Since news broke that half of new parents are shown anti-vaccine misinformation on social media, Facebook has announced an intention to reduce the visibility of anti-vaccine advertising, groups, and pages. YouTube has similarly vowed to demonetize videos that contain anti-vaccination content. Since it seems that social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube actually have played a role in the newly found prominence and zealotry of the anti-vaccine movement, it stands to reason that limiting their scope on the platforms could be a helpful short-term solution.
But it is not what we need if we want this problem solved for good.
Using censorship as a strategy assumes that the underlying cause of the anti-vaccine and related movements is misinformation. And misinformation certainly is a problem. But misinformation wouldn’t be able to have such a potent effect if people weren’t so primed to distrust science in the first place.
For many decades science was the institution that Americans trusted the most when it came to looking out for the public interest. Though now eclipsed by the military, trust in science is still quite high. But it is waning, and this is cause for significant concern. According to a Pew survey conducted in 2014, during the previous five years (from 2009), the percentage of US adults saying that the effect of scientific work conducted in the fields of health care, food, and the environment is mostly negative rose by eight, ten, and twelve points respectively.
There has been a significant amount of debate as to why the public so much now distrusts science, and, of course, the best answer is that it’s complicated. There is another answer however that runs beneath and undergirds all of the complexity, which is that it is simply easy to do it. It is easy to distrust science. Actually it is easy to distrust pretty much everything these days.
Distrust comes naturally to modern Westerners today because in the twentieth century we learned that humanity is basically untrustworthy. Before genocide, Great Wars, and arms races rocked the West’s supposedly imperturbable march to progress, most people believed that everything would just continue getting better. Technology would improve; governance would improve; quality of life would improve. But during the mid-twentieth century, the West was rudely awakened to the possibility that humanity might not actually be on an inevitable climb to utopia.
It was also during the mid-twentieth century that media began to boom—specifically television—and we began to learn how widespread self-interest, greed, and corruption actually are. Americans watched with horror as their President betrayed them (a shock back in those days). Academics such as Michel Foucault began to take a good hard look at the idea of power. They realized that even institutions we had once thought of as immune to the vagaries of human foible—including science—are corruptible. Flaw, bias, and corruptibility in fact became major themes in the study of science from that point onward, and endures to this day.
The kindling, then, is set for distrust, and social media has helped set the fires raging. But this is precisely why censorship is not an adequate response; the fuel supply may become more limited, but the kindling is still abundant. If we want a permanent solution to distrust in science, we need to radically re-think how we present and define science. Science education can help us get there, but it isn’t enough. We need to present science in a whole new light.
The conventional way science is presented as a method. How many of us remember learning about the scientific method in primary school? First hypothesize, then experiment? This is simply what science is to us. The Wikipedia page on science says that science “is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.” Science = empirical inquiry.
The problem with this understanding is that it misses what makes this empirical inquiry all hang together in the first place: its values. Sure, science usually entails the methodological elements with which we are already familiar: the crafting of hypotheses, meticulous execution of experimentation, and attempts to corroborate results with others. But what’s at the heart of science? What’s the reason people do it? What’s the core commitment that drives all of the rest of its commitments?
It is the search for empirical truth.
Science may entail a methodology, but laced throughout the methodology and keeping people loyal to it is the value of truth. This is a component of science is that has been radically underestimated since the turn to distrust and skepticism in the sixties. Of course, scholars were right to point out the flawed aspects of science. But it’s important to refrain from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially because the bathwater is what makes science distinct from other institutions in the first place.
Many people in all walks of life seek and yearn for the truth. But science is set apart from the others because theories and hypotheses cease to be legitimate if they fail to accord with empirical observation of reality. That is—scientists don’t just value truth, but are held accountable by the practical examination of it. Empirical truth is a hard mistress. If your “science” doesn’t cohere with what others can see and test, it will be rejected and you will fall into disrepute. You must be loyal to the empirical truth, or else you will fail. Of course, some people prioritize their own self-interest over the truth. But that is a short-term problem, and frauds are usually caught and excommunicated or ignored.
Sociologist of science Harry Collins argues that the scientific attachment to empirical truth gives rise to fifteen other values that the community of science aspires to uphold. Included in this list are honesty and integrity, the sublimation of one’s personal interest to the truth, universal access to and practice of science, the sharing of scientific knowledge among the community, clear communication, respect for expertise, loyalty to observation and evidence, the importance of community dialogue, the ability for an individual to speak out against the majority, and an open-ended respect for the fact that science is never definitive and never ends.
These values are useful for helping scientists be as efficient and effective as possible. This means that they, together with truth generally, have the ability to stick around even when the going gets tough. Why has science historically been the most trusted institution throughout history? It’s not because of good PR. It’s because even living in a society in which trust is in such short supply, and in which we really do get a clear and terrifying view of the corruptibility of our world, science maintains some degree of commitment to prosocial values that support the empirical search for truth. It has to, otherwise the science simply won’t survive the test of others’ opinions, technology, or consumer experience.
We would do well to remember and to remind people what it is that makes science distinct. Science entails unique methodologies, but is driven and made accountable by unique values. Science should not be lumped in our malaise of distrust; it’s uniquely honourable among the politicians, corporations, influencers, and media pundits that profit off our deception. Of course, science can get ugly, too; but its ugliness is held check in a way institutions untethered from hard empirical reality are not.
Taking immediate measures to cut off the potency of misinformation is an important step in stopping the wildfires of dangerous ideas. But if we want to keep society in accord with empirical facts such as that vaccines are safe and important in the long-term (and to be clear, we absolutely do), we had best rebuild the trust we once had in science. This is an effort best started by remembering what makes science distinct, keeping science distinct by calling out the ugliness when we see it, and educating the public about science’s open-ended and honest loyalty to empirical observation.
