An Xiao Mina is co-founder of the Credibility Coalition and co-chair of the W3C Credible Web Community Group, where they are building web-wide standards for content credibility through rigorous research.
The goal of this workshop is to address the difficulties faced by media producers and journalists trying to communicate findings from new health research, and to highlight the ease through which health misinformation can spread from scientific articles through various forms of media.
We’ll first look at the journal abstracts of 5 new health research articles, and, in teams, create extreme misinformation and disinformation campaigns around those findings that might exist in a variety of media forms: on Instagram, through Whatsapp, in news media or on Pinterest. We’ll review the misinformation campaigns created and try to understand why current formats of scientific abstracts lend themselves to research claims that can be misinterpreted or misrepresented in media, and the ways we might try to address them. Finally, we will create new templates for health research study abstracts that may accommodate for these “translation” issues through exploring questions such as: what are common terms used in abstracts that may not be familiar to journalists or broader publics? What would make understanding the applicability of new scientific research easier? Do we need a rat emoji front and center to highlight interventions that have only been researched with animal subjects?
These new abstract drafts will be summarized in a blog post, with the ambitious goal of sharing findings with academic journals (like the Journal for Obstetrics and Gynecology, who already asks authors to provide a tweet-length summary) to highlight the need for a new abstract format better suited for online public consumption.
We will try to get public health researcher Nat Gyenes involved. Nat and An wrote a recent piece in The Atlantic about the challenges of misinfodemics.