Science Editorial: The current form of social media is not conducive to the dissemination of facts and rational discussion

A special set of editorials published Thursday in the journal Science said that the current form of social media has fundamentally disrupted the dissemination and presentation of facts. The researchers point out that social media is being dominated by.

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Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele from the University of Wisconsin-Madison write in this short and concise article:

The rules of scientific discourse, and its systematic, objective, and transparent assessment of evidence, run counter to the status quo of debate in most online spaces.

Social media platforms that try to trade anger and disagreement among netizens for traffic are not an effective way to discuss scientific topics like climate change and vaccines with skeptics.

Obviously, in the eyes of researchers who uphold scientific methodology, this matter is quite debatable. Among the many factors that negatively impact scientific discussions on social media, ranking and recommendation engines are the first.

This has resulted in the so-called “homogenous self-categorization” pointed out by Brossard and Schefele, which means that the platform will focus on the user’s preferences to recommend relevant content, and the effect of clustering will become more and more obvious.

The same profit-driven algorithmic tools can be seen on Twitter and YouTube channels. Embarrassingly, social media businesses have little incentive to help scientists build bridges with audiences who most desperately need it.

The reason for this is a structural shift in the balance of power in the scientific information ecosystem. Social media platforms and their underlying algorithms are only concerned with attracting traffic and promoting the rapid growth of platform scale.

To this end, companies will allow the screening and exploitation of users’ emotional and cognitive weaknesses. So we are not at all surprised that this happened. H. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science series of journals, pointed it out succinctly—after all, it’s an excellent way to make a lot of money for companies like Facebook.

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