Establishing a taxonomy of potential hazards associated with communicating medical science in the age of disinformation

Fourteen quick tips for crowdsourcing geographically linked data for public health advocacy

This article presents 14 quick tips to build a team to crowdsource data for public health advocacy. It includes tips around team building and logistics, infrastructure setup, media and industry outreach, and project wrap-up and archival for posterity.

Constructive and obsessive criticism in science

Social media and new tools for engagement offer democratic platforms for enhancing constructive scientific criticism which had previously been limited. Constructive criticism can now be massive, timely and open. However, new options have also enhanced obsessive criticism. Obsessive criticism tends to focus on one or a handful of individuals and their work, often includes ad hominem aspects, and the critics often lack field-specific skills and technical expertise. Typical behaviours include: repetitive and persistent comments (including sealioning), lengthy commentaries/tweetorials/responses often longer than the original work, strong degree of moralizing, distortion of the underlying work, argumentum ad populum, calls to suspend/censor/retract the work or the author, guilt-by-association, reputational tarnishing, large gains in followers specifically through attacks, finding and positing sensitive personal information, anonymity or pseudonymity, social media campaigning, and unusual ratio of criticism to pursuit of one's research agenda. These behaviours may last months or years. Prevention and treatment options may include awareness, identifying and working around aggravating factors, placing limits on the volume by editors, constructive pairing of commissioned editorials, incorporation of some hot debates from unregulated locations such as social media or PubPeer to the pages of scientific journals, preserving decency and focusing on evidence and arguments and avoiding personal statements, or (in some cases) ignoring. We need more research on the role of social media and obsessive criticism on an evolving cancel culture, the social media credibility, the use/misuse of anonymity and pseudonymity, and whether potential interventions from universities may improve or further weaponize scientific criticism.

Protecting expert advice for the public: promoting safety and improved communications

The drivers of the harassment and intimidation of researchers are complex, widespread, and global in their reach and were being studied across many disciplines even before COVID-19. This policy briefing reviews some of the scholarship on this wide-ranging problem but focuses on what can be done to help ensure that Canadians fully benefit from the work of Canada’s researchers while also preserving the security and safety of those researchers. It identifies policies and actions that can be implemented in the near term to gather information on the problem, better frame public research communications, and ensure that mechanisms are readily available to support researchers who are threatened. The policy briefing is concerned with researchers, but these behaviours are also harming journalists, politicians, public health communicators, and many others more fully in the public eye than researchers. Some recommendations here may help to address this wider problem.

The Struggle against Cancer Misinformation

Cancer misinformation has become an increasingly prevalent problem, imperiling public health and understanding. Cancer researchers and clinicians must play a significant role in combating its detrimental consequences.

Effect of Internet use for searching information on vaccination on the uptake of human papillomavirus vaccine in France: A path-analysis approach

Internet is a popular source of information regarding vaccination. This study aimed to determine whether there is a negative association between Internet use among French vaccine-hesitant mothers and HPV vaccine uptake by their daughters, and to gain insight into the pathways that would link Internet use to the lack of HPV vaccine uptake. We conducted a pooled cross-sectional analysis across the 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 Vaccinoscopie® Survey. Multivariate logistic regression and path models were used in the analysis. The study sample included a total of 2038 respondent mothers. Of those, 89 (4.4%) declared having never been in the situation of searching for information regarding a vaccination they had hesitated about, leaving 1949 mothers for the present analysis. Approximately 24% (466/1949) of the mothers declared using the Internet as a source of vaccine information. In multivariate logistic regression adjusted for physician recommendation of HPV vaccination, attitudes towards vaccines in general, perception of HPV vaccine usefulness, maternal level of education, region of residence, and the survey year, the use of Internet by the mothers was significantly associated with a lower HPV vaccination among their daughters (adjusted odds ratio (aOR), 0.66; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.47-0.91). Path analysis further confirmed the negative effect of Internet use (β = -0.10, standard error (SE) = 0.02, P < 0.0001), highlighting how the Internet plays a detrimental role in HPV vaccine uptake through a lower perceived level of HPV vaccine usefulness, a lower perceived level of information on childhood vaccination, and unfavorable attitudes towards vaccination in general.

Medical disinformation and the unviable nature of COVID-19 conspiracy theories

The coronavirus pandemic has seen a marked rise in medical disinformation across social media. A variety of claims have garnered considerable traction, including the assertion that COVID is a hoax or deliberately manufactured, that 5G frequency radiation causes coronavirus, and that the pandemic is a ruse by big pharmaceutical companies to profiteer off a vaccine. An estimated 30% of some populations subscribe some form of COVID medico-scientific conspiracy narratives, with detrimental impacts for themselves and others. Consequently, exposing the lack of veracity of these claims is of considerable importance. Previous work has demonstrated that historical medical and scientific conspiracies are highly unlikely to be sustainable. In this article, an expanded model for a hypothetical en masse COVID conspiracy is derived. Analysis suggests that even under ideal circumstances for conspirators, commonly encountered conspiratorial claims are highly unlikely to endure, and would quickly be exposed. This work also explores the spectrum of medico-scientific acceptance, motivations behind propagation of falsehoods, and the urgent need for the medical and scientific community to anticipate and counter the emergence of falsehoods.