On Tuesday, May 12, NASW members participated in a #SciWriCoffee Zoom session to share tips and resources for addressing misinformation surrounding COVID19 and other science issues. The group shared their favorite online resources below. Many thanks to the participants for their generosity and time. We have added additional resources as they become available. Last updated August 3, 2020.
COVID19-specific resources
- First Draft’s Coronavirus: Resources for reporters
- A thoughtful LifeHacker piece from Beth Skwarecki on the assumptions that underlie the appeal of misinformation
- A piece in The Atlantic on how to talk about the coronavirus by Liz Neeley
- What to say to conspiracy theorists, a piece on pushing back from The Atlantic
- An investigative reporter with ProPublica offers tips on questions to ask
- Meteorologist Marshall Shepherd, writing for Forbes, on why people believe conspiracy theories
- Also in Forbes, a piece on why it’s important to recognize propaganda and how to push back by Tara Haelle
- An exploration of how misinformation gets to Fox News and onward to the White House in a piece by Scott Pelley for CBS
- Video of a Duke University panel on Science Communication in the Time of Coronavirus, with Maryn McKenna and others
- A video on healthy digital practices from the Center for an Informed Public
- Washington Post story about how watching “corrections” happen live on Twitter makes people better able to parse credibility
- A view from the frontlines of the disinformation crisis via NBC News
- Follow hashtag #infodemic for more.
General Misinformation Resources
- First Draft: A London-based nonprofit focused on helping journalists navigate the misinformation age including the Field Guide to Fake News project, Claire Wardle’s scheme for classifying the many varieties of misinformation: Fake news. It's complicated, and Essential Guides to reporting in the age of information disorder.
- A write-up of an international workshop on what researchers know about misinformation. ICWSM 2017 Workshop Report
- A 2017 PNAS News Feature: The genuine problem of fake news on efforts to combat misinformation by Mitch Waldrop
- A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial. A deep resource developed by researcher, and ScienceWriters2019 speaker, John Cook
- Filippo Menczer at Indiana University has done work mapping the spread of memes and misinformation on social media. His group offers open-source datasets and an Observatory on Social Media with online mapping tools. Here is one of his talks from 2019 on YouTube: 5 Reasons Why Social Networks Make Us Vulnerable to Misinformation
- MIT’s Media Cloud platform for studying media ecosystems.
- The Misinformation project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center
- A discussion of fact-checking on social media platforms from FiveThirtyEight: Fact-Checking Misinformation Can Work. But It Might Not Be Enough.
- The Pew Research Center’s publications related to Trust, Facts and Democracy, including the 2017 Pew report: The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online
- A 2020 PNAS feature on Finding a vaccine for misinformation and "cognitive inoculations."
- Who to follow? On Twitter, try Kate Starbird, Dietram Scheufele, John Cook, and Dominique Brossard, all scholars of how people misinterpret risk and published researchers on misinformation
