Recently, during a negotiation with my 10 -year -old child on the number of animals in plush, he told me that a disorderly piece was a “sign of creativity”. I was skeptical, but he explained that he had learned that from a youtuber and – it was crucial – the youtuber had shown a research study.
I tried to explain that not all research studies are created equal and that some studies are better than others, but it fell into the ears of a deaf. Mom is science.
This interaction is not far from most of the interactions that I have every day with people online, many of whom try to determine the accuracy of affirmations on children’s education and parenting, often linked to medical subjects. And, very often, these statements they see are ostensibly based on research studies. On Tiktok, on Youtube, on Instagram – doctors or other apparently accredited individuals publish carousels with screenshots of scientific study or green projection videos of themselves in front of research articles.
Some of these people are real experts in their fields, and some of these scientific articles are excellent, and some of the results of the articles are correct. But some of these online voices – even some people with medical diplomas or other identification information – do not read literature properly, and the articles they show are based on bad methods or biased data and do not support the claims that are made. But for consumers of this content, it can be extremely difficult, fundamentally impossible, to separate the truth from fiction.
The central problem: we have what economists call a “pooling balance”, a concept derived from the study of labor markets. Imagine that workers come in two types: hard and lazy worker. The employer only wants to hire people who work hard, but there is no way to know who works hard and who is not just to look at them. Now imagine that there is job work in terms of accreditation, job seekers can get – talk about it, a university diploma. It takes work, which means that this diploma is easier for the group that works hard than the lazy group. If the diploma is difficult to obtain, we end up with a balance separation. People who work hard get the diploma, lazy people do not and the employer can use this diploma to say who they want to hire.
This breaks down if identification information becomes easier to obtain. If the college becomes magically easy (for example, due to generalized inflation), then workers job seekers and lazy people will obtain identification information, and now the employer is back not to be able to say who uses this marker. Then we have a Pooling balance.
Communication for health, especially on social networks, becomes this pooling balance.
Previously, when the results of scientific studies have been disseminated, messaging came from your doctor or national organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These organizations are in no way perfect, but this messaging was developed by people trained in the interpretation of medical data and to put them in a broader context. Their messaging was often based on in -depth journals of numerous studies and consensus of experts. Part of what dictated this structure was the fact that access To these studies were limited and excluded the general public, creating a barrier which generated this balance of separation.
Over time, access to scientific research has become more democratized. Free access to scientific journals has become more widespread, and there was a greater push to try to help the general public access and understand the results of the research. This has many advantages, but it has facilitated non-experts to appear as experts when they wish.
“The essence of snake oil is that the person who sells it promises a complete solution with very little work. Cut the sugar, and your child will be healed. Buy my supplement and your health will improve. Everything you need for your inflammation is my parasitic cleaning of $ 85.99. ”
Two other factors have made this even more a problem. The first is that the social media algorithm, which values views and commitment, prompted people who are Real experts to produce social content that looks very much like those who are not. The second is that we are seeing more and more disagreement within official sources which normally agree. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Ministry of Health and Social Services, suggested that autism is caused by vaccines, while the AAP and the CDC say that this is not the case. This type of internal official disagreement causes confusion and caused distrust of institutions.
Why is this necessarily a problem? Many people would say that allowing large access to information is all good, and people can see information and make decisions for themselves. The problem is that, in many cases, non -expert messaging does not provide a complete image.
Here is an example. Recently, a large Instagram account – carried out by a doctor – posed a study on ADHD and diet, with the assertion that 78% of children experienced a significant improvement in their ADHD by food changes. The involvement, in legend, was by cutting a few incriminated food ingredients (gluten! Food dyes!) ADHD could be cured.
The problem is that this message was terribly incomplete. There was A study (15 years ago) on diet and ADHD, but the intervention was not the elimination of food colors, but rather a complete elimination diet in which children could only eat a small number of foods (venison or lamb, rice, certain vegetables and pears). The symptoms of the ADHD of some children have improved in the short term on this diet, but such a limited diet is almost impossible to maintain for families. Other studies that focus more directly on articles such as sugar and food dyes have not shown the same impacts. An analysis focused on experts in the possible links between ADHD and the diet would do all these points, which would provide a sufficient context for families to speak to their doctor if food changes are a reasonable option.
Instead, parents hear that the ADHD of their child could be corrected if they simply eliminate ice lollipops and loot loops, which is both false and can bring people to delay the doctor to get treatment that could be effective.
If we accept that the search for cherry picking in this way is a problem, the natural question is: how to return to a separation balance? For individuals, this comes down to asking if there are signals that you can use reliably to determine who provides good information and which is fundamentally a charlatan. Based on someone who uses scientific studies does not necessarily work, and apparently legitimate identification information as having “DR” in a title is not always reliable indicators.
There is no perfect answer to this, which explains why I spend my days demystifying online disinformation on subjects such as expensive prenatal vitamins and plastic utensils. But there is a key differentiator: if messaging suggests an easy solution. A large part of this online content focuses on difficult problems of parenting or health – the rise in autism or ADHD, how to improve your blood pressure or heart health, how to lose weight.
None of these difficult problems has an easy solution or a simple response. But the essence of snake oil is that the person who sells it promises a complete solution with very little work. Cut the sugar and your child will be healed. Buy my supplement and your health will improve. Everything you need for your inflammation is my parasitic cleaning of $ 85.99. We will know the cause of autism by September. The “simple tower” is inherent in the sale argument, so these messengers cannot give up this, even if it is clear that they are not real experts.
In the end, the way of separating at least part of this disinformation from the authority of authority can be very simple: if something seems too good to be true, this is probably the case.
