Science Disinformation in a Time of Pandemic

By drawing parallels to elections, climate change and the anti-vaccination movement, author Christopher Dornan illustrates how disinformation about COVID-19 can pose significant risks for public health, social cohesion and collective trust. Dornan identifies several useful recommendations for citizens, governments and social media platforms to consider to effectively combat disinformation and engage in evidence-based discussion about scientific findings.

Click Here to Watch the Webinar

Panel Discussion of the Science Disinformation in a Time of Pandemic Expert Roundtable

Featuring: Christopher Dornan, Dr. Samantha Hill, André Picard and Linda Solomon Wood

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On June 11^th 2020, The Public Policy Forum convened over 40 experts to discuss the report Science Disinformation in a Time of Pandemic. The event began with a panel discussion, which you can view as the webinar above. Expert participants were then broken into smaller groups to discuss both the report and science disinformation more generally. You can read the summary below.

Event Recap Expert Roundtable on Science Disinformation in a Time of Pandemic

Resume de l’evenment Table ronde d’experts sur la Désinformation en science dans le contexte de la COVID-19

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The advent of social media has conferred on the public a freedom of expression and virtual assembly that has transformed contemporary society. In doing so, the 21st century media environment has also given licence to information extremism and disinformation of all stripes, from the comical to the venomous. Here, Christopher Dornan examines a specific species of information disorder: content that adopts the mannerisms of science in order to advocate anti-science.

Science disinformation, he argues, is an especially worrying genre of falsity because it amounts to an attack on rationality, and therefore on the underpinnings of informed public policy and good governance. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a case study to examine specific instances of science disinformation, how these spread, and the dangers they pose to the public good.

The paper argues that science has long been poorly understood by the greater public, but while a fascination with pseudoscience predates the rise of social media, the algorithms of the new media environment reward ever more outrageous content.

The paper parses different types of COVID-19 disinformation with a view to the damage these can cause. It considers the responsibilities of the traditional news media and the social media platforms in a moment of crisis. When does publishing contrarian views move from helpful fair comment to public endangerment? Scepticism of science was already building before the pandemic, but recently appears to have taken on a political inflection. On climate change, vaccination and COVID-19, some on the right seem perfectly ready to dismiss the scientific consensus when it conflicts with their political values.

Addressing this, the paper concludes, will require: (1) redoubled engagement with the social media companies to press them on their public responsibilities; (2) greater understanding of why science scepticism seems to be aligning with the political right; (3) a more sophisticated understanding of how science disinformation uses social media channels to its advantage; and (4) commitment to a robust and permanent public education campaign so as to counter the social harms of science disinformation.

Read the full report

About the Author

Christopher Dornan

Christopher Dornan teaches at Carleton University where he served for nine years as director of the School of Journalism and Communication and six years as director of the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs.

He holds an M.A. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in science communication from McGill University. He taught for two years at Cornell University before joining the faculty at Carleton in 1987.

He has worked as a reporter for the Edmonton Journal, an editor and editorial writer for the Ottawa Citizen, and a columnist for The Globe and Mail and CBC National Radio. In 2006 he was Erasmus Mundus visiting scholar at the Danish School of Journalism and the University of Århus.

Among other venues, his academic work has appeared in Critical Studies in Communication, the Media Studies Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Topia, Journalism Studies, and the research reports of The Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing. He is the co-editor (with Jon Pammett) of The Canadian Federal Election of 2019 (forthcoming, McGill-Queen’s Press), along with six previous volumes in this series. He was a principal writer and editor for both volumes of the 2012 government-mandated Aerospace Review (the Emerson Report), the Canadian Space Agency’s 2014 Space Policy Framework, and the Public Policy Forum’s 2016 report on the state of the Canadian news media, Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age.

He is chair of the board of Reader’s Digest Magazines (Canada).