Challenging Pseudoscience
6 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★ - 4 ratingsWe look at how to tackle the destructive rise of scientific misinformation and disinformation. Each episode is a live recording of one of the public events hosted by Challenging Pseudoscience, at the Royal Institution. We’re a diverse collective of journalists, scientists, academics and social media experts who came together in 2019 to look at this problem from different angles. The group is supported by the Royal Institution and the Open Society Foundation, and based in London. The goal is to identify how we can foster better access to more reliable scientific information.
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Episodes
On the legacies of eugenics
December 10, 2021 12:44 - 48 minutes - 88.6 MBThis episode is a recording of a talk given by medical historian, Marius Turda, at the Royal Institution in September 2021. His talk explored the historical roots of eugenics. He argued that the longevity of eugenics is due not just to its promise of drawing together social and cultural theories of human improvement, but also the credibility it was given by the scientific elite from the 1870s onwards. He shares that after the Holocaust, the tree was denuded of its branches, but its roots re...
Science museums and the 'culture war'
November 23, 2021 12:00 - 51 minutes - 94.7 MBThis episode features a panel discussion hosted online by the Association of British Science Writers in October 2021. The theme was the so-called ‘culture war’ and its effect on the UK's science and technology museums. The panelists discuss their personal experiences of government influence on museum independence and policy, and who should and shouldn’t sit on their boards. They take questions from the audience on the impact of the official ‘retain and explain’ policy, which expects publicly...
Fake news fighters
September 22, 2021 11:51 - 41 minutes - 75.6 MBThis episode features a panel discussion held at the British Science Festival Live in Chelmsford, UK, in September 2021. The theme was fake news and how to tackle the spread of scientific misinformation. The panelists discuss how social media algorithms help the spread of misinformation and fake news, they speak about the language to be aware of when spotting misinformation in science, and how the fallacies of race science have spread over time. They also take questions from the audience o...
Misinformation and censorship on social media
July 05, 2021 16:15 - 50 minutes - 91.7 MBThis episode features a panel discussion held at the Association of British Science Writers online in June 2021. The theme was misinformation and censorship on social media. The panel discussed how algorithms that feed us science news on social media sometimes promote disinformation and inadvertently demote good scientific content. The panelists explain why this can happen, who is affected and what we can do to prevent it. The panelists were Ben Deighton and Maarten Schenk. The discussion ...
Vaccines: Warriors and worriers
June 24, 2021 14:23 - 1 hour - 148 MBThis episode was a panel discussion about vaccines hosted by the Royal Institution in February 2021. The panel explored how vaccines work, why some people are sceptical of them despite the evidence, and how disinformation about vaccines spreads online. They also took questions from the audience, offering lots of practical advice. The discussion was chaired by the Financial Times science columnist, Anjana Ahuja. The panel were Zania Stamataki, Marianna Spring and Abigail Thorn. You can find ...
Disinformation and how to counter it
June 24, 2021 14:05 - 1 hour - 126 MBThis episode was a panel discussion on the theme of disinformation held at the Association of British Science Writers for their online UK Conference of Science Journalists in October 2020. We focused on the difference between misinformation and disinformation, the tactics of those spreading pseudoscientific theories such as climate change denial, anti-vaccine misinformation and pseudoscientific racism. Our panel looked at how science journalists can cover and combat this dangerous form of on...