Try not to spread the misinformation

It is not just COVID-19 and a damaged economy with a lot of people unemployed and bills to pay that are messing up our lives. We have - as we have always had - a mixed message political system that presents to us two opposite approaches to most problems. But along with two political “belief systems” in the USA, we also have a “scientific fact system,” and a lot of people are confusing the two.

It is one thing to have a “preference” for left, right, or middle politics, but it is another thing to understand scientific evidence that the COVID-19 virus is real compared to claiming out of thin air that it is a hoax. Politicians and corporations did not discover viruses and other diseases. It took test tubes, microscopes, clever experiments, and correct deductions by scientists at universities and institutes, and sometimes dedicated people with specialized knowledge.  Electron microscopes can see viruses, and special experiments can see molecules and atoms. History books are full of these stories and science books will tell you how science works. Go there or Wikipedia instead of Twitter, conspiracy generators, or other non-expert sources, for your information.

Unfortunately, against solid facts there is a lot of misinformation - from mistakes, omissions, ignorance, etc. - being spread around, too. We also have disinformation - from lies to get political benefit, criminal benefit by fraud, conspiracy theories, misrepresentations, and plain old destructive mischief - being injected into our social networks and other media. And we have politicians trying to sell stories too often for the benefit of one person or one party, but often not enough or not at all for real benefit to the people in general. Thus, quite a lot of bad information is being spread around by non-experts. On top of all that, the major internet social networks are doing a poor job of controlling this bad or incorrect information. Then we have people who pass on bad information because they like it, not because it is the truth. 

To counter the misinfo and disinfo, a whole range of fact-checkers have recently appeared. They usually dissect, analyze, explain, and find references and sources. They spend days chasing down almost everything, show what they found and how they found it, and you can read it and decide if you want to become enlightened. 

While some print media carry fact-checker columns, or carry a fact-checker article, some factcheckers are on the internet with websites and some have newsletters. Here are a few that I follow: Snopes, Factchecker.org, Politifact.org,  Stanford Internet Observatory, Factually (a newsletter from www.Poynter.org), First Draft (from London), Coda (from Czech Republic), HKS Misinformation Review (from Harvard), www.Factcheckingday.com (www.Poynter.org), and www.Fullfact.org (medical issues, from the UK).

Instead of listening to a president who wants us to - for example - inject bleach into ourselves to protect us from the virus and has no training in science or medicine, it seems to me like a no-brainer that it would be better to listen to NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose training and decades of experience in a full-time relevant job would be more helpful. And to the people who call the virus a hoax, you need to understand how microscopes, telescopes, instruments, and experiments allow us to obtain an objective understanding of natural things that are beyond our limited senses. 

Arthur E. Sowers
Harbeson