Arguing About Controversial Science in the News: Does Epistemic Uncertainty Contribute to Information Disorder?

Heng Zheng, Theodore Dreyfus Ledford, Jodi Schneider

Abstract: News informs the public, especially in crisis situations. The news significantly impacted the public’s beliefs about COVID-19. Handling uncertainty in scientific evidence production is a particular challenge. The public controversy in the United States over mask mandates and the effectiveness of masks to prevent COVID-19 was reignited by a controversial scientific review article that Cochrane published in early 2023, which concluded “There is uncertainty about the effects of masks.” The current paper presents a case study of 58 news articles that linked to the review article according to Altmetric.com; news articles were published from February 1, 2023 to March 9, 2023 (inclusive). We use an argument mapping approach called polylogue analysis to diagram the players and positions covered in the news. We find that news articles citing the Cochrane Review took contradictory positions such as “masks work” and “masks don’t work,” neither of which was falsified by the conclusions of the review article. However, these positions require further contextualization. We argue that current definitions of information disorder, which focus on misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, cannot adequately account for the challenges associated with conveying scientific information. In particular, due to epistemic uncertainty, multiple contradictory positions can coexist as credible. Future work on information disorder in science needs to consider not only the intention to harm but also the risks associated with oversimplification or decontextualization of current scientific evidence.

External IDs:dblp:conf/iconference/ZhengLS24