By Liam Mannix
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In early 2020, a rumour swept through the Middle East.
As the novel coronavirus spread through the region, health authorities urged people to use alcohol-based hand sanitisers to kill it. But among a desperate people, faced with a rising death toll and no effective treatments, information soon became misinformation: alcohol kills the virus.
Professor Brett Sutton on Tuesday.Credit: Wayne Taylor
In Iran, a dry country, people turned to drinking poisonous black-market alcohol. More than 700 people died from methanol poisoning during March and April.
Alcohol. Internal bleach and UV light. Horse de-wormer. The pandemic ushered in a new age of overwhelming misinformation and disinformation researchers now term an “infodemic”.
For years, Brett Sutton lived on the frontlines. Victoria’s former chief health officer has the scars and death threats to prove it.
And now, he’s trying to do something about it, by attempting to launch what he hopes will be a big new player in Australia’s science sector: a Coalition for Trust in Science.
“People want to know what is real and what is not real,” said Sutton, who is now director of the CSIRO’s health and biosecurity research unit. “I think we’re all stronger by working together.
“One of my great reflections is it can be a pretty lonely and pretty brutal space between hate mail, vitriol, death threats, that makes scientists withdraw from that space at a time when we probably need it more than ever.”
Sutton has been quietly doing the groundwork for nearly a year now; the CSIRO held a design workshop in May. The design is not yet set, or the name, but Sutton wants a “paddock to plate” approach: ensuring the science itself is robust, the way universities promote studies is accurate, and that scientists are resourced to fight for the truth on social media.
This week, his idea won in-principle support from the Australian Academy of Science and the Academy of Health and Medical Science, as well as from the Australian Science Media Centre (Nine, owner of this masthead, is a paying member of the centre). Professor Margie Danchin, head of the Vaccine Uptake Group at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, is also working to develop the coalition.
“In an increasingly fragmented information environment, bringing the right voices together in a co-ordinated way has never been more important,” said Professor Louise Baur, president of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.
Australian Academy of Science president Professor Chennupati Jagadish said he was concerned evidence-based information was being “drowned out by disinformation, and reliable and independent sources of knowledge are increasingly rare”.
Globally, Australians retain an extremely high trust in scientists – ranked fifth in a survey of 68 countries published in Nature Human Behaviour earlier this year. And misinformation has always been a part of society; much of it, like astrology, is tolerated as harmless.
The problem we now face seems instead to be driven by a global collapse in trust in institutions, combined with a media and social media environment that empowers people to choose the version of the truth they want to watch, said Associate Professor Will Grant from the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.
“It’s a pull away from competing over what is true to instead saying we can have our own truths, our own world,” he said.
Some 61 per cent of Australians worry about political meddling in science, per Edelman research released this year. Nearly half of people globally distrust government to care for their health.
Trust in media to accurately report health information fell by 16 per cent in Australia since 2019; 35 per cent of people now say they can be as knowledgeable as a doctor if they have done their own research.
In 2019, Australians’ trust in government fell to its lowest level since 1969, according to a tracking survey run by the Australian National University.
Society has three institutions for finding out the truth: science, journalism and the courts, said Grant. “All those are under attack.
“We are decaying our central institutions. We are losing our central social ability to adjudicate truth.”
Sutton’s coalition was welcome, said Dr Susannah Eliott, CEO of the Australian Science Media Centre, but faced a tricky task, as people might actually find a coalition of science institutions less trustworthy than individual scientists.
A similar effort in the US, the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science, floundered because it tried to simply compete directly with misinformation, rather than engaging people in genuine dialogue, said Tina Purnat, a misinformation researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“It can feel pretty paternalistic if you are on the receiving end,” she said. “I think the positioning of any coalitions as ‘defenders of science’ and using combative language can massively backfire in any effort to de-escalate polarised discussions.”
Sutton is not yet clear on what shape his coalition will take or how it will be funded, but he wants it to be separate from government. “Government can be the reason why people lack trust in where information comes from,” he said.
AI: a growing misinformation threat
Even as Sutton works to pull together his coalition, Australian researchers are tracking a new and growing misinformation threat: artificial intelligence-enabled bots.
Automated accounts have long plagued social media. But they have generally been fairly easy to spot. Not any more.
Bot developers have linked Twitter and Facebook accounts to AI models like ChatGPT, giving the bots the ability to post like humans – and even respond or retweet. “The bot is pretty much mimicking human behaviour,” said Dr Muhammad Javed.
His team at Melbourne’s Centre for Health Analytics has tracked these bots as they made a major impact on social media discussions of vaccination. In preliminary data presented to the Communicable Diseases & Immunisation Conference earlier this month, they found nearly a quarter of social media content around the new RSV vaccine was generated by bots – most of it around safety concerns.
Social media companies have made efforts to limit anti-vaccination content – but the bots were getting around this by behaving as though they were real humans posting adverse effects they had received from a jab, Javed said.
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Liam Mannix travelled to the Communicable Diseases & Immunisation Conference as a guest of the conference and an unpaid speaker.