Dilemmas of Covering a Field: Reporting on misinformation research

Reporting on misinformation research can be dizzying. While some researchers see the issue at the heart of conflicts, climate disaster, and the decline of democracies, others contend that there is no real problem and some politicians see a “censorship-industrial complex” at work. Help from the very platforms where misinformation spreads is needed for some studies and they pay for others. Results are hard to generalize and when strong effects are found they are often less than what the public already believes to be true. And at the end of the day, whatever the journalist writes is subject to all the same strange distortions of the information ecosystem the scientists are studying – and might be labeled misinformation itself.

In 2024, Kai Kupferschmidt wrote a story in Science covering the state of misinformation research and what he saw as the biggest problems the field is facing. In this talk, he will turn this around and look at the biggest problems in covering misinformation research and his biggest failures - at least as far as his cognitive biases allow.

‍