Lessons: fighting misinformation with social media

Thus endeth the first lesson.

In early summer 2024 I began an experiment to determine whether it was possible to fight misinformation by actively posting reliable information via a social media platform serving a well-defined geographical area. (I had posted sporadically in this group as early as 2016.)

Topic: The relation between trace soil radionuclides and health.

Context: The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge

“Reliable”: citing evidence, showing data, linking to more thorough discussions or directly to articles in peer-reviewed journals or reports by reputable groups.

I am a retired physics professor who felt it was my professional obligation to make what I knew more widely available than through a website. All of my posts about science and Rocky Flats, and alerting Nextdoor readers to local political developments concerning the Refuge and the Rocky Mountain Greenway, were deleted or hidden about August 26th, probably at the behest of Laura Chrisler-Matheney, a self-described downwinder.

I’ve learned several things:

• Nextdoor is an effective way to reach people in a well-defined geographical area (I knew this already). Some of my posts received 4500 views, some as few as 1500. (Some postings were simply removed after my appeals were turned down so I can’t examine view statistics.)
• There is a core group of people (typically living near the Refuge or with professional expertise or both) quite interested in the (wealth of) measured data about Rocky Flats, the epidemiology, and the prediction of radiation dose from known soil radioactivity. Obviously this is of interest to those living nearby.
• There is another core group (typically living farther away from the Refuge in older neighborhoods) of self-termed “downwinders” (not necessarily represented by Tiffany Hansen’s Rocky Flats Downwinders). This group fervently rejects the scientific findings in favor of their perceptions that many illnesses of people living downwind (often relatives) are due to plutonium. (It is not clear if they believe there is ongoing exposure, but Kim Griffiths and I were told in the 2014-2016 time frame that our kids would all die of cancer.)
• I had believed that spokesmen (either appointed or “free lancers”) for anti-nuclear groups were the principal source of misinformation on Rocky Flats. Now I am more inclined to believe that (no surprise!) it is the actual users of social media who perpetuate the misinformation.
• There is an immense majority who appear to not care at all about Rocky Flats, apart from a desultory click to see a posting.

The problem with social media as a tool to fight misinformation is that

1. There is a very low “signal to noise” ratio even on a well-defined topic
2. Posters are at the mercy of groups who have an anti-science (or anti-misinformation) agenda, based on their own beliefs. Their members can disrupt an ongoing interchange and completely swamp it with vitriolic claims.
3. Moderators (if present) typically don’t know enough to meaningfully distinguish between reliable and unreliable. Worse, appeals have a low (zero?) chance of being taken seriously–it seems very unlikely that Nextdoor moderators even examined the posts. (The 40-year history of misinformation about Rocky Flats means that many people in a metropolitan area made up their minds long ago.)