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Scientific communication in a post-truth society
Edited by Dietram A. Scheufele, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, and accepted by Editorial Board Member May R. Berenbaum October 4, 2018 (received for review April 27, 2018)

Abstract
Within the scientific community, much attention has focused on improving communications between scientists, policy makers, and the public. To date, efforts have centered on improving the content, accessibility, and delivery of scientific communications. Here we argue that in the current political and media environment faulty communication is no longer the core of the problem. Distrust in the scientific enterprise and misperceptions of scientific knowledge increasingly stem less from problems of communication and more from the widespread dissemination of misleading and biased information. We describe the profound structural shifts in the media environment that have occurred in recent decades and their connection to public policy decisions and technological changes. We explain how these shifts have enabled unscrupulous actors with ulterior motives increasingly to circulate fake news, misinformation, and disinformation with the help of trolls, bots, and respondent-driven algorithms. We document the high degree of partisan animosity, implicit ideological bias, political polarization, and politically motivated reasoning that now prevail in the public sphere and offer an actual example of how clearly stated scientific conclusions can be systematically perverted in the media through an internet-based campaign of disinformation and misinformation. We suggest that, in addition to attending to the clarity of their communications, scientists must also develop online strategies to counteract campaigns of misinformation and disinformation that will inevitably follow the release of findings threatening to partisans on either end of the political spectrum.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: dmassey{at}princeton.edu.
Author contributions: S.I. and D.S.M. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “The Science of Science Communication III,” held November 16–17, 2017, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The complete program and audio files of most presentations are available on the NAS website at www.nasonline.org/Science_Communication_III.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. D.A.S. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
Published under the PNAS license.
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