportunities.

Featured Image

Photo by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash

Photo by Kayla Velasquez on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Irrespective of the source and legitimacy, today's web technologies (blogs or tweets, YouTube videos, or Facebook posts) allow non-experts to make the stories go viral in the blink of an eye. Most consumers may not be able to differentiate factual news stories from fake ones. Sometimes, fake news and mistranslations can be deemed more credible and attract more discussion than the original work. The inability of the public to process and detect errors in scientific information leads to a disconnect between the scientific consensus on topics such as vaccine safety or climate change, and their opinion among the public. Misinformed citizens can confidently voice their beliefs and opinions and affect such things as elections and policies. In the medical field, misinformation can endanger life as seen in the case of the public’s negative perception toward vaccines. More importantly, erroneous scientific information can have serious consequences on our behavior, individually and as a society. Therefore, this work is important.

Perspectives