By Sara Degli Esposti and Turkay Nefes, CSIC If you believe that powerful people intentionally produced the coronavirus epidemic[i] you are not alone: in fact some surveys suggest one in four people in the US think the same. Many Americans also agree with those who think 5G technology is responsible for the spreading of SARS-Cov-2, that Stella Immanuel, who said that hydroxychloroquine is the cure to Covid19, is more credible than Dr Anthony Fauci and the American Medical Association, and that the US government is partly run by non-human reptilians. After all, believing in that a bunch of powe ..read more

By Pamela Bartar and Gábor Szüdi, Zentrum für Soziale Innovation The sudden outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic – to give an example that affected all our lives – was a drastic reminder of the importance of science communication. Scientists and researchers, policymakers, journalists or media and citizens etc. can attest that measures to contain the spread of the virus will only be socially accepted if the communication between these stakeholders is effective. To increase the likelihood that quality scientific findings and advice are taken into consideration during the policy-making process, s ..read more

By Richard Hudson, Science|Business A survey by the TRESCA EU research project details how scientific disinformation and misinformation abounds. The group is working on tools to help manage this digital plague of our era. Here’s a quick test: Did man land on the moon in 1969? Or was it a TV studio hoax? Spoiler alert: Of course, the landing really happened. But don’t try telling that to the 25% of Europeans surveyed by the TRESCA EU research project on misinformation. When asked about the landing last year, a fourth of the 7,120 people surveyed in seven countries agreed with a statement that i ..read more

By Pamela Bartar and Gabor Szudi, ZSI The European Commission has called fighting misinformation and disinformation one of the grand challenges of the 21st century. This has become even more obvious since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic: a new wave of misinformation, fake news and hoaxes about the pandemic has generated a dangerous infodemic. But there are solutions available to us – and our research in the TRESCA project, discussed recently at the SCIENCE & YOU conference in Metz, France, underscores the importance of developing long-term strategies for handling the problem. Crises ..read more

By Elisabeth Steib and Marc Zwiechowski, KURZ Kurzgesagt is an animation studio and YouTube channel that specializes in explaining complex scientific topics in illustrated and animated videos. For the TRESCA project, we created a video about science communication and the challenges experts and science communicators face. Initially, we wanted to talk about a completely different topic. But after working with the TRESCA team, who did some experiments on one of our videos to analyze which aspects influence their trustworthy impression, we realized that the overall subject of the TRESCA project sh ..read more

Facebook testimony highlighted the mental health dangers, but research suggests it matters plenty how you present scientific data on a contentious issue like this. By Sara Degli Esposti, CSIC Are social media bad for your mental health? That’s a question that dominated news headlines this week following explosive Congressional testimony by a former Facebook manager that the world’s biggest social media company commissioned and covered up research showing its products are harmful – especially to impressionable teenagers. Facebook tried to discredit the testimony; but as a group studying online ..read more

By Adolfo Antón Bravo, David Arroyo and Sara Degli Esposti, CSIC The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the risks of online misinformation. Are the vaccines safe? Should we keep wearing masks? On such questions, social media has become a minefield of wrong, misleading or false information – with real-world consequences. Surely there’s a way that we, when online, can more easily check the trustworthiness of a post? That’s the aim of Ms.W, the Misinformation Widget being developed by the EU-funded TRESCA project. It is a bit of software, that can run as a phone app, to help judge whether what you ..read more

Evidence from the TRESCA Citizen Science Communication Workshops, an experiment on pre- and post-audio perception of video mediated scientific communication. By Chiara Lovati and Giuseppe Pellegrini, Observa Science in Society Citizens find it increasingly difficult to choose between the growing number of science communication sources and discern trustworthy and reliable information from fake news. But there are some elements that science communicators can pay attention to and ensure that their message gets across as effectively as possible.In a series of science communication workshops organi ..read more

By Asher van der Schelde, Marina Tulin, and Jay Lee, Erasmus University Rotterdam How do you stay informed about what is happening in the world? Chances are social media play a crucial role. This is not entirely surprising as science communication increasingly occurs via platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. Nonetheless, we know little about how viewers perceive, trust, or judge, this type of science communication. In this study, we tried to bridge this knowledge gap by running a survey experiment using a science communication video by the popular animation studio Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell ..read more

By Giuseppe Pellegrini, Observa Science in Society Since the beginning and the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic across the world, it has been clear how a wave of misinformation has spread fake news and hoaxes proven difficult to fight. One of the numerous problems has regarded media and newspapers in particular, unable to communicate in the most comprehensible and concise way fundamental contents to readers. The kind of content that could have led people through fear and uncertainty of the present: uncountable photos, video and articles reported on the media without a proper fact checking have ..read more