By G. Mason
The 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science was held in Copenhagen in July and saw 728 delegates from across the world enjoy a day of tutorials and then a further three packed days of key notes and shorter talks. This was complimented by a huge range of posters which were exhibited each day.
Keynote – Jevin West, University of Washington (US) Information Science:
Jevin kicked off the conference with two questions asking: “Can we muster enough elective energy to take action for ourselves in politics, health etc”. and “how do we solve a problem like misinformation?” His answer to both was: basically “you don’t, but you can do things better”.
One myth he wanted to debunk: anti vaccine equals anti-science. This is not true, people who are anti vaxers look to science to inform their views too. The public like to think that they can do their own research, but they often depend on the “credentials of experts”, whether they are scientists or lay experts. He then asked “do journals still matter as credential makers?” The conclusion was that “yes they do”, however, highly regarded professionals are less likely to publish in journals as they do not see the need to be “published” as their research is readily available and “out there”.
Perceived expertise: what are the prevalence and relative influence of perceived/lay experts who spread Covid-19 vaccine misinformation? Data & methods – 4.3m tweets and 5.5 m users that included vaccine discussion during April 2021 were examined and manually labelled. It was found that anti-vaccine supporters shared lots of perceived expert knowledge, tweets, likes etc. Perceived experts were more influential in the community than real experts e.g. health professionals. Perceived experts had a sizeable presence in the anti-vaccine community and are seen as important.
Perceived expertise to perceived consensus around Covid-19: Papers were being discussed in both communities – science based and anti-mask wearing. How papers were referenced had an effect, they could be split into epidemiology and physical experiments in the science community. In the online community it was separated by mask and non-mask wearing. The conclusion was that perceived expertise leads to a perceived consensus.
Much laughter was heard when he explained Brandolinis Law, from Wikipedia the definition is: “Easy to create BS, hard to clean it up!” When asked, ChatGPT produced a definition of Brandolinis law that was complete BS; the irony of it!
For the Future: Jevin stated that we need to find out how to measure the prevalence of and exposure to misinformation. We need to teach science from an early age with social science, future generations will then understand the bridge between science and social science; and we need to save the planet from social media so we do not destroy ourselves! (Anecdote on the next page . Ed)
Take away main message – “We need critical thinking skills more than ever”.
Please note that conference reports reflect the opinions and views of the presenters