During the pandemic lockdown, I had the great fortunate of being invited to participate in a global desk study on how spiders are portrayed in the news organised by Stefano Mammola and Catherine Scott. The study included 66 authors from most corners of the globe with each author being responsible for finding and analysing news from one or two countries. I was responsible for Denmark and Norway and the analysis included finding online news via Google News that included the words spider and bite (edderkoppe og bid) and scoring them ranged on whether spider experts were quoted or not, and the degree of using sensational words/exaggerations or words meant to induce fear in the reader.
In the paper all of the 5348 news items from 81 countries (in 40 languages) were analysed. Of these, we found that 47% contained errors (wrong species of spider or describing the spider as stinging for example) and 43% used sensational words. The news items were highly interconnected and misinformation from sensational or error prone local news outlets in one country would sometimes rapidly be picked up by large news outlets in a large range of countries. The resulting paper has now been published in Current Biology.
Mammola,S., Malumbres-Olarte, J., Arabesky, V., Barrales-Alcalá, D. A., Barrion-Dupo, A. L., Benamú, M. A., Bird, T. L., Bogomolova, M., Cardoso, P., Chatzaki, M., Cheng, R.-C., Chu, T.-A., Classen-Rodríguez, L. M., Čupić, I., Dhiya’ulhaq, N. U., Picard, A.-P. D., El-Hennawy, H. K., Elverici, M., Fukushima, C. S., Ganem, Z., Gavish-Regev, E., Gonnye, N. T., Hacala, A., Haddad, C. R., Hesselberg, T., Ho, T. A. T., Into, T., Isaia, M., Jayaraman, D., Karuaera, N., Khalap, R., Khalap, K., Kim, D., Korhonen, T., Kralj-Fišer, S., Land, H., Lin, S.-W., Loboda, S., Lowe, E., Lubin, Y., Martínez, A., Mbo, Z., Miličić, M., Kioko, G. M., Nanni, V., Norma-Rashid, Y., Nwankwo, D., Painting, C. J., Pang, A., Pantini, P., Pavlek, M., Pearce, R., Petcharad, B., Pétillon, J., Raberahona, O. C., Russo, P., Saarinen, J. A., Segura-Hernández, L., Sentenská, L., Uhl, G., Walker, L., Warui, C. M., Wiśniewski, K., Zamani, A., Chuang, A. and Scott, C. The global spread of misinformation on spiders. Current Biology 32, R871-R873.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222011277
Abstract
In the internet era, the digital architecture that keeps us connected and informed may also amplify the spread of misinformation. This problem is gaining global attention, as evidence accumulates that misinformation may interfere with democratic processes and undermine collective responses to environmental and health crises. In an increasingly polluted information ecosystem, understanding the factors underlying the generation and spread of misinformation is becoming a pressing scientific and societal challenge. Here, we studied the global spread of (mis-)information on spiders using a high-resolution global database of online newspaper articles on spider–human interactions, covering stories of spider–human encounters and biting events published from 2010–2020. We found that 47% of articles contained errors and 43% were sensationalist. Moreover, we show that the flow of spider-related news occurs within a highly interconnected global network and provide evidence that sensationalism is a key factor underlying the spread of misinformation.
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