Confused? It’s not your fault.
A recent The Economist poll revealed that 20% of people in the US believe that Covid vaccines contain a microchip. Think about that. The survey also found that only 46% of Americans were willing to say that the microchip thing is definitely false. Even though there’s no plausible way it could be happening. According to a 2020 survey by the University of Oxford, at one point, more than a fifth of Brits believed that the pandemic was a hoax.
These stats are troubling. But given our frenetic information environment, they are also understandable. It is becoming harder and harder to tease out the real from the unreal. The sense from the nonsense. The magical thinking from the microchips.
Not long ago, I was shocked by a headline about ‘Covid parties’ – people allegedly gathering to intentionally infect themselves and others. Infuriated and without pausing to reflect (or factcheck), I immediately took to social media to rage about how irresponsible this was. Reality: Covid parties are mostly an urban legend. All I was doing was adding to the noise.
I study misinformation. This is my job at the University of Alberta, where I am a professor of law and public health and specialise in health policy and the public representations of science. I really should have known better. But the story played to my values, emotions and interests, as well as my professional passions. Cringe.
This is truly the golden era of misinformation. We are, as the World Health Organization declared in early 2020, in the middle of an ‘infodemic’
– a time when harmful misinformation is spreading like an infectious disease. Part of the problem is that we have normalised nonsense in some very subtle and some very obvious ways. There are a host of successful wellness gurus who have embraced pseudoscience as a core brand strategy. And thanks to people like Andrew Wakefield – the disgraced former doctor who started the awful ‘vaccines cause autism’ fallacy in a paper published in and later retracted by the journal
The Lancet – misinformation about vaccine safety has continued to spread and find new audiences.
A sad truth: misinformation and men are an especially bad combo, and it’s hurting our health. Research from the University of Delaware tells us that men are more likely to believe Covid conspiracy theories and may be less concerned about the harmful effects of misinformation.
Men are also less likely to get the Covid vaccine. While there are myriad reasons for this hesitancy, the male inclination to accept and be influenced by Covid conspiracy theories is a key part of the story. It’s especially important right now for men to use the strategies here to ingest a healthy diet of information and wash it down with a dose of scepticism.
Our information environment has become a chaotic, confusing, exploitative shitstorm that is destroying our health. There are a variety of forces making it increasingly
Men are more likely to believe Covid conspiracies
difficult for us to avoid the harmful hogwash and polarising pandering. And all this is happening at the exact moment in history when we crave and so desperately need facts and clarity.
The infodemic has helped foster an erosion of confidence in scientific institutions, as those who spread misinformation frequently seek to promote doubt and distrust. The scientific community deserves some blame, too, with occasional bad research and poorly communicated results creating confusion. (Masks don’t work. Oh, actually, they do.)
But that’s how science works; evidence evolves and recommendations change, and being transparent about those changes is essential. Just be aware that alternative and often science-free voices will try to be definitive when actual scientists don’t have the data or facts to get there quite yet. You’re better off waiting until they do.
But there is a way forward. By using a few critical-thinking tools and being aware of the tactics used to push misinformation, we can begin to cut through the noise.