Hype detector

There's a problem with online science directed at laypeople.

I was discussing this with a friend yesterday.  Although he and I both have a decent science background, we're both very much generalists by nature.  We're interested in many different topics, we're each kinda sorta vaguely good at maybe a dozen of them, but we're actual experts in none.  It's not that I think this is an inherently bad thing; having a broad knowledge base is part of why I was a good high school teacher.  I did a decent job teaching biology, but could still field the occasional pop fly into deep right about, say, the ancient history of Norway.

The issue centers around the fact that curious people like myself are attracted to what we don't know, so when we see something unusual and attention-grabbing, we want to click on it.  Couple this tendency with a second issue -- that when sites like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are monetized, it's based on the number of clicks (or the minutes watched) -- and you have what amounts to an attractive nuisance.

There are some sites that do their level best to present science as accurately and fairly as possible; two excellent examples are Neil deGrasse Tyson's YouTube channel StarTalk and astrophysicist Becky Smethurst's outstanding channel Dr. Becky.  (If you're interested in astronomy, you should subscribe to both of these immediately.)  But intermingled with those are hundreds of others that mix a smidgen of science with a heaping handful of sensationalized hype, designed to get you to say "WTF?" and click the link -- because that's how they get revenue.

I'm not going to give you any links -- they don't deserve it -- but a quick perusal of my "Recommended For You" YouTube videos this morning included the following:

• One claiming that Betelgeuse is ABOUT TO GO SUPERNOVA (capitalization theirs), with a caption of "Life on Earth Will Be Wiped Out?" and a photo of physicist Michio Kaku looking worried.
• "If You See the Sky Turn This Color, Run!" -- turns out it's the "green sky = tornado" thing, and when you strip away all the excess verbiage it boils down to the rather well-known fact that tornadoes are scary and you should avoid being in the middle of one.
• "99% of Humans Die -- Could It Happen Again?"  This one is about the Toba Eruption, the effects of which are far from settled in scientific circles, and the answer to the question is "I guess so, but it's not likely any time soon."
• "Why an Impossible Paradox Inside Black Holes Appears to Break Physics!"  This is about the "information paradox," which is certainly curious, but it (1) obviously isn't impossible because it exists, (2) isn't about the inside of black holes because by definition we don't know what happens in there, and (3) hasn't "broken physics" (although it did demonstrate that our knowledge of black holes is incomplete, which is hardly surprising).
• "Yellowstone Volcano Simulation!" -- heavy on the catastrophizing and AI-generated footage of people being vaporized, light on the science.  As I've pointed out here at Skeptophilia, there is no sign that the Yellowstone Supervolcano is anywhere near an eruption.

And so on and so forth.

The trouble is, science videos and webpages exist on a spectrum, with wonderful sites like Veritasium on one end and outright lunacy like the subject of yesterday's post (about people who have allegedly jumped through time and space and ended up back in the Carboniferous Period) on the other.  It's usually pretty obvious when you find one that's straight-up science; the total wackos are also generally easy to spot.

It's the ones in the middle that are troublesome.  They mix in just enough science to give them the façade of reliability, but stir it into a ton of flashy, sensationalized speculation.  Since minutes watched = dollars earned, these videos generally draw out the message; they're often way longer than the topic warrants, and are characterized by endless repetition.  (I watched one twenty-minute video on Cretaceous dinosaurs that must have said eight times, "a fearsome predator unlike anything we currently have on Earth"!)

It's hard to know what to do about this.  Even people who are intellectually curious and want to learn actual science like to be entertained; and there's nothing wrong with framing scientific content in a way that's engaging to the audience, something that the three outstanding sites I mentioned certainly do.  But the monetized social media model feeds into the practice of using science as clickbait, and therefore encourages content creators to exaggerate (or outright fabricate) the story to make it seem more exciting or edgy or dangerous than it actually is, with the result that people come away less well-informed than they went in.

Which is frustrating, but isn't going to change any time soon.  And I guess this sort of sensationalized garbage is nothing new; all that's changed is the delivery mode.  Growing up, every time I went through a grocery store checkout line I was assaulted by The Weekly World News, which featured headlines about BatBoy and the Lost Continent of Atlantis and Elvis Is Still Alive And Was Spotted In Tokyo, and I came away mostly unscathed.

So the important thing is teaching people how to tease apart the good science from the hype.  But honestly, it always has been.

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